We went househunting last night on the spur of the moment since its that time of the year and we have to decide if we want to keep the current place for the second year of the lease.
So we toddled off home, discussing what a nice place it was and how it'd be really lovely to live next door to Marian Finucan(e) (for non radio listeners or non irish residents, a thoroghly unpleasant - in my opinion, interviewer who tackles the "tough" issues by asking politicians questions that they can't answer since it'd be political suicide), a fox and a stork. I rang the agent about the place and the conversation went something like
Me: Nice place! we'll take it
Him: You've seen it? when?
Me: Just now, the current tenants showed us around
Him: I've been here an hour, there are no current tenants and you've not been here.
Me: Oh noes! wacky misadventure!!
So we went to the second place - an interesting design for people who love stairs and falling down them and also not seeing the people you live with from one week to the next - four stories, bedroom on the first and third, kitchen/sittingroom on the second and some sort of attic-ey conversion affair on the top that would make a nice computer room. Also, it had all the character of a floor tile. It does occur to me though that we could easily install some sort of device like they had in submarines using funnels and hosepipes.
So to cut the rest of this long story short, we went back home and called the landlord of the first place to see what the deal was. In a fairly outragous (yet not as extreme as we had assumed from the description given by the tenants) D4 accent he explained that the "deal" was that he has .. loike, been renting the place a year ago roight? for loike 1500 euro a month (the wafting scent of bullshit came from the phone around that point) but he'd be ..yew knew, willing loike to rent it for 1300 per month if we took a longer lease, loike two years.
So... technically not a bad first evening, two nice houses and one wacky misadventure.