What a blah kinda day! Raining here, not as cold as back home, but dull & chilly nonetheless.

I finally got a call from the landlord of one place we were considering and he was asking for not only a credit report, but proof of income. He seems to think that we cannot live on the amount of money we are living on. Yet we do so. His biggest concern is 'whether we can pay the rent' - believe me, that's one of my biggest concerns too! I'm not real comfortable with having to share this information, especially for a place like this one (it's not the most fabulous place we've seen, but it's cheap and in a good town), but it seems I have little choice if I want the apartment. The place is a little odd - the kitchen is easily identifiable as such, but the other rooms are just rooms with doors of varying sizes (the rooms, not the doors!) and can be used for almost anything you want them to be used for.

I'm having difficulty adjusting to the rental climate here, and part of me resents having to share my income information with a landlord...but you just won't get a place if you don't. It really feels like an invasion of privacy, and to me it doesn't make much sense that landlords are that helpless here when it comes to evicting tenants. I'm used to a system where if you don't pay your rent within the first week of the month, you can be evicted and the police will help move you out if you refuse to comply. Here, that apparently isn't the case and you can end up with people squatting for months or years without paying. I don't get it - this is supposed to the the land of cut-throat capitalism.

Maybe I'm just naive. All I know is that it makes me uncomfortable.

The frustrations of this week are really starting to get to me.