The Past Few Days

We've found an apartment! Praise the Lord.

The search both began and ended yesterday. We had been put in contact with an agent named Svetlana. An agent over here helps people find apartments to rent, and for said services also gets a full months rent as commission, but it's the only way to go. Svetlana proved to be very helpful in the process.

We started out going to see a place on the south side of the city just about 15 minutes walk from a metro stop. This is important as the metro is the way that we will do most of our traveling around the city. As we walked to the place Svetlana told us it was newly renovated, but it was on the 23rd floor. The "lift" (elevator) apparently work, but in all my ventures in Russia I've learned that elevators are not very reliable. But we pressed on.

We arrived outside of the building and met the owner of the apartment. He was a man, mid-forties, and the first words out of his mouth were "I didn't know there was a baby." In less than twenty seconds the transaction ended. He told Svetlana "nyet" and walked away. Svetlana explained that the man was afraid that Isaiah would tear up his newly renovated place. We recognized the Lord's hand of mercy. Even if this guy had conceded to letting us stay there, he didn't seem like the kind of guy we would want as our landlord.

Svetlana immediately suggested another place that she said was "very nice." It was also located closer to a metro stop, and we could go see it in about two hours. We agreed to meet her at the metro stop in two hours, and we headed off to that section of town.

The metro stop was Petrogradskaiya (if that means anything to you). This stop is just two stops down from the downtown area, which is great. Sure enough at 2:30 we met Svetlana and went to see the apartment. I'll summarize the details.

-It's a two room apartment (two bedrooms, and a kitchen, no living area which is normal)
-The apartment is already furnished with antiques and fine china that we are free to use.
-There's a grand piano
-The landlady is putting in a brand new bed
-It has an almost new washing machine
-The apartment has its own water heater so that when the hot water gets cut off we'll still have hot water
-The landlady is a trained musician and singer
-Her husband is a physicist who speaks English
-Both were taken with Isaiah
-The agreed to lower the rent 1000 Roubles for the first six months.

As we examined the situation, it just got better and better.

Now the price of the rent was a bit more than what we had originally wanted to spend, but we had discovered when we arrived here that all rents had gone up significantly over the past few months. But as we looked at the situation something quite amazing made itself clear. We had originally expected to have to furnish our own apartment as well as buy a washing machine. In all we were expecting to spend about $1000. When you subtract that amount from what we're spending on rent the monthly average goes down to just about what we had hoped to spend on rent each month. The Lord has truly blessed us.

So last night at 8 o'clock Will and I went out to the apartment again and signed a year lease. We made a deposit, and the rest of the money should be transferred to our Russian account by Monday. We'll then pay the rest of the first month's rent. Lord willing we will move in Tuesday or Wednesday.

The next step is to start our language studies. We've contacted one of our teachers, and our lessons should hopefully begin by the second week of August.

The Lord continues to be faithful. Thank you all so much for your prayers and love.