day 4
http://www.gurneysjourneys.com/cycling_blog.htm
Unbelievable, and rather scary. My “friend” Ian has asked me to leave this flat in two days. I wasn’t going to be cheeky and stay for ages (honest!!), but i was kind of banking on a week here. The hardest part for me is that he has said to Jane, my traveling buddy and best friend, that she is welcome for as long as she wants. What did i do wrong? I know phoning all the International Schools while he was asleep in the next room might have been a bit annoying, but it was 10:30am!! He should have been awake. Or maybe it was the pilfering of too many precious English tea bags.
I spent the morning on the internet with a slightly anxious butterfly feeling in my stomach. What am I doing here? I haven’t heard back from the English teaching interview, and my best prospects are an application I am making through a friend’s brother’s girlfriend, and possibly getting some substitution work at one of the five International Schools here. At this point i discover the cheapest temporary accommodation available in Barcelona is a 14 euro a night hostel way out of the city, or 140 euros for a double room for the week. That is a lot of money that i don’t have.
Our plans for picnicking on the beach went wrong when we found ourselves trailing to random corners of the city to look at rooms. The 140 a week place is booked, and I learnt that asking a few key questions on the phone could save you a lot of traipsing around . The 350 double in Glóries was a decent flat in a dodgy looking area, the 480 room with sea view and terrace was not all it was cracked up to be. I was imagining (for that price) a beautiful modern apartment - lovely tiled floors, all mod-cons. In reality there was a 70’s kitchen with tatty curtains where there should have been cupboard doors, a room which “will be the lounge” was piled high with boxes, junk, and bed bases, and the bedroom itself was average - apart from the sea view. I didn’t realise they cost that much. The last place I saw today was a gem, a double room in Poble Sec for the absolute bargain price of 260 a month. To enter the flat you had to open the shutter of a small sewing workshop that belonged to Julia. The room itself was locked, via a tiny padlock. I couldn’t actually see in but the chipboard door said enough. Towards the back of the flat was a table and chairs and an opening onto a dark patio/washing area. The shower faced the patio and had a short swing door - which meant I would be able to wave at my greasy Ecuadorian flat mate whilst washing, and the toilet was out here too. So there you go, there are places in Barcelona worse than nearly all of the accommodation I saw in Mexico.
For a top quality night I snubbed drinks with the flat mate who wasn’t letting me stay, and spent the evening alone, trawling the telesales jobs in Metrpolitan magazine for the ones that didn’t sound too hideous. There weren’t many.
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day 3
To solve the shower problem we paid 4 70 to visit the Olympic pool in Montjuic park. The swimmers were extremely keen types, with goggles and teeny little trunks. They ploughed up and down - front crawl at all times. We spent less than fifteen minutes in the pool and were the only people who didn’t put our heads under the water. On the other hand we made very good use of the sun beds around the pool, and in the second changing room we discovered a jacuzzi and a steam room. On leaving we felt relaxed, and had clean hair - ready for our lunch date with a friend of a friend of a friend.
We really did scrape the barrel looking for contacts in Barcelona, but Kirsten works for Time Out and actually gets paid to go out to lunch so it was an opportunity not to be missed. It must have felt a bit like an interrogation for her though.. advice on this please… how do we do that.. etc, and you can’t help but feel looked down upon as the newcomer. In fact according to the BCN Week, an American free paper, we have arrived about five years too late. The theme of this week’s paper is explaining why Barcelona is past its prime; overrun by tourists because of budget airlines, but most offensive to the proper “local” foreigners are the stag and hen weekenders which bombard the city. It is now the second most popular “hen” city, and many references are made, just to reinforce our stereotype, about Brits throwing up drunkenly in the street.
This afternoon I started on the flat hunting.. just to gauge prices. My first stop was a small but homely three bedroomed place where another contact of ours used to live. After chatting in slightly stinted Spanish to Andrea for half an hour, I discovered she was from New Zealand. And then you have the dilemma… carry on in Spanish for practice, but feel like a twat… or switch to English. Neither of these options is good for a housemate. (My master plan is to move in with Spanish speakers and thus become fluent). The other flat we viewed today was “2 Spanish girls” looking for a flat share. When we arrived it turned out they were Mexican, this was great for a rant about Mexican Independence Day, but the kitchen was tiny, and the girls clearly hyperactive.
Tomorrow I’m biting the bullet and going to look at places which are way out of my budget, just to see what’s around you know?
day 2
The torrential rain is still going for it, and there were massive storms during the night. The neighbours all hang their washing to dry out of the windows, but I really don’t think the plastic sheeting they peg over the top will have helped keep off the rain last night. In fact I’ll bet there’s a few lost socks drifting around the streets.
Where to start? It’s a tricky decision when you have nothing - except one job interview, which obviously i have ended up pinning all my hopes onto. I think i will leave flat hunting for another day.
In fact today was spent attempting to suck up to the guy who’s tiny flat we are staying in. This involved accompanying him to Carrefour and buying kitchen equipment - not the best introduction to Barcelona city (we went to a hideous shopping centre in a run down area) or Catalan culture. After finding a lovely sieve and browsing different types of kitchen knives we returned to the flat where i transformed myself (as best as i could) into a smart, yet approachable, candidate for an English teaching job. The flip flops may not have been a great idea, but the interview was fun and i came away feeling confident that i could do the job. Just a few days waiting for that email now…..
We checked out a local bar in Poble Sec to celebrate. About two blocks from the flat is a plaza with several places to choose from, (this is the case with almost any flat on any road in Barcelona - you never have to walk far to find people chatting away whilst enjoying a beer on the terrace). “Jazz” was comfortable and friendly, but to be honest i would have been happy in any one of these bars; they are all just so much cooler than the massive wooden floored chain pubs you get in England. Oh, and if you want to confuse people when they use the toilet, disguise the flush button as a doorbell.
day 1
So here I am, “starting again” in Barcelona. I don’t know how many times the average person moves to an unknown city to seek a new life, but for me this is number three. Only this time I have plunged right in there with -80 pounds in the bank, no chance of getting a math teaching job (the only position I am properly qualified for) and nowhere to live. On the plus side I have a friend of a friend with a flat, and my traveling buddy from the late nineties has flown out to do a Spanish course and provide moral support.
Why choose Barcelona? This is a question I have been forced to answer many times by various family members who think I have been an unemployed loser for the last year, (”traveler” is what I like to call it). The answer sounds more certain with each re-telling- I am looking for a fun, warm, cultural, city (with a beach) where I can learn Spanish. England wasn’t doing it for me, Mexico is the other side of the Atlantic, I am hoping to find Barcelona a cross between the two.
What I wasn’t expecting was torrential rain on arrival and that my friend’s spare room would be a windowless, poorly whitewashed room, exactly the size of a double bed. I had been warned that the flat was old, but I was expecting it would be possible to have a wash. In fact the bathroom is the size of a toilet cubicle. It is too narrow to bend over and wash your face in the miniscule sink, and the floor doubles as a shower tray. With careful tweaking you can (at the right time of day) produce a dribble of hot water from the shower head. If you hold it above your head, preferably without catching your funny bone on the sink, the water splashes over your body before covering the floor, the door and the toilet seat.
Due to the impossibility of washing my hair under these circumstances, I am faced with the prospect of going to my one and only job interview tomorrow, the culmination of a week trawling the internet for English teaching jobs, with greasy hair.
