Finding a flatshare in Rome as a single girl

It's been a while but I decided I wanted to do some blogging again. I guess getting back to Rome after a break has inspired me to start noting all those small but intriguing cultural differences/observations about being a foreigner in another country again.

Since I last posted I finished my first year of teaching (big sigh of relief...and I only had a few language-based mishaps), worked at an english-language kids' holiday camp in the italian mountains for 2 weeks (crazy hard work), went home for the holidays, went to Russia for nearly 3 weeks, now THAT was a culture shock...) and then got back here.

Since getting back the biggest challenge for me was finding myself a house - a house-share. Those of you who know me know that, since moving to Rome, I have always been lucky enough to have my fantastic fellow english teacher friend Erika to live with, helping me to negotiate tricky italian language situations with her excellent communication skills and generally being a fun, helpful and supportive person to come to home too. However! due to her defection to the higher salaries and multi-lingual english classes of London, this time I was on my own. This turned out to be pretty terrifying. I arrived in Rome, checked into a hostel and started scanning the pages of the local classified ads paper, Porta Portese, and calling potential flats.

As always in house hunting, I started with a very narrow specification: "I want to live with italians...who are young, friendly, preferably attractive, in the area of San Giovanni or Re di Roma, within walking distance of the Metro and ideally Pompi, home of the best tiramisù in Rome". Needless to say, I ended up compromising my ideals.

I HATE speaking Italian on the phone to people I don't know, so the first challenge was just forcing myself to call the numbers. Then I got aLOT of "già affitato" (already rented) responses. Obviously some of these must've been genuine, but after being told once that "The landlord says no foreigners" I tend to suspect that at least some of these people just didn't like my accent. (Friends said that I should play on people's perception of "good" vs "bad" foreigners by pointing out that I'm english, not from eastern europe, but I kind of feel like I don't want to exploit other people's prejudice for my own ends!! and anyone who doesn't want to live with an immigrant from a particular country...I don't really want to live with them.) Anyway, out of the people who responded in the affirmative, I went to see some flats. I looked round about 7 in total. It was stressful. Let me see:

First, it's the weird combination of judging, and being judged that makes looking at flatshares so difficult. You're looking at the flat and the room and most importantly the other housemates, thinking "could I live here? could I be friends with these people?" while they're also assessing YOU. And you're never quite sure whose choice it is. Sometimes people say "please call me, I really want to rent this room by the end of the day." Alternatively, sometimes they say "we've got 5 people who already say they want to move in. Put your name down and we'll be making a decision later." So it's not generally clear if it's really up to you to choose the flat, or up to them to choose their favourite prospective flatmate. I remember this being hard when I looked at flats in London; doing it in another language really took it out of me. Basically, I just smiled alot, and apologised for my italian. (On the plus side, recently when I apologise for my italian people tend to say "no, no, your italian's fine, have you really only been living here for a year and a half?" which makes me very happy - it's obviously improved alot. I attribute this to my reading of teenage books).

The problem with being foreign, though, is that it makes potential flatmates and landlords question how long you're planning to be in the country. I always say a year. But I got alot of grilling. "are you sure? you're not going to leave after 3 months? it costs me alot to advertise this place, I don't want to be doing it again in a couple of months time." A couple of times I felt like they didn't believe me and it was pretty impossible to convince people of my commitment to Rome.

The language used in Italian house adverts differs a bit from back home, mostly by being more exaggerated. A flat's not just "quiet", it's "molto silenzioso". It's not just "light", it's "luminosissimo". Internet, or rather broadband, is called "fastweb". I think what attracted me to the flat I ended up choosing was that the advert said "friendly and lively environment" or something along those lines. Ooh yeah, that's me.

I saw some weird places. The first flat I looked at, which was very close to my old one (so close that I would probably have been paranoid about bumping into Alberto in the street, argh) was pretty nice in theory but the flatmates were a brother and sister combo, not very friendly, who lived together in a shared room (it was a 2-bedroom flat, so they shared one and rented out the other. Deliverance territory!! I mean, I'm not one to make incest claims easily, and I'm sure it was totally innocent and they were just saving money, but they looked weird to me. Plus these guys weren't, like, 18 years old, you know. The guy must've been at least 28. Sharing rooms is WAAAAY more common in Italy than it is back home but surely there comes a point when you're like "I'm an adult, I need my own space"?!

The following day, I saw a couple of flats quite close together, a bit further away from the centre (the process that I, Bush-like, like to call, "compromisation" was in action). One was ok but the people living there were a bit older. I wasn't sure if I could see myself hanging round with them. They were probably thinking the same thing. Also, I excluded the possibility of ever moving in there straight away by lying - it was involuntary!! one of them asked if I had a boyfriend and I wasn't really sure what to say (things are complicated in that department). You tend to look a bit, hmm, "special" if you hesitate when answering what should be straight-forward questions about yourself, so I tried not to pause and said "Yes". Then they asked if he was Italian and for some reason, I found myself saying yes again...even though it's not true! I think I thought that telling the truth would just involve too many questions. Anyway, Italians love it if they think I have an italian boyfriend (I think because it confirms the theory that Italian lovers are the best in the world) so they were all happy for me "Oh great! You've made a good start in Italy!" etc. I smiled and nodded and thought to myself "well done Mary, now you can actually never move in here because the moment they met your Arabic boyfriend they would be all like "why did you tell us he was italian??"" grrr.

Anyway. I saw one flat that day that I really really liked. It was a student flat and the guys that lived there - 1 girl and 2 boys - were all friends from back home in Puglia, so I guess that made it seem more friendly to me. It had a balcony as well...a dream come true for me...so I was very keen. Unfortunately, so were alot of other people: the girl who showed me round told me that there were already 4 or 5 people who wanted it. She said they might have to pick a name out of a hat. Anyway, I never heard from them again so I guess I didn't manage to impress them that much!

Finally, on the third day of serious looking, my friend I was staying with suggested I broaden my search area and asked if I would consider looking closer to my work, closer to where she and some of our other friends live...I thought "why not" and started looking at adverts for flatmates in Centocelle. It's a bit cheaper, and I found a couple in budget that sounded friendly...It's not an area I'd ever been to before, so the first time I came to look at a flat I stepped off the funny train/tram thing that comes here and thought "hmm, where the hell am I?". However, once I got inside my current flat I was pretty convinced - it's bigger than others I looked at, and I have a double bed (massive bonus for when I have friends visiting). Plus Maria, one of my new housemates, seemed nice and friendly and like someone I could hang out with. She lived in London for a year so I think she liked that I was from there. The flat has internet, it has a phone, all the things that are important for me, so...when she called me the next day, I said I'd take it.

Another bonus is that we're renting pretty unofficially, with no contract, which means no deposit and no interrogation from the landlord. I've met him - he lives in a flat upstairs in this same building - but he was just incredibly chilled out, like "hello, oh, you're english, how interesting". I guess so long as he gets his rent every month he's not that bothered. So...here I am!

I'm sharing with Maria, a student from Sicily, sometimes her boyfriend, who works in a hotel, and sometimes his dog, who is cute but growls when I come into the house late at night...and Maurizio, a webdesigner from Campania. They're both really nice and friendly. Maria speaks pretty good english as well, although we tend to speak in italian (this is going to be very good for my language skills).