Bad for you, good for the story

When in Vietnam, follow the calendar.

Scott and I arrived in Hanoi cocky and full of silly ideas about personal space, so when our gracious hosts offered us our choice of two perfectly good rooms in their lovely shared house, we said, no, we’d prefer to continue shamelessly exploiting their hospitality and the free air conditioning in their living room while we searched for our own apartment.

It should have been no problem. We had an appointment with Mr. Them, a real estate agent who said he had apartments in the areas we were interested in, on our first full day in town. After taking a long and expensive cab ride out, frantically miming at a woman until she sold me bread (because I was starving) and locating a building in what appeared to be a swamp, I found myself barefoot in Them’s office, trying to sneak little bites of bread (seriously starving) while learning he only had properties available so far away from the city center that if we lived there, we’d never explore anywhere else.

Still no problem. The Internet was full of listings for nice-looking, furnished apartments in our desired locations. Calling brokers and asking to see places prominently displayed on their Web sites quickly made it clear that there was kind of a problem. Maybe, at some point in the distant past, those apartments had been in their inventories, but they had nothing to do with what was currently available. The agents would take our numbers as part of their elaborate plots to make us think they’d show us something, but then really not call back, or call and cancel 15 minutes before the appointments. One did take us to a flat with a cute balcony shut off by an even “cuter” door that didn’t quite reach the ceiling.

We’d been sleeping on some random people’s floor for almost two weeks and were starting to feel guilty, when I got an e-mail from Scott saying he’d found a “totally sweet” apartment. Finally! Plans were set to move at 7 p.m. on Monday until Scott got a text (if you don’t think text message buzzing can sound ominous, believe me, it can) asking if we could move on Thursday instead, because, according to the Vietnamese calendar, there wouldn’t be a fortuitous day to move until then. We convinced Hai, the quirky PhD student we’d be subletting from, to overlook the universe’s warnings and let us in that night.

I have to admit, on first glance, the apartment did look pretty sweet. There was a grand piano in the living room and pillows instead of huge couch cushions to sleep on, so an improvement over the previous situation … until … Hai warned us not to open the industrial strength wooden shutters over the windows or rats might get in. Seemed a little strange, but I was willing to overlook it … until … we were laying in bed and heard little rodent feet running through the walls and ceiling. If asked, I probably would have said the four-footed guests would have been the last straw for me, but actually the incessant water dripping on our air conditioner that only started at night was more annoying. And the lack of hot water. And the power outages. Oh, and it was illegal for foreigners to live there, and Scott was attracting the usual amount of attention. There was some comic relief in the fact that he didn’t fit in the bathroom, though. I wish I’d gotten a picture of that, but I didn’t because…

We went crawling back to Mr. Them an accepted the first house he showed us. It’s nice and super Vietnamese, meaning very tall and skinny, down a crazy maze of alleys and decorated with vaguely French-inspired molding on the ceilings. Perfect. We were able to fill the other three bedrooms with roommates pretty quickly, but not before Hai randomly kicked us out of the apartment in the middle of the week we’d paid for while we were both at work, forcing our friend to move all our stuff to Hai’s parents house for us to pick up later and thwarting my plans for a hilarious Scott-hunched-above-the-shower photo.

Really, don’t challenge the calendar.