Wrong Decision?

I may have made a bad decision today.  A furnished studio apartment sublet was posted on the CERN market place and I was lucky enough to be the first to contact the person who posted the ad, a friendly Italian transplant named Donatino who specializes in the construction of tunnels for CERN*.  He was particularly proud of having worked on the section of the LHC tunnel, originally created for the LEP collider in the 1980s, which lies under the Jura mountains.  They blasted out a 3km section of the tunnel under 170m of Mesozoic rock!  I was particularly amused by this because one of my favorite memories of the SSC, the doomed super collider in Texas which my dad worked on in the late 80s/early 90s, were the pictures of the massive tunnel boring machines, used to create the deep underground tunnels.

A picture of an SSC boring machine, or Robbins.  

The 2nd guy on the left even looks like my dad!...well, the mustache looks like his.

Those machines captured my imagination, perhaps due to their resemblance to robotic worm monsters.

Donatino met me at CERN and took me to the studio of his lady friend, a nice woman named Fatima who was a teacher in her home country but had recently lost her job as a cleaner, the only job she could get in Switzerland.  She was moving in with Donatino to save money and they were renting out her studio.  Explaining the situation to me prompted Donatino to launch into a diatribe about the Swiss autonomons, whose rigidity and rules and unwillingness to give a hardworking woman like Fatima a job infuriated him.    He claimed that out of a population of seven million, one million Swiss inhabitants are unemployed.  I didn't check his numbers, but I would not be surprised if that was true and, having had my own experiences with Swiss bureaucracy, I could sympathize a bit with his frustration.    

Walking into the building I knew that it was going to be a very nice place.  It was on the bottom floor of an apartment building in a cluster of high rises situated in a quiet residential neighborhood.  The floor of the entry was granite and the walls were covered in nice wood paneling.  The studio itself had an enormous bathroom and a decently sized and nicely decorated main room.  The kitchen, however, was essentially a closet with two ceramic hotplates for cooking.  There was no oven and the refrigerator was actually in a closet.  Tragically, this setup is standard for studios around here.  

I was torn.  I knew the apartment was very nice, especially for the price, and I was sure that I probably wouldn't see anything like it in my future searches.  However, aside from the kitchen, two other aspects gave me pause.  The bed, which was twin sized, looked like a cot, and it would take 3 bus rides to get to CERN everyday.  I left, telling them I would mull it over and give them an answer in a few hours.  

As I went back to my office conflicted, weighing the pros of having a nice place to myself against the cons of the distance and the lack of an oven, two priorities crystalized in my mind.  I realized that I would be happy either with a nice kitchen or with easy access to public transportation.  I'd be willing to sacrifice one or the other, but that I'm not desperate enough to give up both yet.  I reasoned that I've only been here for five days and I have 25 more left to look, so I could probably find something suitable with a little more effort.  All the warnings I've gotten about how hard it is to find a place tell me that there is a good probability that I will not, in fact, find as nice a place, and I will probably get desperate and take something much worse than what I saw today.  But at this point I didn't want to settle.  When the panic sets in I'm sure I'll be kicking myself, but right now I'm willing to take the chance.  Fingers crossed!

*I have to mention that Donatino was wearing a winter coat made of puffy down encased in black plastic vinyl.  It was amazing.