Sorry for the onslaught of blog posts! Apparently I've been writing them and not posting them...
I already wrote about the process of finding
my apartment, but I have never elaborated on the actual apartment. When I found the room that I wanted, it
wasn’t available for three days, so the dueña (landlady) said that I could stay
in a small room in another apartment in the same building for a few days so I
didn’t have to stay in the hostel. My
first night in this small room, two of the guys who lived there were hanging
out playing the guitar, and I walked in and joined them in singing everything
from Lady Gaga to Guns-N-Roses. Over
these days, as I met and talked with the people in this apartment, I became
more and more excited about living with Spanish students and more and more
anxious about how my new apartment (we call them pisos here) would match up.
When I moved on Monday, I was sad to leave,
and as they were all still asleep, I didn’t get to say goodbye, so left them a
note on the table. Upon moving into the
new piso upstairs (into a room that was much bigger), I discovered that the
dueña actually lived there with her family in one half of the apartment, with
their own bathroom and kitchen, which they locked off from the other
inhabitants. Additionally there was a
Canadian girl who was nice, but never wanted to speak Spanish, and a girl from
Holland who also never wanted to speak Spanish.
As I sat in my room, there was no guitar music and no “holas” as the
main door opened and closed. Two days
later, I passed my dueña in the hall and spontaneously asked her if I could
move back downstairs. I used the fact
that the two girls always spoke English as my excuse (Middlebury does have a
rule that we can’t live with native English speakers, though they never
actually check up on it), though everyone knew that I actually just liked it
down here better.
So now here I am, in my tiny, yet adequate
room, living with Alba, Joaquin, Sofia, Gabriel, Gema, and Ruben – and I love
it. The piso is very long – it’s
basically one hallway with all of the rooms, including the living room and the
kitchen, behind doors. My room opens up
to a big garden between a bunch of apartment buildings, which is great because
it’s really quiet, as opposed to the other side, which is right on a pretty
busy street. One day I’ll try to get up
pictures, but for now, use your imagination – it’s probably making it better
than it is. We do have Nintendo 64
though… and a dishwasher. And an oven,
which is apparently uncommon here. The
washer is in the kitchen, and when it’s done (after the spin cycle that sounds
like it’s going to lift the whole building off the ground) I hang my clothes on
a line outside the kitchen window in a little internal courtyard-type space
that goes up all eight floors (being on the first floor, we don’t get a lot of
sun in our kitchen).
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