Well, the big news is that I made a contract for an apartment this morning! Yay, for me!
I spend all day Sunday and Monday, searching on the internet, calling around, making appointments, and seeing different apartments, and let me tell you, two days was more than enough.
First of all, the custom here in Madrid is that old single women rent out rooms of their 3-4 bedroom flats to students. So not only are you sharing the apartment with 2 or 3 other foreigners that you don´t know (okay, sure, you have your own room--but not your own bathroom) you are also sharing it with the owner of the flat. So it´s like being in a dorm again and living with your house mother. I must say that after meeting a few house mothers, I found myself thinking...I am a thirty-year-old woman with a professional sassy attitude. Do I really want to live with students and a house mother?
I told Paco this, and he didn´t understand what the problem was. Look, I know it´s the custom and all, and I get the idea that it´s what most foreigners do, but I am not like most foreingers. I am Sassy Catalina, after all.
Well, unfortunately for Sassy Catalina, there was a bigger problem unfolding: when I would call about the few studios that did exist for rent, they either were already rented (even though the internet announcement had only been posted for one single day) or the owner wanted a longer lease than 5 months.
By yesterday afternoon, I was feeling quite frustrated at the prospects of spending every night and morning, searching internet leads and trying to be the first one to jump on it. Plus, the fact that I only needed a place until July was going to be a problem. And, the other problem was that many of the rental options were not near the center of the city. They were located far in the north, where the university district is, and after going up there last night to check it out, I was feeling a bit hopeless. I came to Madrid to live in Madrid, not to live in the residential university campus district.
So yes, Sassy Catalina was getting a bit fiesty and elitist about where she wanted to stay...but I really had no idea how to find better rental options. Then, out of the blue, I got a call for a studio for rent. The girl on the other line asked me if I wanted to meet at the studio in order for her to show it to me. You bet I wanted to!
I quickly rifled through all my notes because I had no idea who she was or where the studio was located or when I had left her the message. By this point, I had my notebook filled with notes about rentals. But she told me over the phone that it was a very small studio, but totally remodeled and completely new, and it was near the plaza de españa, which is perfect because that´s where I´m staying now (the center of Madrid without being in the touristy center). So I said, sign me up!
Actually, she told me the address and I told her I would meet her. (this is all in Spanish, please remember). Then, I set off to find the street of this magical studio. The name of the street was something I didn't recognize. Well, she explained to me on which side of the plaza de españa the street was...but she really only said, "you know where plaza de españa is, well it´s behind it. " Well, really, plaza de españa is a BIG rectangle with streets running along each side and more streets running off each of those streets. And since I never bought a proper Madrid street map before I left the US, I was a little bit fucked.
But off I went in search of the street. I asked some cute guys in a restaurant, because hey, why not (don´t worry, Danny, they were cute, but not that smart!) because they told me that I really wanted this other street (which after going in the wrong dirrection for awhile, my instincts finally told me that I was going the wrong way, looking for the wrong street.)
So then, I went back to the plaza de españa and approached a few cops, who despite trying to be helpful and calling all their cop friends on the radio, they really had no idea. They waved me up towards Princesa street with the vague notion that it was up there somewhere and that I should go ---->that way. After milling about----->that way, I saw a Pepsi truck driver, and thought to myself, this guy has to know what I´m talking about. Alas, he did not, but he was very nice and he had a big map of Madrid, and we looked on the back for the street, and Lo and behold, there it was in the map´s directory. Yay, for Pepsi truck drivers!
I hurried to the street and found out that it was at the top of plaza de españa, and not really the back, depending on your perspective, so I´m really glad that I asked someone who had a map, or else forgettaboutit.
Once I arrived, I realized it was about three minutes from where I´m staying now at my little brothel (inside joke if you´re coming into the blog late), and the location is perfect. Berta, the leasing agent, met me quickly, and show it to me, and indeed, it is tiny! But also very cute and new and perfect...and at this point, I was exhausted and frustrated and sad about my general lack of prospects, so I told Berta that I liked it (b/c I did!) and asked if the owner would be willing to rent it to me for only 5 months. She hesitated b/c like everyone else, she thought that 5 months might be too little. Also, there was another girl, an italian, coming to see it after me, so maybe it would be leased to her. (damn those italians!) Anyway, Berta told me she would call the owner and ask if 5 months was okay, and then, she would call me that night.
I left, thinking that if it was meant to be, then great. If not, then I would just have to keep searching...and I prepared myself mentally to keep searching. I made an appointment for one more place, but again, it was way far in the university district and it took me an hour and half to get myself there and back. And it was an even more complicated endeavor then finding the little studio apartment, let me tell you.
Are you getting the idea of how exhausting this whole process was becoming? And this was only the second day. Thank god for me that Berta called and told me that the owner agreed to lease it to me for 5 months until the end of July! Horray! And as an added bonus, the studio has not only a washing machine, but also a dryer, which is actually quite the rare thing in Spain. Double horray! No hanging my underwear everywhere to dry. Triple horray!
I took a train this morning to Aravaca, which just happens to be the same suburb where Paco lives, so it was helpful to know where I was going. Berta picked me up at the train station and took me to the leasing office where I signed all the documents and made the deposit. I pretty much understood everything in the contract--it was pretty basic--and while reading it in Spanish, I realized that after working in a real estate office for five years, I had seen enough leasing contracts to know what was in them, so translating the concepts from Spanish into English in my head was actually much easier than I thought it would be.
So now, I am the proud renter of a little studio apartment in the center of Madrid! Horray for me! The only problem is that the current renter doesn´t move out until the end of February, so I need to figure out what to do with myself until then, so I´m thinking I´ll just go to Rome next week.
Hey, why not!
