Getting an apartment in Zürich

This post was saved for the time when I can proudly say that I will not be living under one of the many bridges of Zürich in one month - after my contract in this student house ends.

So most of you have probably already heard that fining a place to stay in Zürich can be a struggle! I was scared by several persons that it will be hard to find an apartment and that everything is extremely expensive. Well - it is! Rent for a room in a shared apartment (with 2 or more people) in suburbs starts roughly from 600 CHF/month (a bit less that 500 EUR). A 2-room apartment close to the centre - starting from 2000 CHF/month (approx. 1600 EUR) etc. Some people can spend months before they find an appropriate place...

Surprisingly, I was quite lucky. After some notes from friends and my supervisor about the problems of finding an apartment in Zürich, I checked out more than 50 advertisements on 5 housing sites in the internet and sent out 12 different (!) application letters for apartments during one day + put an advertisement in the internet - saying that a nice estonian student is looking for a room in Zürich etc etc. In the end, I took a room in the third apartment I went to visit and sent "sorry, I already found an apartment"-letters to rest of the places. My future flatmates will be a German guy studying evnronmental engineering and a Swiss girl giving dancing lessons and studying physics. ;) The place is 20 minutes from work by tram and has a grocery store downstairs. Not familiar with other possible benefits yet.. 

However, in terms of Zürich, I am quite a frugal (=undemanding??) person - there are a loot of students living in shared apartments and people are changing there all the time - so it's quite easy to get one. On the other hand, if you want to rent a whole apartment for your own then you might have a bigger problem. The number of them is probably not as big and everything seems to be very official - renting is done through real estate companies, a looot of interested people attend each apartment visit and you need references from work to be selected by the company etc. For example, one of my formates was crashing on a friend's couch for 2 months before finding an apartment :) However, this is still a record of our lab!!! 

A small mandatory picture of the city view at night. And by the way, the lights in the air are nothing supernational (like I thought in the beginning...) - there's just a village or something in on a mountain. However, you can't blame an estonian for NOT considering the possibility of mountains... (familirize yourself with our geography: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suur_Munam%C3%A4gi).

And an foggy picture of what happens if the OV lab goes for a beer on Friday.