"Human beings are the only creatures on earth that allow their children to come back home." - Bill Cosby

In the past three weeks I turned 25, had my best friend pluck out my first gray hair (thanks Bridget), packed up my life and headed back to Spain, stayed out til 6:30 am with some French guys I just met, and found a new apartment.  This past week, I started back up at school,  gave a presentation about my experiences last year to this year’s group of new teachers at orientation, and have been bombarded by teachers who want private classes for their kids.  So needless to say it’s been a little crazy, but nothing that I can’t handle. So let’s fill you all in on what I’ve been up to.  Before I left for Spain I had planned to stay with a teacher from my school until I found an apartment, but I couldn’t get a hold of her.  So Mary asked Rafa if I could stay the night at his place with them to give me a night to make arrangements.  He happily obliged, so we made the long trek back to his apartment after they came and met me at the bus station.  I was finally able to get a hold of me teacher and she said she would be more than happy to have me stay with her until I found a place.  So now that I had that settled I really just wanted to sleep.  I took a nap for a couple hours until Mary woke me up pretty much just to see if I wanted to eat dinner or keep sleeping.  Well, actually Rafa woke me up by tickling my nose with a feather, but that’s beside the point.  I didn’t want to sleep for 18 hours straight like I did last time I got here, so I dragged my butt out of bed and Mary and I went for a walk.  We ended up sitting down for a drink then ordering Chinese take-out.  Yes, I travelled across the Atlantic Ocean just to order Chinese food in Spain.  Anyways, we ate our dinner, watched some TV and then went back to sleep.  I made arrangements to take all my stuff over to my teacher’s house the next evening, so during the day, Mary and I continued our hunt for apartments.  

 We had an appointment to go see one right in our old neighborhood.  It was an apartment of four rooms, with two available so we went to go check it out.  It turns out that they had just rented out one of the rooms and there was actually only one available.  Good to know.  What we didn’t know then, was that this was only the beginning of a series of mishaps and bad luck until we actually found a place that worked for us. I could seriously write page after page about this, but instead I’ll try and give a quick run down

1.        We showed up at the first place and there was actually only one room available. No go.

2.       We saw a really nice place with three bedrooms.  No oven or dishwasher. Also, we both decided that the location wasn’t ideal for either of us.

3.       We saw a place with two rooms available out of three.  Cool girl, but the place was pretty beat up.  Also, no TV.  Anyone who knows me should know that this is pretty much deal breaker.  Oh, and did I mention the cat?  Now I am an animal lover, but not a huge fan of cats. Especially ones that look like part of their ear was bitten off possibly by another cat.

4.       We saw a place in a perfect location for me, near the bus station. It had five bedrooms, so it would have been a little hectic, but possibly a lot of fun.  Unfortunately it was a dump, and overpriced for the quality of the room. We also didn’t get the best impression of the lady showing the place.  She seemed really nice, but in a used car salesman kind of way. 

5.       I went to go see a place owned by a friend of the teacher I was staying with, but honestly it was just to humor her and show her that I appreciated her helping me look.  The location was way too far from anywhere we needed to be.  The place was kind of cool though, very retro.

6.       The next one is a real doozy.  We went to see a place with two rooms available out of four.  Awesome location right between the bus station and the center and really just close to everything.  We walked in, and the building was really nice.  The girl greeted us and explained that while there are four rooms it would normally just be us two and one other Spanish girl because she only came back and used her room for holidays. The place seemed great.  Not the best looking rooms and not really spectacular in any way, but it worked for us.  Also it had a great balcony with awesome views of the river.  We were sold.  Then, the girl, who was married but couldn’t be more than 30ish starts talking about “keeping the peace” because there were lots of families in the building.  We said that was no problem because we lived in a building with lots of families last year and didn’t have a problem.  Then she starts saying things like for the first few months we can’t have anyone staying over there, but maybe after a while if we had friends visit we could ask her permission to have them stay over, oh and absolutely no boys are allowed to sleep over.  Ummm what?  She didn’t even care if they were just friends, there were absolutely no boys allowed.  I wonder if she applied that rule to her and her husband, or just to us unwed heathens of the world.  We were so shocked and turned off by that we just left and never went back.   I was utterly disappointed after that and thought all hope was lost for finding an apartment.

7.       This next one I think is my favorite.  Mary read an ad for a place with four bedrooms, two available in the same building as the dump with the 5 bedrooms.  Then she saw the number and it was the same lady. I insisted that we give it a try because the ad was different and maybe this place would be a little nicer.  At least, I hoped it would be nicer because I really loved the location. So we get there and she recognizes us, and we say oh yeah we saw the other place with you but we thought that place would have too many people for us.  What I really wanted to say was yeah, your other place is a dump and we’re really curious to see this apartment.  So we get off the elevator and she unlocks the door to the same exact apartment. She’s like oh, you guys already know this apartment, and we were like uhhh yeah we didn’t realize we were coming to see the same one.  I was seriously so deflated.  I was thinking to myself, could this seriously get any worse.  And she continues to try and sell it to us all over again, turning on that car salesman charm, using the word “quality” over and over again.  After about ten minutes of blah blah blah she basically told us to name our price to get us to live there.  Unfortunately neither of us was assertive enough to say that we just flat out didn’t want to live there.  The price was the least of our worries.  So we told her we would think about it and call her.

8.       Home sweet home. The same day of the disastrous second time seeing that apartment, I got a call from Mary saying she just walked by a place for rent, called, and we had an appointment to see it at 7:30.  At this point I was so ready to just get settled, but I really didn’t have high hopes for this place. I mean how could I after the previous debacles.  We got there a few minutes late because I misjudged how long it would take me to get there, but upon arrival I found that the location was perfect and the grounds of the place were really nice. It was in the same neighborhood I live in last year, but a totally different part, and it was really close to the bus stop I use to get to work.  So far so good.  We met the owner’s son Jose and he took us up to the apartment on the 9^th floor.  As soon as we walked in, it felt really good.  Nice spacious living and dining area, two bathrooms, four bedrooms – one double bed and three twin bed rooms.  Kitchen was a little small, but at least there was an oven and microwave. No dishwasher, but that was something I was willing to compromise on.  It also reminded me a bit of our last apartment which is probably why I liked it. It had great views of the city from our windows, a nice balcony, and access to the roof.  As soon as we were done with the tour I was ready to sign on the dotted line.  The only problem was we were only two people, and the place was four bedrooms.  So, we made a deal.  The total rent of the place is 900 euros, which comes out to 225 a person, and that includes water and community utilities – electricity, gas, and internet would be separate.  So he decided that we could rent the place, just the two of us, but we would have to pay 250 each until we found two other roommates.  This sounded fair to us, especially since even with the increase, that was still less that we paid last year.  Another thing I was worried about was that it was only September 23^rd, and we were going to draw the contract up for October to June.  But Jose was really accommodating and said we could move in whenever we wanted, but we didn’t have to pay until October.  Perfect!  So we were sold. 

      I’ll fast forward to now because we’ve already found our other two roommates, so the increase of rent never even applied and we’ll all pay the 225 right off the bat.  I really like the two girls that moved in too.  They’re both studying here.  One of the girls, Milena, is an Italian girl who was born in and lives in Germany and speaks like 20 different languages.  She’s really fun and goofy and I already love hanging out with her.  The other girl Andrea is also Italian, and pretty much only speaks Italian and limited Spanish.  It’s ok for her because Milena speaks Italian, but communicating with us has been pretty comical.  She’s really nice though, a little more reserved, but cool.  Oh, and she cleans a lot, so that’s works for me haha. 

So anyways, everything’s going great so far in the apartment, we had to buy new sheets and comforters and things like that because they were either not here or they were hideous.  We also had to buy a few things for the kitchen and bathrooms, but other than that we pretty much had everything ready to go.  Here are some pictures of the new place!

 This was my bed before I went shopping.  If my memory serves me well, which it usually does, this is what my parents' bed looked like in the 90s.  Needless to say I bought a new comforter.

 My bed now!  I love it.  Take a good look, because I only make my bed about once a month haha. Since Mary and I took first choice of the bedrooms, I took the big one.  We decided it was fair because I had the smallest room last year. 

Mirror, mirror on the wall.  My cool, kind of creepy old mirror decorated with pictures from home.

My giant desk.  You'll never see it this organized again!

                     

 Here's the view from my room. Not too bad, huh?

The bathroom

The kitchen

Our little semi indoor semi outdoor laundry room.  No dryer of course because they don't exist here.  Still something I'll never get over.

Dining/living room area.  Note the GIANT mirror on the wall.  It's really funny when we're sitting on the couch and you accidentally look at each other in the mirror.

 Living room consisting almost entirely of Ikea furniture.  What you can't see is that you can slide out the bottom part of the coffee table to display things from the glass.  There's a really old school landscape puzzle in there currently. 

Balcony!

View of the Cathedral from up on the roof.  AWESOME!

Mary and I enjoyed some tinto de verano and olives up on the roof and watched the sunset.  If you can't already tell, I pretty much love my life here!