Hello everyone!
After a great summer at home working and visiting with family and friends, I returned to Madrid at the tail end of September and began the dreaded house hunt. I was lucky that I had a place to stay while a looked for an actual place to live. Gotta love friends of friends of friends and their hospitality. I was looking at rooms and thinking about looking at entire apartments to rent as well if two of my friends were willing to go in with me. One is my friend Chelsea who I met when I studied abroad in Madrid 3 years ago, and the other was my old roommate from last year. Right before I left home I heard he was looking for a place to live, and I figured that instead of being uncomfortable with new people, it would be better to be comfortable with old people. We did a lot of hard piso searching, (a 'piso' is what the Spaniards call an apartment or a flat), which in Madrid involves looking at all possible ways of finding pisos including walking up and down the streets in your desired area and calling the numbers that are on windows and entryways. All things aside, we were quite lucky. After pretty much exactly 12 hours of continual searching, we found a place that we all liked. It is a three room apartment located by the metros Quevedo and Iglesia. It has a BIG kitchen and a BIG living room and little balconies that go to the main street. We are paying 400euros each without utilities so it is more than last year, but already the place is worth it. Having large spaces where we can hang out is sooo nice. As is having a larger working kitchen. Our landlords are also really nice and excellent and they take care of things right away and are around the area in case with need anything. (For those of you who didn't know, our landlord last year was always travelling around and unreachable when we needed something and when the water pipes broke and the freezer broke it took him 3 or 4 months to fix it with his only motivating being that we were all leaving the apartment.) Our new landlords are amazing. We called them to ask about getting a new mattress for one of the beds and they said 'sure, no problem. It will be delivered on Monday' Simply amazing.
The same day that we moved in the apartment, we also started school. In true Spanish fashion, the school was completely unorganized and we spent 4 hours catching up between ourselves and waiting for someone to tell us what to do. They ended up telling us that they would give us our schedules on Monday and that we could go home. What makes this more annoying is that it takes an hour to get to school and I had to get up at 6.30 to get there by 9 only to be told that we wouldn't know what we were doing until Monday. But them I moved into my apartment and it was the weekend, and everything was splendid.
The following Monday I learned that I would be working with first, second, and third graders. The second graders have to take an exam at the end of the year called the Trinity Exam. It is a standardized English exam where they have to answer questions. The kids usually just memorize rote answers. When the results come back the school gets more prestige if they have more kids pass their exam and I think they also get more money from the government as well. Last year the assistants at my school worked 16 classes which were all 45 min. The program is designed to have the assistants work 16 HOURS. So this year, the school decided to give us the correct amount of hours, which basically means working 9-2 Mon-Thurs. Our school, in comparison to others is on what is called a 'horario continuo' which means they go from 9-2 and that's it. The other schools go from 9-5 with a 2 hour lunch break in between. After school on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays I have some private lessons to help me offset the cost of living here. Well the cost of having fun here:-p
Since all of my money went to paying the month's rent on the apartment plus the month and a half of deposit, I have been laying low and not doing too many interestings activities. We did have a house warming party that was loads of fun, especially now that we have the space to do such a thing. The past weekend I was able to use my metro pass and go out to Alcala de Henares for a Medieval Festival that was going on all weekend. Because the location of the school where I work is considered 'C1' (with Madrid Center being zone 'A'), I can go a lot of places without having to pay more. I went with Chelsea and my friend from college Alissa. It was SUPER crowded. There were a lot of stands and a lot of things to see, but there were so many people that it was hard to move and hard to see especially because a lot of Spaniards are pushy and not interested in letting anyone else but themselves and their family/friends see anything. The highlight of the day was waiting in line for 40ish min. (not joking here) for FRESH BREAD!. There was this one stand that was just selling freshly baked bread rounds. So we waited, and waited, and waited, and ended up with just out of the funny little wood fueled oven bread. It was so hot we could hardly hold it. We each carried out breads around for the rest of the day like they were our little babies. Nothing beats fresh-baked. After seeing the outrageous "menu del dia" prices, 15-20euro a EVERY cafeteria, we decided to get sausages at one of the stands. They hit the spot with grilled onions and spicy sauce. We could almost pretend we were at a BBQ back home.
I've been back in Spain for three weeks now and we FINAlLY have internet at the house. This will hopefully make for more frequent updates on my, uhm, exciting life abroad...
Ciao, Ciao
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