house hunting...

When we got to Cambodia, we had already communicated with someone that was recommended to assist us in finding a place to live. His name is Mon Sinet. We sent him an email with all the details: our budget, preferred area of the city, # of rooms, etc.. All the normal stuff. When we got here, he had a full list of places for us to see.
We quickly realized that all the houses are relatively similar. Most common is 3 floors and 4 bedrooms. Every bedroom has its own bathroom. The first floor is the kitchen and living room with an extra bathroom. Then the upper 2 floors have 2 bedrooms on each. Also, there are some large balconies and small ones. A few houses have a 4th floor where they've basically made access to what we'd call an attic. Some of them have a little wall around the house (like a fence) that allows you to park your motos or vehicle inside and also you can hang your clothes out. It just gives a little more security. Some of them don't have this wall, so they're just open. You can roll a moto pretty easily if it's in neutral, so parking without a fence is risky.

We made more than a dozen house visits in one day. Here are some pics to show you just what I'm talking about.

The covered parking area hides most of the house behind it. :)

We really thought we were going to end up with this one. 

But this was the one for us. 

In the middle of all the searching, Sinet said he wanted to take us to a specific place for lunch.

Sinet and his colleague with Floyd and Tyler.

I had the beef fajita burrito and Tyler and Floyd had a burger. Not bad!

Since they were all within our budget, it came down to some little details of what was included, location, and dealing with the Landlord. In this case, there was a lot of stuff included that would have really increased our move-in costs for other houses and the Landlord's son speaks decent English, so we can communicate. Jump over to this post to see the inside.