Week one..

Madrid-

Please, no judging of the grammar, punctuation or spelling while reading my blog- let’s remember I learned Spanish first J

Week one:

Realizing now that this blog should have started day one, I will do my best to retrieve all the great and not so great memories and adventures of week one.

Once again I am reminded of how lucky it is to be the daughter of a flight attendant. I was able to get to Philly from Minneapolis one my second attempt of the day (without being charged for my 76lbs bag! Thanks Mammasita). The flight to Madrid was pretty full- apart from first class- so an executive decision to spend the $100 was made. First class to Barajas airport in Madrid it was!

Let it be known that the Minneapolis airport is microscopic compared to that of Madrid. After getting through customs and retrieving my oh-so-light bags I found the screen for arriving flights. My friend Becca was supposed to arrive about an hour and forty-five minutes after me so I was going to try to meet her. Oh and by the way- my flight was delayed an hour or so due to “technical difficulties” and shortly after that problem was resolved the entire Philadelphia airport shut down so the presidential plane could take off safely… great. Anyway- so I took a bus to get to Becca’s terminal and met her outside her gate- I was quite proud of myself…  We got a taxi and made it to the hostel safe and sound.

The next day I blame on jetlag. Instead of writing about the emotional overload I experienced upon arrival to Madrid I will just leave it as… after a short lived walk around town it was decided that sleep was absolutely necessary. After my siesta (6 hours later) I was feeling better, I would just need to give myself a little time to adjust and realize that Minnesota-nice is something to appreciate, you-betcha.

The next two days were filled with orientation (Wednesday-Thursday) - long and a little boring but it was very comforting to meet other Americans in the program. We met one girl on the metro from Seattle and another on our walk to orientation from Rochester, MN- small world. At this point we had really no connection from home because the internet in our hostel was very slow and due to my emotional-state on day one I hadn’t allowed myself to talk to anyone yet J. One of our fellow Auxiliares did some investigating and found the internet Wi-Fi password- not more than two minutes passed before there were about 20+ computers and conversations to home surrounding me.

This being my first hostel experience I must say that it is the way to travel if you want to meet some very interesting people. I have met some wonderful people at this hostel from all over the world. Many were in the same situation as me; working their butts off to find a place to live, some were doing bicycle trips across Europe, others were just enjoying Spain. But made some friends nonetheless J

Next phase of the week: apartment search. Becca, myself and about 843 other people set off on Friday to find a place to live. Between Becca and me, I’d say that over 50 phone calls were made to various places we found advertised online, somewhere between 15-20 walkthroughs, and a few no-answers of the door (after about a 20 minute metro ride)-we had reached far over our limit.

Living accommodations in Madrid are far different from what I am used to back home. A lot of the bedrooms we looked at were no bigger than the area we had Eddie caged off in before he was house-trained. I am not kidding you-- walk-in closets have more space. The searching began Friday, and carried on through

Saturday, miles and miles of walking

Sunday, more miles were walked

Monday, helpless/hopeless would be the only accurate way to describe the vibe at this point.

Tuesday- Met Becca at Starbucks with a newspaper and as much optimism as I could muster. We were talking about different places to call. By the way, in the beginning of this searching process the plan was to find a place with two bedrooms so Becca and I could live together- plans changed when we could hardly find one bedroom available in most flats. Anyway back to making calls. We were chatting about different appointments we had made to go see in the afternoon when another girl sitting two tables away asked if we were looking for somewhere to live, we had this conversation many times throughout the week so we didn’t think much of it… as we were talking the man next to us informed us that he lived down the street and he thought it had just opened up and was to be put up for rent. It had three bedrooms and was less than a block away; I have never packed up my things so fast. We ran down the street to see the Portero (someone who works at the door and office of apartments) it was about 12:45, she came down to the office at 12:56 saying that she couldn’t show it to us now because she got off at 1:00 and wouldn’t be back until 5:00… God bless the siesta, but it seriously ruins my plans relentlessly. We went to two other walkthroughs and had found one that we decided would sit on the back burner if nothing else showed promise. We had lunch and killed some extra time until 4:30.

We were very skeptical about this place because it was going to be rented for 700euros a month; 234/person- we had only been looking at places from 350-500euro/month- so we were preparing ourselves to see rooms the size of a picnic table, if not smaller. On the contraire!   It was exactly what we were looking for, later that night we called to finalize everything- We will be getting our Keys on Thursday J

Today was the first day I was really able to breathe and appreciate the fact that I was in Spain. After an excruciatingly annoying week it had all paid off for the better. I am so thankful and realize that a lot of people must have been praying to get some cards pulled for me over here… we will be living in an extremely safe area (Goya/Salamanca) full of shopping, bars, shopping, Retiro park, museums, shopping… you get the idea. I will put up pictures as soon as I can.

-Kelley