Long Time No See~Life update part 1

Well it has been a long time since the Chinese new year and my last post. I really wanted to keep this thing more alive than this and more interesting, but life here is not so easy to accommodate such things at times.

Since I haven't said anything for such a long time I guess I should do a life update entry. This year so far has been crazy, boring, hot, and very difficult. Earlier this year I attempted to buy a house to settle down and start my life here, and things were going great for a time. That is until I got snaked out of the purchase.

I had gone through a realtor that was a friend of a friend of my coworkers brother, which should have been a red flag for me in the beginning but being that this is Taiwan and this a common thing I didn't think of it like that. So, meeting with the realtor lady was an interesting experience because she spoke No English, marginal Japanese, and mostly Taiwanese, which meant that I had to find a friend to translate for us. No big deal I have a few friends that don't have much to do and are usually bored on the weekends, so we tramped around most of eastern Taichung for a few weeks before finding a house that I liked, it had just come on the market because the guy had received his dream job in Kaohsiung and was moving in 2 months. Therefore he was ready to make a deal and drop his house as fast as he could.

We met with the man on March 15th with out the realtor just to get a feel for the type of person he was, and to chat over a few things. He gave me and my friend the grand tour of the house, showing us each room and telling some story about how he and his wife did this or his kids did that in the room, each time he would finish the story he would aways say that my friend and I made a beautiful couple and he hopes our life will be as good as his. Even though there is no romantic chemistry between her and I we still felt all warm and fuzzy after hearing his stories. So after the grand tour, he asked if there was anything that we wanted to know more specific about the house, being careful not to point out any of its flaws to us he hoped we wouldn't ask anything too serious. But being my first house I was more observant than he thought, I asked a few questions about the piping, the ceilings, the walls and floors, and why a cast poured cement step in the contractor miscalculated the distance from the floors and added and extra step that had to later be redesigned.

So later that week we met with the man, the realtor, and a home inspector to go over any pre-existing conditions that would be expensive for me to repair but should have been part of his normal home maintenance. While my friend and I wondered through the house watching as the inspector man poked, tapped, scanned and kicked his way through the rooms the realtor and the homeowner were downstairs talking about the terms that I had for buying the house and what not.

Unbeknown to me at the time another man from Taipei had been driving by the house for a couple days with his wife and she suddenly decided she had to have the house, so being in true Chinese/Taiwanese fashion the man used money to steal the house from under my feet. When we came down the stairs we saw the man signing the contract with the realtor and the homeowner paying almost double what I offered him (which was only slightly less than he wanted for the place). In a moment of confusion and dismay I am standing there shocked while my friend is asking whats going on how can they sell the house to someone else blah blah blah, and all I can think is "I just paid 2.5 million NT for something I can't have. What am I going to do now, thats all the money I have. Oh Sh1t!".

Well the home owner being a kind older man said that he would return the deposit money I gave him as long as I have him some time, since he used it to purchase his new home in Kaohsiung. While right in front of his sits probably 2 million NT, money that he could easily give to me, but being as shocked as I was I didn't think and just agreed to what he said. He wrote an IOU for 2.5 million NT, and we went our separate ways. As I was leaving the guy from Taipei said in his broken Chinglish "Oh, No hard feelinguzu Okay laowai (foreign) brother." Now normally I don't take offense to the word laowai or being called brother, these are just part of Taiwanese life. However this time the guy was definitely using them in a very smug way, and with out thinking about it I repeated a few choice words that I had recently over heard my friends saying, and was told I shouldn't say repeat. Which sort of pissed off and stunned the man at the same time, after hearing me say this my friend grabbed my by the arm and pulled me out of the house scolding me the whole way.

Well the story ends with the homeowner returning every dollar back to me, over the course of 3 months, the realtor having to be forced by a lawyer and the Foreign Affairs Police to give me back my money for breaching the contract we had, and me with out a house, but a hell of a story.

So the moral of this story is, its easier to live in an apartment than it is buy a house. I think. Maybe there is no moral, or maybe the moral is a friend of a friend's brother's friend isn't your friend.

Anyway I am Chububobcat and this has been my random thought for the day.