Cried all the Whos in Whoville

So, we´re here, and we´re not dead. But we ARE using Internet kiosks to communicate. Fortunately, they´re WAY cheaper than their equivalents in the US.

Getting here and closing on the apartment was an adventure, but it ended well. I had all sorts of nightmares about worst case scenarios when we got here because there were so many unknowns. The biggest ones were that the apartment agent we were working with might turn out to be dishonest and we would either not have an apartment or have an unlivable one. Mercifully, none of that came to pass. The apartment is very small, but that´s exactly what we signed up for. Since apartment prices are very expensive here (thought not as bad as they will be in London) and we weren´t even sure we´d have any rent income for the house when we put a deposit down, we opted to go for as low a rent as we could get while still being in a convenient location where we could live without a car. That meant the apartment would be very small.

So, size aside, it´s a nice, ground floor apartment that looks out over the courtyard. Most Spanish apartment buildings are built around a courtyard, so you have a choice of street facing or courtyard facing. Courtyard facing is much quieter, and that´s a big deal when you have a city apartment in a city that REALLY never sleeps. The courtyard view really makes the place feel Spanish. The kitchen and bathroom look to have been updated recently. Everything works well. The bed is comfy. I´ve adjusted surprisingly quickly to the time change, and I´m sleeping really well.

The flight over was incredibly relaxing. Business class on American Airlines was even fancier than Terran remembered from being bumped to business on KLM once. We felt like we were in the lap of luxury. But when we hit the ground in Madrid, we hit more “adventures”. The airline lost our luggage. We met up with the driver that the apartment agent had sent an hour late after filing a claim with American Airlines. He got lost on the way to the apartment and seemed to be very confused about the fact that we needed to stop at a bank to get our traveler´s checks exchanged for cash. Then exchanging the traveler´s checks turned out to be a nightmare. Almost no banks would deal with us because we were not customers. Terran´s dealt with traveler´s checks in a few countries on business travel before, and he´d always been able to walk into the first bank he saw to exchange them. Not so here. Eventually, the apartment agent had to intervene and found us a place that would cash them out. THEN we were able to close on the apartment. It made for an even more stressful first day than we expected, and I personally had expected the first day to be an ordeal.

Oh, and our luggage was delivered midmorning the next day. It actually turned out to be a blessing in disguise, since otherwise we´d´ve had to manage it while we ran from bank to bank, trying to get cash.

So, really, the only outstanding problem is that Internet wasn´t hooked up in the apartment after all. There´s always one thing that you should have followed up on one more time. I´d actually intended to double check this with the agent before we left, but it fell into the small handful of things we just couldn´t get done. When the apartment agent and I negotiated this place, I told him that I absolutely had to have broadband internet in the apartment for my job. He replied that it came with the apartment and quoted me a price. It sounded so smooth and he´d been so helpful that I assumed that was true. Apparently, a lot more actually has to be done to hook up Internet, and that was one the one thing in everything we negotiated that he forgot to do. This puts us in a weird emotional place. This guy has been absolutely wonderful in all other areas, but I´m burning leave time right now, and I can´t even file a timesheet to get the leave time without being able to connect to the internet from my own computer. We´re talking to the agent about using his cell phone internet as a stopgap, and we plan to hold it hostage until the Internet is dealt with. Watch this space for more information.

Other tidbits — almost nobody in this area speaks English at all. We didn´t expect everyone to speak English, but Terran´s associate at Universidad Polytechnica assured him that our ignorance of Spanish was no issue at all. He said he had a grad student who had been here two years and had never bothered to learn a word of Spanish. That matched our experience in Germany, and France is legendary for answering in English if you try to speak in French. So we figured we´d sign up for Spanish as a Second Language classes here. Well… apparently there are lots of English speakers SOMEWHERE in Madrid, but we´ve been lucky to find a single bank teller and one person in an electronics store who could speak enough English to take our money. Plus the apartment agent, who is British and has been invaluable as a translator. So communication has been a real adventure.

On the bright side, we ran into a young woman in the electronics store who spoke English — very quickly your ears perk up whenever you hear it. She is here for a post-undergrad exchange program. When we struck up a conversation, she said, “They told me everyone spoke English here! This has been really intimidating!” It was like finding a kindred spirit, and we immediately exchanged contact info. So maybe we´ll have a little bit of social contact after all.

I think that´s everything for now. Hopefully, I´ll be posting next from the comfort of our apartment. The city itself is delightful. We´ve been having a wonderful time exploring. Tomorrow (Sunday), we plan to go to the Prado art museum, supposedly one of the premier art museums in the world. Admission is free on Sunday! Heh.