by So I did it. I signed the contract on Thursday. There was no sense of jubilation or excitement; my feeling afterwards was 10% relief and 90% what have I done?
My agent sent me the contract the day before the appointment and I read it, resorting sometimes to Google Translate to guide me through the Romanian legalese. Alarmingly, there was nothing about the furniture and appliances that the owner said would remain in the apartment. It also said I only had five working days to pay the owner; with my money all in New Zealand, this seemed a rather tight deadline. The contract gave personal information about the two parties; it said that the vendor was born in Arad in 1989 (I would have guessed more like ’82) and had already been married, had kids, and got divorced. I then found out she’d done a six-year medical degree and moved country several times. I was looking to buy one of her several flats.
My appointment was set for 1pm. I arrived ten minutes early. The agent and the vendor were already there. (I didn’t know exactly who would be there. I really had no idea how this would play out, although the agent had told me that the process would only take half an hour.) The TV in the waiting room was tuned to a music station called Kiss, and Cher’s Believe was playing. Both the agent and the vendor would have been in primary school when that came out. The lawyer too, as I soon found out when we were ushered into her office. I think they all just expected me to sign. Gata, as they say here. Done. Then I felt trapped. This is all happening a bit fast, isn’t it? How can I be sure that I’m not buying a complete lemon? “But you’ve seen it with your own eyes!” Yes, but there’s a lot my eyes don’t tell me, as I found out ten years ago. “Look, we don’t deal with any of that stuff here. Just the legal stuff. To make sure all the paperwork is in order.” At one point I said, “I’m not buying a sodding shaorma here!” (A shaorma, which can be spelt in a dozen ways, is a very common fast-food item, which we’d probably call a wrap in English.) My attempt at humour in Romanian fell pretty much flat.
I didn’t have my passport on me, thinking I wouldn’t need it because they’d already scanned it and at any rate I had my residence permit. But they needed it, so I had to go back home and get it. Ten minutes each way on my bike. The agent then offered to take me in his car instead, but it would have been just as quick and far less stressful on my bike. I could have got away from them for twenty minutes. All those eyes. People who knew the system and spoke the language. That would have been nice. Instead I had to deal with the agent, and he wasn’t a particularly happy bunny. He parked on a side street vaguely near my block, and I ran out and got my passport from my drawer. Then I couldn’t remember where he’d parked or which side street I’d run down three minutes earlier. My head was spinning by this point. (I went through a period years ago when every working day was like this. At 10:33 I had no recollection of what I’d done at 10:30. It was horrendous.) I finally did remember, and he drove me back to the lawyer’s office.
Back at the office, I began to calm down a bit. The vendor seemed trustworthy, at least. (But who knows, really.) I agreed to sign as long as the contract was amended to extend the payment deadline from 5 working days to 15 and to confirm that all the furniture and appliances were included, even though “all” could mean just about anything; there was no inventory even though I had asked for one. After a delay to get the amended document printed, I signed it. After another delay I had to pay the lawyer 5700 lei (almost £1000 or NZ$2000). Cash or card? Um, card please. Then I had to make another payment of 800-odd lei to get the ownership details changed in the official records. At least I think that’s what it was for. This time they only accepted cash, for some reason, and I only had a couple of hundred on me. Could I pay tomorrow? No! So I had to make a trip to the cash machine. Money is maddening here when you’re dealing with the big stuff. Sometimes you’re dealing in euros, sometimes in lei, sometimes you have to pay cash, and life turns into a web of cash machines and Arab-run money changers who make a tidy profit from all the madness.
I got out of there at 3:10. That meant cancelling a lesson, which is always upsetting for me on the rare occasions that it happens. I was able to see the girl on Calea Aradului though; I saw her 16-year-old cat, who she said had already suffered four strokes. I had an online lesson when I got home.
The learning curve on Thursday was so steep that I nearly tumbled back down to the bottom.
