1684 Rue de Geneve Ornex, France
Locating a place to stay in the Geneva area is tough. Geneva has not had major housing construction for years and a number of multinational corporations have chosen to call Geneva home while others have a significant presence here. This may be due to the central Europe location or possibly favorable corporate laws. Add in the United Nations, World Health, International Labour Organization, and the other world focused groups and the housing shortage is easier to understand. The Swiss laws apparently are favorable to tenants to the point that it’s difficult to eject a tenant even if they quit paying rent. In Geneva, foreigners outnumber the Swiss and due to all of the above, residents are reluctant to let go of their apartments – nearly all of the residents of Geneva rent apartments – thus the housing shortage. In locating a place, we started with our network by asking friends, friends or friends, facebook friends, professional contacts, etc. what they knew about Geneva and housing here. We also began searching websites. What we found was that when something comes available, if you do not jump on it immediately and commit, it disappears. Not knowing the area or understanding the language made it more difficult.
As an aside, it is September 3, 2010 while I’m writing this about 10:00 am and a perfect day; cool temperature, clear sky with low humidity, mountains in the background, and warming up. Much different from what we left in Auburn a week ago, i.e. 98 degrees with 90% humidity.
We had decided to have a city experience and focused our efforts on finding a two or three bedroom apartment in Geneva. Our son Chris was accepted in the International School of Geneva and this seemed a good plan at first. A friend of a friend sent us an ad for an apartment, which seemed too good to be true. As a rule, apartments in Geneva are small around 800 square feet or less and expensive, $3,500 or more a month plus utilities. Many are in big cube like unattractive structures containing multiple units. This ad was for a modern three bedroom fully furnished and equipped place in an old district with an apartment that was quant and charming from the pictures. We contacted the renter and received a series of emails in pidgin English that reminded me of the emails I frequently get from Libya offering me a million dollars just to hold some money for the Ambassador. The renter promised the world and indicated he would fly over to meet me at the apartment to let me in as he lived in England. He did send a contract “drawn up by his attorneys” that looked like something I would do and requested we wire $1,500 to hold the apartment to an address in England. He may well have been legitimate but apparently apartment scams are frequent and it scared me off. We then ended up with two places we found, a concrete cube apartment building in Versoix Switzerland right down the street from where Chris’s ended up going to school and an old redone French Farmhouse just out of Ferney-Voltaire France with an address in Ornex France across the border from Geneva. We took the farmhouse because it had more charm basically. Interestingly, you can go on Google maps and get a street level view of places and actually a pretty good feel for an area from your computer. At this point Chris and I have had a week to settle in our new house and town. The house is a three bedroom, three floor – four floors if you count the basement - house with a small yard backing up to agricultural fields. Unfortunately, it sits right on the main road from the west into Ferney-Voltaire and on into Geneva and it’s constantly noisy from the traffic, both large trucks and motorcycles. Our first few nights here it was warm and we had windows and shutters open since there is no A/C. It sounded like we were in a freeway. More recently, it has cooled down so we close the shutters and windows and it’s much better. Chris has an attic room on the third floor, our room and the other bedroom (really an anteroom to ours) and a large bathroom is on the second, and the first floor has a living room, dining room, and kitchen. The house has minimal furniture, bare wood floors and nothing on the walls resembling to me a youth hostel. Debra from here has loaned us a few pieces of furniture and some pictures which has helped it out – a rug would do wonders.
The bus swings through town and either heads by our house, but doesn’t stop, on the way to Gex (pronounced Jex) France or swings around in the center of town at the Ferney Mairie and heads back to the Geneva Cortavin or central bus/train station. My routine is to get Chris up and going around 6:30 am and drive him to school in Switzerland by 8:00 am (about a 20” drive), get back home to get myself together, walk to the bus stop (about 20”) and take the bus to work (about a half hour). People at work are casual about getting there but seem to stay late, as much as 7:00 pm regularly, probably due to it being daylight here until 8:30 pm. In the afternoon Chris rides the train from Versoix to Geneva and then catches a bus to Ferney. He can ride both for a 3 Euro ticket. The bus/train drivers do not take up tickets and occasionally the trains or buses are boarded by police who enter from either end checking tickets. If you don’t have one there is an 80 Franc fine – about $80.00. The bus and trains are often used since they are clean, modern, and efficient arriving and departing exactly on time. Plenty of people bike to work and seem to reach incredible speeds commuting. The male bikers tend to be decked out in full cycle regalia while the women ride in a more upright position wearing their street clothes; more on biking in another post. The roads are also clogged with motorcycles who pass cars on the right and left and work themselves to the front of any traffic line. It’ a little like driving on a racetrack. I’m amazed that with narrow roads, accommodations are made for numerous small cars, large buses, motorcycles, and bikes. It is a bike culture where cycling is seen a mode of transportation.
Our house has a modern though small kitchen with small modern appliances. They look completely different than American brands and it’s been a challenge to figure them out. The instructions are here but in French. Fortunately the toilet is straightforward and we have both a claw foot tub and a modern glass shower. Similar to the other appliances, the clothes washier is tiny holding only a small load with a real old fashion clothes line outside – that should be fun when it gets cold. We do have Internet with WiFi, Internet phone, and Cable TV all compliments of Orange, which is kind of like Charter or AT&T. It took several days to get the WiFi going and I about went nuts feeling cut off from home. The Internet phone however is tops and gets us free calls to the USA.
In finding a place, we found Internet web sites that were extremely helpful including: AngloInfo.com which has general information about different European cities and living in Europe with a classified section and specific information about the city you enter; Sublet.com that lists apartments/houses for rent both furnished and unfurnished for short and long rent; World Swiss Radio Classified with oodles of information on items for sale and rent; homegate.ch similar to sublet.com; Vanilla Homes.com with short term rentals; VBRO.com with vacation rentals in most countries; and ExPat.com with general information for Americans living abroad. We found intriguing sites at homeexchange.com and sabbatical.com where you can swap houses if you can make the dates work – we weren’t able to. There also are realty agencies that a friend’s friend steered us to and they were helpful in sending information. One of the best contacts we received about an apartment for rent was from a post put out on the United Nations Intranet that landed up a great sounding apartment offer that was unfortunately received after we had committed to the current place. That’s it for the moment, more to come. While here, please feel free to contact us at:
1684 Rue de Geneve
01210 Ornex France
Phone: 00 33 450 404 385
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