Return to the Red Tape

Just when you´ve had enough of the papers, the signing, the commutes to buildings you´ve never been to in random parts of town, just when you think you´ve done it a thousand times and it won´t ever surprise you or upset you, or ¨grind your gears¨ as some might prefer, it makes an ugly and rather uncomfortable comeback like Brett Favre returning to play for the Vikings.

 Some people say that change is good, and I believe that whole-heartedly, but sometimes change is also something heavy and obnoxious to put up with, like when you pay for a metro pass with 20$ and get 18$ in Sacagawea coins that get easier to carry as you eventually use them, but are at first a total ball-buster to deal with. Let´s just say I´ve got a bag full of Sacagawea coins and they need to be taken all over Madrid. They´re cool 1 or 2 at a time, but a weeks supply of them sort of sucks.

Land ho!

After 3 weeks of sleeping on couches and a solid week of searching all over internet sites, texting and calling random people, riding the metro and walking all over Madrid to buzz said random people's doors, loving all of the places for one thing or another and then finding that there was just something missing, or wrong, or whatever... I've finally found a keeper. 

Being my first time living in a city larger than good ole' Winston-Salem (which is approximately a whopping 225,000 people) I've found that planting yourself next to public transportation that takes you directly where you need to go is one of the most important things to look for in your place of residence. Next comes what kind of amazingly atrocious deposits you need to leave with the former room dwellers ie; two months rent and buying the furniture in the room -possibly a single bed, wardrobe, desk and shelves-. Now the next one not be quite as easy to understand, but being a foreigner in another country requires you to typically look for a single room in an apartment full of random people, this can ultimately present you with seriously wacky situations. I've seen some impressive stuff ranging from techy nerd squad pads to possible illegal immigrant drug trafficking dens. Personally, I wanted to live with Spanish people to make sure that I continued learning, practicing, and improving my language and cultural awareness, while not risking my life, which was actually rather difficult to come across given some of the household situations that I've already described, but, I eventually found a great place with two guys; one from Valladolid, and the other from Cadiz. Sweet baby Jesus does the dude from Cadiz have the funkiest accent, he speaks exactly how Mexicans thinks Spaniards speak, lisping his c's, s's, and z's, all of them (which by the way is not at all how about 95% of the rest of the Spanish speak as they only lisp c's and z's). This is apparently a southern trait shared by very few. 

It can throw you off when talking to him because talking like this makes certain words change into other words simply by the phonetics... ie; if he says "casa", it sounds like /catha/, which normally would be written "caza" and means something completely different (casa = house, caza = hunt). Kind of nuts. 

Anyways, the house is cozy, has a balcony, AC and heating. I've moved into my first apartment in a capital city.