Finally...

The lease on our house has been signed by all parties. The landlord has received his check for the 10 month security deposit (yes, this is normal here in India). Now, all we have to do is continue to wait...wait for the landlord to get the house ready...wait for our sea shipment to arrive.

The details about the house...it is 3 bedrooms, 3 1/2 baths, and supposedly 3800 square feet. I honestly think that they measure houses weird here as there is no way it is this big. It actually has a lot of waisted space in it...which seems to be the norm with Indian houses...right in the middle of the house is a huge 2 story atrium. The house has an open dining/kitchen area...and off of the kitchen is another kitchen that they call the wet kitchen. We'll be using this room for our food storage from our quarterly food shipments. Also, the house has a TV room, a puja room (prayer room that we can use for either storage or a library or something else), a storage room, a patio room, a walkout roof terrace that has a swing on it (not sure if and when we'll use this as during the day it will be extremely hot and at night the mosquitoes will be out).

The house is brand new and pretty much completely furnished. We are having the landlord take out a few furniture items in order to accommodate what little furniture we have coming from our apartment in Beijing. Most of our stuff is still in storage back in Illinois as we felt we didn't need to drag it across the world to Beijing...little did we know that we would end up in a huge house in India only a few months later. We'll work with what the landlord is providing...and I'm sure we'll probably buy a few pieces of India furniture to go with our American and Chinese furniture.

Sorry to everyone who thought they would be coming to visit us on the ocean...the house is not on the ocean...it's not far, probably less than a half mile, but unfortunately, we cannot see the ocean :( Also, the house does not have a swimming pool. Everyone thinks we are nuts for not having the landlord add one in...however, we just aren't big swimmers...no matter how hot it may be here. We would much rather sit in the air conditioning...which by the way is not necessarily standard here...we actually had to negotiate in extra A/C units as the house did not have any in the dining room or kitchens. As far as I know, central air does not exist here in India. Every room has individual A/C units in it...which means a remote control for every unit. Just what I need in my life...more remote controls to keep track of! I think one of my first tasks once we move in is to get my label maker out and mark every remote with which room it is from. Also instead of a swimming pool being added, we felt that it was more important to have the landlord provide all the major appliances. We felt that it wouldn't be a good investment for us to buy appliances here that will be useless to us when we move again in a couple of years.

OK, you have to use your imagination a little bit and piece these photos together to get a sense of what the house looks like. I guess I was in a hurry to take photos so didn't really get a good shot of the house.

A photo of the dining room looking into the kitchen.

Another photo of the kitchen. It is actually a fairly large kitchen compared to some of the ones I saw in the houses here.

This is a view off of the roof terrace of the coconut farm across the street. This is where I am sure a million snakes live! If only I could figure out some way to set up an electric fence around my property to keep them out...any one have any suggestions on how to do this? Also, yes, the street is not paved...I'm sure it will be quite messy during the heavy monsoon season...hence one of the reasons why we are getting a SUV. The little building you see is the servant's quarters/guard shack. Also, yes the property is fenced in...very common here. We will have security guards hired by our company.

Well, the house isn't ideal. I really wanted to live in another apartment like we did in Beijing...however, decent sized ones just don't seem to exist here. Chennai does not have a lot of tall apartment buildings like other major cities do. However, considering the limited options we had, we had to take the first house that was somewhat acceptable for us. All of the other houses I looked at needed major remodeling work. The landlords here are willing to do just about anything to a house...however they won't do it until after the lease is signed, and they receive the security deposit. Since we were already here living, we had to take a house that didn't need major renovations...and this was the only one available to us.

The house is south of the main city of Chennai. It will take Steve probably 25 to 30 minutes to get to work...and if I want to go shopping in the city, it will probably take well over an hour to get there. However, there are some grocery stores near us, so I probably will only go into the city maybe once per week. The traffic actually isn't too bad out where we will be living...the farther away from the city the better it is...however, on the flip side...the farther away from the city you get, the less reliable the electricity is. Therefore, a generator is an absolute must have. Our house truly is out in the middle of nowhere...after living in the middle of Beijing, I'm once again going to have to get use to the quietness of having no neighbors. I'm a little concerned about how I will do when Steve is traveling...I'm hoping that I have a little bit of time to adjust to the house and get to know the security guards before this first happens.

OK, well I think that covers more than the basics on the house. We are hoping to move around August 1. However, I have a feeling that this will probably occur more towards the middle of August. The sooner, the better, as far as I'm concerned...this little bitty apartment is about ready to drive me nuts!