My thoughts on international Craigslist-ing

Finding an apartment is hard.  Finding an apartment from across the Atlantic is harder.   Today, my inclination is to get a bed in a hostel for a few days, check out available rooms, meet potential roommates, and take my time.  However, when I was looking for a room to rent in Lisbon a couple years ago, I was pretty apprehensive and wanted to have a place secured before leaving the US.  In typical Northeasterner fashion, I turned to craigslist.org, which has a surprisingly active community in Lisbon.  As with any online dealing, I approached the task of finding an apartment in a city I’d never been to with caution.

Not only am I alive to tell the tale, but I ended up finding an amazing apartment in a central location, with roommates who I absolutely adored.  This last bit was just luck, but here are my tips for how you can maximize your chances of having a good experience with international craigslist-ing:

1. Trust your instincts.  This goes without saying.  If you’re a tech-savvy person, you’ve probably got a good eye for online scammers.  Don’t let your desperation to find a home overshadow any perceived creepiness.  When it comes to renting an apartment, there’s a lot at stake, not least of which are your money and personal safety.  If it looks sketchy, it probably is sketchy.
2. Do your research. Once you’ve found a place that seems legitimate, find out as much as you can about it.  I asked the landlady I’d be renting from for contact info from previous tenants.  After Googling them to make sure that they were legitimate, I emailed and Facebook-messaged them to find out if the apartment and landlady were legitimate.  This was also a good way to find out other information about the place.  For example, the girls I talked to mentioned the landlady was pretty anal retentive about cleanliness, which I wouldn’t have known otherwise.
3. Explore your surroundings.  This is where the magic of the Internet is really helpful.  When I was looking at apartments in Lisbon, Google Maps’ street view feature was still pretty new, and was a great way to virtually walk around my future neighborhood. While this is far from ideal, it did help me check out whether the area seemed clean, densely populated, near busy streets, etc.  If you’ve managed to befriend former tenants on Facebook, take a look at their past photos to see if you can learn anything about the area you’ll be living in.
4. Get a second opinion.  Whenever possible, try to get someone who actually lives in the country to check the place and landlord out for you.  I was lucky to have one of my future coworkers stop by to meet my prospective landlady on her way home from work one day.  Once I got a positive review from her, I felt a lot more at ease.  If you don’t know of anyone in the city you’ll be moving to, utilize your social networks.  Chances are, there’s some travel blogger out there in the city you’re visiting who wouldn’t mind checking helping you out.  Take them out dinner or something when you arrive to return the favor.
5. Take a leap of faith.  When it comes to travel, there’s no such thing as a sure thing.  At the end of the day, you’re going to have to send a substantial sum of money to someone you’ve never met (Speaking of this, I wired the first month’s rent to my landlady, but this is not recommended. Leave me a comment if you’d like to know more.). Following these tips should help set your mind at ease, and increase your chances for a positive outcome, but you still stand a chance of getting totally screwed over.  However, I’d venture to guess that if you’re planning on moving to another country alone, you’re no stranger to risk-taking, so trust your instincts and have faith that everything will work out.

Have you ever used craigslist to find an apartment (or anything else for that matter) overseas?  What was your experience?  What other international cities have active craigslist communities?

Finding a home base in a new city– Libson, Portugal

During my time in Lisbon, I was lucky enough to live across the street from the Campo Pequeno shopping center, which housed the restaurant and bar, Os Torricados.  While I thought I’d just be taking advantage of my proximity to Campo Pequeno for grocery shopping, Torricados quickly became my home base in Lisbon.

My first meal at Torricados was bacalhau a bras, which is absolutely essential for anyone looking to get a taste of Portuguese cuisine.  As anyone who visits Lisbon quickly learns, bacalhau (salted codfish) is a dietary staple, and Torricados makes some of the best bacalhau a bras (salted codfish cooked with egg, rice, and vegetables) around.  Their white sangria is also some of the best I’ve ever tasted.

I’m not lying when I say I spent all of my money at this place the first couple weeks I was in Lisbon.  Luckily, after getting to know a few of the bartenders and waiters better (more on that in another post), I stopped having to pay.  One night, I even met the owner, who signed a copy of his coffee table book/cookbook for my roommate and me, and bought both of us cocktails.  Being recognized as a regular by the owner of the restaurant (a prominent restauranteur in Portugal) made me feel really important.

Aside from the amazing food and central location, Torricados is a great place to hang out.  If I didn’t have dinner here, I at least stopped by for a drink with my roommates.  The cocktails are amazing, and there are lots of leather couches where you can sit and have a drink (or several) at any time of day.  Cocktails on the couches at Torricados was definitely an integral experience to my making friends and feeling at home in Lisbon.  I bonded with my roommates, the waiters, and other customers.  Living alone in a new city, on a continent I’d never visited previously, was scary, but finding a place where the staff recognized me, greeted me, and invited me to hang out with them after work helped me feel more confident in my new home.