Piso Hunt

Hola from Madrid, Amigos!

Well you´ll be happy to know that I found an apartment. It´s with three other Spanish girls around my age, in the ¨mixed¨neighborhood (meaning immigrants, older Spaniards, college kids, etc.) so the price is right! I´m withing two blocks of the fresh produce market, the supermarket, the church, a park, and the metro stop is 10m from my front door....and most importantly, the McDonalds! Haha, tough to beat in my opinion. I even get my own TV in my room and WiFi internet which is hard to come by here! Pretty lucky if you ask me, but at the same time I´m just happy with a roof over my head. I´ll be moving into my apartment within the next week or so and will then be able to use my own computer to upload a few photos.

My weekend was filled with the ¨piso¨ (or shared apartment) hunt. The first few phone calls were hard to make as I still don´t understand much of the ¨Spain¨Spanish with the lisp and all. Last night, I went to the Plaze de España with some of the kids from the Marquette program. Turns out one of them was the girl I was told to look for who knows one of my really good friends and when I gave her the name of a few other people I knew at MU, the first person I named was her boyfriend....talk about a small world!

I have also discovered that I was Spanish in a past life. Here, everyone stays up until the odd hours of the morning, sleeps in, eat a late lunch, an even later dinner at 10, and somehow they make time for a nap in the middle of the day! The entire city closes from 2-5 to eat and sleep....EAT AND SLEEP....... in the MIDDLE of the DAY! Ha, I was just living on the wrong side of the pond all these years!

Funny Story Numero Dos: The ¨besito¨. So in Spain, it´s common (and necessary) that when you meet someone or greet them you lean in and give them a kiss or ´besito´on the right cheek, then the left. Well stupid me...when the first door to the apartment opened I went to shake hands with the girl as she learned in for the peck. I was so startled that I forgot to move my hand and poked her right in the stomach!!! Then, I felt like such an idiot I couldn´t remember how to apologize and was stuttering. Ha, all I could do was laugh. Subsequently, I have now learned the Spanish word for AWKWARD.