We’re been in Singapore for a few years now and the latter half of this month, yes just before Christmas our lease expires. Unlike in Australia where your lease expires and you go month by month (or you could sign another lease if you want to lock in time / rent). Here your lease expires and you either leave or sign a new lease and pay an additional bond if your rent is raised and rents here in Singapore have skyrocketed over the past two years, mostly between fifty and a hundred percent. Our agent, Catwoman was expecting us to sign again or signal our departure two months before our lease expired. One month before our lease was to expire we still didn’t know if we were going to stay or move, we like it here and its easier not to move but it a rather small apartment, having two kids we figured more space is a good thing, so we have found a four bedroom place in this area that is okay, it’s not great as the bathroom and kitchen are old and very bad colours, yes dusky rose and powder blue bathrooms, yes 1980’s style yet built in the 1990’s, trend setters! I’ll upload some pictures later for the strong stomached. We’ll now have a good sized guest bedroom with its own ensuite and room to swing a cat for anyone interested in visiting. As we’ll be moving before Christmas I’ve decide to hold off putting up the Christmas tree and the ten thousand twinkling lights, much to Marika’s surprise. Having a bigger apartment means we can get a bigger tree, our little three foot tree has served us well, maybe we’ll use it again this year and go tree hunting in the after Christmas ‘sell off Christmas crap’ sale.
Since I started writing this blog a few days have passed and its now official, we are moving later this month, we have signed a lease or TA (Tenancy Agreement) as they call it here for the new place, so I’ve been trying to sort out mover and getting the utilities sorted. And I’ve come to the conclusion that removalist companies here try to screw over the ang-moh’s (non locals). I assume because they think we’re all on expats benefits, which like many these days we’re not so we have to pay our own way. I’m tempted to hire a van and a few guys for the day to help us move. I guessing we would save between 50 & 75 percent on the average cost, the last two quotes have been better as I’ve let the guys quoting know that we have to pay ourselves and that we know what our local friends pay to move. Still their quotes have been considerably higher than what our local friends paid. Mmmm why do I hate to move? Oh what a big list that would be! The thought of not having to move was one of the great benefits of buying our house in Australia, alas a year or so after moving in we moved out, well we moved to Singapore, two years later we are moving again, why do I get the feeling we’ll be moving again in the next two years.
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