House hunting horrors

Given that we need to move out of Graduate Hall soon (end of this month, to be precise), three of my similarly afflicted friends and me commenced house hunting last month. I was meaning to blog about this in one of my earlier posts but I came to the conclusion that this one deserved its own space. Since we started searching for that dream apartment, we've had some amazing, and some downright hilarious experiences, and since this is the first time I have been part of such an enterprise, I have enjoyed the ride thus far tremendously!

House#3: We walk in to be greeted by the house owner. Huge guy, 6 ft plus, built like a tree trunk. Clad in a 'lungi' and a sando 'ganjee'. Indian or Malay, we guess. The tattoo on his arm says 'KILLER'. The house is dark and has a funny smell. Scenes from 'Texas Chain Saw Massacre' and 'The house of 1000 corpse' play out vividly in my mind. Apparently Brij is thinking the same and is already looking around for creaky floorboards and bloodstains. Our agent tells us to take a look around. Mad axe murderer says nothing, just stares. We look around. The place was nice but we had already decided not to be tenants of 'KILLER'. Our agent tells us to talk about rent. We look at the owner and then look at each other...silence...the owner finally speaks. The voice is shrill and weak and almost like a girl's! 'Oye yaar, terah sau se kam nahin loongaa!'. Apparently he was a sardarji from Amritsar who moved here in the 80s. We ran out and burst out laughing! Final outcome: we didn't get the place because of budget constraints on our part.

House#5: We are in Holland Village. The agent from the owners' side is with us. Since we are 4 people, we had clearly mentioned that we would need atleast 2 functional bathrooms. The agent had assured us. We see the first toilet. There's a commode, but no shower. We see the second one, there's no commode, only shower. That was the end of that!
Final outcome: Left hurling abuses at both the agents.

House#9: Good place. Duplex. A mansionette, they called it. We are ready to finalize the deal, when the sound of a local train thundering by takes us by surprise. The place is right next to an MRT track! It was night time and hence it wasn't visible when we came in. We had mentioned in our specifications that we would ideally like a place close to a tube station. However, I guess we needed to be more specific! With 2 of us having lived in Mumbai and roughed it out in local trains (one of us actually lived close to a train track for bit!), this was too much. Loving home and all I can understand, being woken up at 12.30 pm by the sound of a rushing train, I cannot!
Final outcome: Begging agent to work harder!

Cheers!
Abhishek.