Truckin

Today we relaxed with a super long walk all around Madrid from José´s house to Parque Retiro.
It was nice to have our minds at ease after a stressful and tiring day of apartment searching yesterday. We found out quickly that apartment searching comes with a lot of heartache. Here in Spain they have caught on that girls are better than boys and about 60-70% of the adds placed for apartments are aimed at girl tenants only. The other 20% are for people living alone so our options were pretty slim. Paul and I have always relied on our gut feeling and after seeing 3 apartments yesterday and calling at least 15 places, we decided on the first place. Not only in desperation but also because it truely was the best. The place is rather big and we will have 2 other roommates but the downside is that we still do not know who they will be. We hope with all our heart that they are native spanish speakers and that we will be able to practice everyday but only time will tell. Our room in the place has its own terraza that over looks the large garden in the middle of the complex. There is also a supermarket at the end of the street, a fruit market below us, and all of lifes necessities in our reach. The apartment is about a 20 min walk from the city center and a 30 min walk to my school. Paul would have had to catch the bus wherever we had gone since his school is so far away. We found out from the guy at the tourist information place that Paul is going to be working with the upperclass of Alcalá. Tomorrow we sign the contract with Edwardo our landlord and we move in at the end of the month. Now that we have a place we can concentrate on more important things like the beach. After our trip to Barcelona with Annie (Paul´s cousin), we hope to go straight to the beach Sitges to do some more relaxing and I especially want to catch up with all these tan Spainards I see all over the place.