First weeks of Puglia - house hunting

On Friday June 14th at 3:45 pm I left for Puglia. From Pensacola, Florida to Atlanta, Georgia then to Rome, Italy and another last flight from Rome to Brindisi. The flight from Atlanta to Rome is a really long flight, about 10 to 12 hours. Luckily I got about 3 hours of sleep on this plane. It is very important that you sleep on the plane because there is a 7 hours difference, so when I left it was 3:45 pm and when I arrived in Puglia the local time was 3:45 pm but in my head it was 6:45 am meaning I should be asleep, so first thing you want to do is sleep, but if you do this your jet lag will get worse, so you have to stay awake until it is a descent time to go to bed it is very hard but it isn't impossible. By 5 pm we finally arrived at our temporary house. We will be staying here until end of September and after that we can rent it month per month. We are very lucky that we found this house because most vacation houses and hotels were all booked because a lot of tourists come over in the summer for the warm weather. The first 2 weeks were extremely busy we went from realtor to realtor looking for houses. We saw at least 1 house a day usually 2 to 3 houses a day and you would think that we at least found one house we like but no such thing. Most of the houses didn't have a decent kitchen or only had 2 bedrooms after searching for a very long time found about 5 houses that were okay. House number 1 is located in Oria. This city is not all that popular and when we first saw the house we thought this is the house! However, after putting some thought into it, we realized the location wasn't great and it was a bit too far from school. House number 2 is located in Ostuni, the same city as where we live now. The outside was yellowish, it had 4 bedrooms (which is very rare here) and mom said that the 4th bedroom could be a playroom and then there was a whole basement floor which mom suggested could be a media room. The only issue with this house was that the kitchen was extremely small and it was in this separate little room. We thought of maybe expanding the kitchen and placing a new kitchen in the 4th room, but the more we thought about it the more we realized that that just won't work. Having such an amount of work done in Italy is asking for trouble. House number 3 was really nice and it was perfect until we heard the price it was 460000€ . In Italy you can bid less for the house than they ask but when we heard that last year some one had done a bid of 360000€ - which is what we could offer - but the owner denied that bid, so that quickly also became a no for us. House number 4 had 3 bedrooms and a really nice kitchen there was only one problem the 3rd bedroom was just big enough for a bed and a closet no room for a desk or anything so that was a no as well. House number 5 had a beautiful yard a big pool, but the inside was not perfect. The difference is that this house was also for rent and it is one of the only ones that are for rent here. The owners are really nice and when we came over they told Sebastiaan and me that we can swim in the pool while mom and dad talk to them about stuff they need to know about the house. We are still thinking about the house and it's really high on the list. It's located in San Vito dei Normanni and that's only 15 minutes from school, so ideal.
As soon as we have chosen a house, I will post some pictures so that you can see where we live. For now, I will add some pictures of our temporary house in Ostuni and also some pictures of Ostuni city center. It is called "the white city - in Italian la citta bianca" and I think you will see why. It's really pretty, but very touristic. In winter it has a population of 32,000 and in summer this swells to a swapping 100,000. We have to be really careful what we say, because the odds are quite high that we encounter people who speak our language. We never had that issue back in Alabama ;-)