The Kids Are All Right

When I walk into the school playground every morning, I’m greeted with numerous tiny–sometimes sticky, sometimes wet–hands.

KEEEEEEELLLLLLLYYYYYYY!!!!

It’s surprising how quickly kids can bond to you. The first day, I was overdressed (wearing my favorite shift dress with the rest of the teachers in jeans) and awkward, looking at twenty expectant faces: What do I say? How much English do they know, and are they going to give me blank stares?

These kids are pros, however. They’ve had auxiliars before, and their minds have stored away every essential question they want to ask a strange foreigner from a distant land. These questions include, without fail (and usually in this order):

House Hunters International

My mom and I have watched probably more than our fair share of House Hunters International. For those of you unfamiliar with this HGTV gem, it’s a show where people with more money than sense buy vacation homes (or, rarely, actual homes) in foreign countries. The realtor shows them three options, and they pick one after an alarming short discussion (hopefully edited for television) of the benefits and disadvantages of each option.

Steve has also watched this show with his mom (not on his own accord, he’ll tell you), and we decided that House Hunters International would be a pretty apt description of our apartment hunting experience here in Spain–although with a much smaller budget, no realtor, and a lot more frustration.

Spain’s rental market is divided into basically three camps:

Arrival in Madrid

It’s been a whirlwind first day full of excitement and exhaustion and frustration and blisters. We arrived at 6 a.m. local time, which felt to my beleaguered, screaming body like 12 a.m. Not wanting to be the victims of jet lag, we decided to power through the day. (A rookie mistake is going to bed–you have to browbeat your body into accepting the new time.)

I’m not one to miss breakfast (or any meal, actually), so we stopped at La Rollerie, a quaint café promising “Coffee. Bread. Food.” We were amused by the mix of languages and culture–Spanish restaurant, French title, English tagline. This place was the perfect way to start the day. For 10€, the special was a basket of bread, a basket of pastries, fresh-squeezed orange juice, coffee, and marmalade and butter. After the depression-inducing airline food (breakfast was a vacuum-sealed sandwich), I was ready to melt into my chair at the deliciousness of it all.

The World Is a Book

“The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.” — St. Augustine