Spain Update
Air BnB, Moving, Death Cats (Cats from Hell)
*We moved into our fabulous new apartment in Madrid 4/16!
~
Well, it’s April 15, Tax Day and also the birthday of my former very good friend, the one who, after nine years of solid friendship, dumped me over politics. But that’s ok. What are you gonna do, right? It’s also Day 12 of my wife Britney and I living in Madrid.
So far, I have to say: I love it here. Everything from the drizzly weather to the narrow cobblestone streets to the food and culture to the bookstores on almost every corner to the act of sleeping in, eating late, doing a midday “siesta,” to the grand gothic architecture to the parks and more. (One thing to note though: The Uber and taxi drivers here are a little insane on the road and also not the most friendly sometimes.)
We’re still, amazingly, in our Air BnB, which is in the Lavapies neighborhood, near Malasana, in Madrid. Last week we looked for apartments. We liked the first one we saw, actually, but it turned out not to be legit. (Scams are common here, we heard, and even though this particular apartment didn’t seem to be a scam, our agent told us it wasn’t legally official because the owner had chopped multiple apartments into smaller units and we therefore wouldn’t be able to get the city to sign off as non-citizens on a visa.)
The place we liked was tiny, two bedrooms (one more like a closet) and the smallest bathroom I’ve ever seen, and that includes the bathroom I had in my tiny shoebox shotgun 3rd floor walkup apartment on East 70th Street between 1st and York in Manhattan in 2021. But it was in a fantastic area, along a narrow cobblestone street in a quiet spot but also very close to the city action. Bars, restaurants and coffee shops sat down the block. Plus, it had two tiny, very small balconies overlooking the street which meant fresh air for us and our three cats.
*(One negative in my experience so far in Madrid: When searching for coffee shops to write in, it’s tough. Most places that are called “coffee shops” are actually “restaurants” where a host seats you and you’re sort of expected to eat and leave, not perch up with a laptop and keyboard writing for hours. Or else the coffee shops are tiny with limited seating. Or there aren’t any tables big enough for my writing setup. Or else laptops are even banned. This has been frustrating.)
The second apartment we looked at was lovely, gorgeous in fact, angelic and pure-white seeming, bigger than the first place but still not big, but with a larger bedroom. It was literally two blocks from The Prado which made my mom, a museum docent, to get very excited. (Myself as well, I admit.) It was in the Circulo de Bellas Artes, the literary neighborhood of Madrid. When Britney casually mentioned to the showing agent that I was a writer, the agent broke out into an almost songlike praise of the area. In all truth I felt mixed about this. As many writers are, I am a writer first but a contrarian and a loner second and third. Writers, I half joked with my wife later, gross me out. I said the same thing when Britney suggested a writing group here: Concerned, I stared at her and said, “Writers are terrible people.”
Yes. I know. Irony. Enjoy it.
Anyway we didn’t go for that place. The area, say what you will, was too touristy. And with summer coming, it would only get worse. Being near The Prado would have definite pros and cons. Plus, there was no balcony and no external view; only windows which opened onto the interior of the building.
The third place we looked at—which we just right this moment found out we finally officially got!—seemed perfect. Malasana again. Specifically, Universidad, by Plaza Espana. A hip, hot area. But further north of where we’re at now. Our Air BnB is in what one might call the Oakland of Madrid (Lavapies), filled with cops’ blue lights often rolling, Senegalese and Mauritanian immigrants, and random clusters of non-working and somewhat sketchy-seeming men at all hours of the day and night in the playground-park area 100 feet from our place. The new area, where our first official apartment is, would be the equivalent of midtown Manhattan, one half Times Square (with glittering gigantic billboards, ads playing in public, rivers of bodies pulsing along the sidewalks, every kind of trendy store you can imagine) and one half more “authentic” old-school Madrid, more or less like our hood now but safer.
But things don’t work here the way they work in the States. We loved the place. How could we not. Two bedrooms. Lots of windows. A long hallway. A large open space for the living room. Windows opening to a large back open area with the views of the backs of buildings. Plenty of closets and storage space. And—the kicker!: Something we’ve never experienced before: Two bathrooms! And not only that: Two showers! This will be life-changing. We’ve always had to structure our fragile mornings around who uses the bathroom, when, and for how long. This tyranny ends now! Democracy has arrived! We are free at last!
The place is a little more expensive than we’d planned for but not crazy and still cheap for what we’re getting and the neighborhood. In Manhattan it would easily cost $5-6,000/mo, no problem. We’re paying less than a third of that.
But the money was an issue. Or, specifically, we being non-natives on visas and without jobs became an issue. The landlady had moved to Africa for work. Our agent dealt with her agent. The initial problem was with the “tres gatos,” aka our three cats. The thing is: Most apartments in Madrid, apparently (and maybe in Spain generally? Europe generally?) come furnished. While Britney wasn’t thrilled by this I LOVED it. I could give two shits, personally, what décor ends up in the apartment. As long as we have a roof over our heads and I can write and our cats can survive, I’m good. Plus, it saves us massively in terms of money and effort. We don’t have to hunt for furniture; we just move in. (Though we are going to buy me a writing desk; I’ll use the dinner table for now.)
But the problem was inherent in this: The landlady worried the cats would destroy her furniture. Particularly her massive jade-green comfy couch. Well, we felt they wouldn’t…but there were no guarantees. The little bastards had done damage in Lompoc and Portland, so why not here? We decided we’d put thick blankets over everything which the devils could ruin. And we’d offer her an extra deposit.
In the end, after constant battling back and forth from agent to agent (I don’t think our agent partakes of sleep), the landlady drew the line hard and thick: Three deposits (extras for the cats just in case they go Rambo on the place) plus…wait for it…the final six months’ rent paid up front. You heard me right. So the first month’s rent, three deposits for Satan with Claws, and six months’ rent up front. This on top of the massive tax bill we had to pay today since we sold my house last year.
But, in the end, we loved the place enough and we realized that most places might be similar, and we didn’t want to risk it. We’d already heard that finding a place in Madrid is often very hard, with high competition and limited supply, plus natives being often picked over foreigners. So: We pulled the trigger. That was last week, just before the weekend. We then had to wait for a large amount of money to go through. It did, and now we’re at last moving in tomorrow, 4/16. Our very own apartment in Madrid! It’s a big financial hit up front, especially with the taxes, but we have a fairly big refund also coming back to us so we’ll get that, plus our passive rental income from Portland and Lompoc will provide more savings. We’ll be ok. The cost of living is lower here than in Portland or coastal California. Hopefully next year it’ll be easier after having lived here a while and having a good reference. (Assuming Demon Paws don’t unleash hell on Earth.)
Besides all that, we’ve mainly been walking around a whole lot, getting in our daily steps, checking out coffee shops and restaurants and vintage clothing stores, bookstores, you name it. We found a bookstore last night right by our new apartment which has a nice size collection of “libros Ingles” (English books) which is somewhat rare I am discovering; some bookstores here have no English books, and some have a small selection. I have found so far only one bookstore that has a big selection of English books. This new place has quality literature, in English, and it’s four books for $10 euros. Deal. (I bought Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast there last night, which seemed appropriate given our life right now, as well as a collection of letters and notes by Charles Dickens, Richard Wright’s Black Boy, a book I’ve wanted to read a long time now, and Graham Green’s Brighton Rock.)
Britney—who has had an on and off love affair/complex relationship with alcohol for a long time—started drinking again, in Spain, after six months off. So far that is working out just fine. She drinks about two glasses of wine per day, “vino blanco” in the day sometimes, but usually “vino tinto” day and night. She says the wine here is very light and it does seem (very European) to be more for the food and culture versus stress-relief and numbing out which is more common in America. She genuinely—like most people—enjoys the pairing of good food with wine. On my end, I have yet to check out the English-language AA meetings in the city but the church many of them are held at is conveniently a 10-20 minute walk from our new place.
And the food. Delicious. There’s the Senegalese food at the place a couple minute walk up the road from our Air BnB, a plate of rice with curry chicken or beef, fried plantains, spices. A lot of “jamon” (ham). They’re obsessed with ham here. Ham, cheese and potatoes. And we love it all. This afternoon we had American-style vegan burgers and fake chicken nuggets. Of course tapas, little plates consisting of meats, cheeses, potatoes. All of it is tasty. Britney had heard Madrid wasn’t a “foodie town,” but that turned out to be dead wrong. She has finally admitted this. There’s of course a strong South American influence here, with tacos, empanadas and foods like this as well.
I’ve been speaking more Spanish than ever. I feel good about my abilities, limited as they are. I seem to be absorbing the language, picking it up quite well. I feel fairly confident now, as long as the dialogue between me and a local is not crazy fast, is clear, and using basic language. Through gesture, context, my basic Spanish, and the ability to make educated guesses, 85% of the time I can get by. It’s fun. I’m actually enjoying speaking the language. When I spent three weeks in Mexico City in late 2018, locals often laughed and even mocked you when you tried to speak Spanish. (Especially as a white American tourist.) But here they take you seriously. They like that you try. They respect it.
The people, generally speaking, are very friendly, whether in the more touristy areas or the slightly “rougher” areas (not rough like Oakland or Harlem but more like downtown Portland, minus the homeless). There are some homeless around but, in the 12 days we’ve been here, I’ve seen perhaps half a dozen homeless, maybe a few more than that; under 10 for sure. This is shockingly different from the States, especially in a major city like Madrid of 3.4 million.
It feels very surreal to be here still. I imagine it will feel that way for a good while. We haven’t even moved into our own place yet. It’s been less than two weeks, as of the writing of this post. It’s very romantic, with the cobblestone streets and Plaza Mayor and all the Europeans smoking billions of cigarettes (which I forgot about and don’t fully understand), and the outdoor cafes and the bookstores omnipresent. Personally I sort of morph from one world to another, imagination to real life, inner to outer. Being a writer, I can’t help but observe the activity, life and culture around me. And I can’t help romantically thinking of myself as an “ex pat American writer” living in Madrid. But genuinely that’s not why we’re here. We didn’t come here to be able to tell people in the future that we lived abroad. We came here for the adventure of it, because life is short and then you die. Because there’s so much more to just The American Experience.
Some people haven’t understood why we came here, why we moved, left the States. Many in Portland assumed—wrongly—that it was because of Trump. Some thought we were being irresponsible, or unkind for leaving behind family (all of which are going to visit), and many were jealous and said they “wished” they could do it, too. Some thought we were rich (we’re not), even though the cost of living is lower here than in most major cities in America. Some probably projected onto us because in their hearts they knew they didn’t have the guts to do it themselves. (Psychological projection, that most favorite of American [and human] pastimes!)
It's all irrelevant, of course. All that matters is that we did do it. We’re here. We have each other and our three cats. We have the present and the future.
Nothing can stop us.
