Thursday, March 1, 2012

Mi Casa


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).

We have two of everything: bathrooms, refrigerators, microwaves, tvs… but there are seven people that live here, so it doesn’t seem to extravagant.  Trust me, it’s not.  Let’s just say that it’s a very good thing that the dueña cleans the common area twice a week.  But alas, it’s home and every day when I walk in the main doorway and say hello to the door lady as she sits there smoking and watching Mexican soap operas, and then unlock the door to one of my roommates watching MTV or the news, I do feel that this is a great place for me.

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