Arriving

Someone told me it would take 2-3 months to find housing in Basel, so I wanted to start dealing with that before I came over. I even had it in my head to have an IKEA bed delivered to our place so we could have somewhere to sleep the first night. Unfortunately, no one would let me begin the process without being physically in the country. And I sent a lot of emails to Swiss apartment rental companies in my rusty high school German. But what we ended up doing out of desperation was probably better for us anyway. We used airbnb.com to find some folks to stay with as long as possible to leave ourselves plenty of time to find a place. We stayed in Breite for 10 nights with a lovely young couple and then in another music student's place in Kleinbasel for a month while she was away singing in an opera.

The most useful website my boyfriend, Juna, and I found to search for apartments was markt.unibas.ch. "unibas" stands for Universität Basel (I just realized that not being able to easily insert umlauts is going to drive me nuts!). We found our next place, on Gerbergässlein, tucked away between Barfüsserplatz and the Musikakademie, using markt.unibas (we also found and applied to many places that flat out rejected us, likely because we were students and foreigners). It was a shared flat that rented the bottom floor out for parties on a regular basis. Not every weekend, but within the three or so weeks we stayed there, there were definitely quite a few. After one, we discovered that a guest had vomited all over our bathroom. That combined with the fact there really was no kitchen besides two electric hot plates, and that it was a smoking friendly place, motivated us to find another place.

The fancy toilet seat cover which was vomited all over by a party guest.

A woman I met because I play piano for the Unitarian Universalists of Basel who meet once a month told me that the studio above her apartment was coming open, and that the landlady was a really decent person. She ended up giving us the apartment before even advertising the vacancy publicly. It helped that this woman could personally recommend me. It also helped that the whole house is English-speaking expats. And probably it helped the most that the landlady is a pianist (like me) and Alexander trained (I'm doing an Alexander Technique training course in Zürich right now). We pay 850 CHF per month including Nebenkosten (extra costs that may or may not include electricity, water, etc., definitely something you want to ask about because often it's NOT included with the list price of rent). Our place is a cozy studio apartment with a high ceiling and lots of windows and natural light that help make it feel spacious. We're also only a few tram stops away from the Bahnhof so we really are getting quite a deal.

We moved to Basel in September and didn't move in to our current place until halfway through November. And the place we found was truly a lucky break. Housing is definitely the hardest thing to find in Switzerland.

Our place right after I assmembled our IKEA table by myself!