For everything we need to do to get settled in I’ve been spending way too much time on the computer or at the table filling out paperwork and researching things and making transactions (moving money across countries is a bit complicated)–I’ve burnt several quesadillas and grilled cheese sandwiches because I start making something, then go back to the table for a sec which is where my paperwork is, then I get distracted continuing to work on it, then before I know it I smell something burning and realize I forgot my quesadillas were still cooking on the stove.
Burnt quesadillas pretty much sum up how this week has gone. Actually, no, not really, because all things considered our settling-in processes are moving along nicely and it’s been exciting to explore parts of the city. It’s more just how we’ve felt in this particular apartment: the smells, the stuffiness, the weird sleeping arrangements with no privacy, the bathrooms that don’t lock, the water situation (it went out for a little while), the unwashed laundry because we were worried running the washer would make the water go out again, the crampedness, the chaos and incompleteness of living out of suitcases. We’re just a little burnt out from transitional living and ready to have our own place.
But like I said as far as our settling in goes, it’s been going nicely. Saturday and Sunday were pretty chill, but since Monday things have picked up quite a bit.
Our first priority obviously has been finding a place to live. We booked our current place for one week, so we’ve needed to move quickly if we don’t want to move ourselves and all our luggage again; we’re up to 5 times so far. But hey what’s one more move? Lol
***By the way, I’d say 3 suitcases each is not unreasonable for an international move, but 18 suitcases is still a lot, even comical, as one friend said 😂 We could’ve done 2 per person actually, but we brought a lot of books and games–partly just for ourselves, but also for my English teaching; I’d heard from other auxiliares that they wished they had brought more English materials like those.
So anyway we’d like our own place to have our own place, obviously, but also we need an address for:
- Setting up internet and phone
- Enrolling kids in school
- Getting a bank account (but we already did this. Technically we needed our own address to do so, but the nice friends from church who invited us for dinner on Sunday said we could use their address for that. But if we didn’t have someone who let us do that, we’d have to figure something else out, because it’s a catch-22–you need a bank account to rent a place, but you need an address to set up a bank account.)
- Getting empadronamiento, which gets us access to:
-the Personal Metro Card that we can pay monthly for with unlimited rides (we’ve currently been paying per ride per person);
-Spain’s official Large Family Discount Card (reduced fees for metro, museums, events, etc…Why doesn’t the US have this???);
-our TIE, which is the foreigner ID card;
-and probably other things.
Empadronamiento is a government registry of residents, for the purpose of getting a proper population count in order to allocate resources to areas accordingly. In theory, anyway. I know nothing about how it all actually works. We’ll probably need our empadronamiento for other stuff as well.
Monday we had an appointment to meet a realtor and see a place with him (only Jacob and I–so lots of screen time for kids 🙄 ), but we could only see that one place so we slept/took it easy the rest of the day. Tuesday we saw 6 places, and put in an offer on the last place. There were a couple of other offers but the landlord company decided to go with ours 🥳 so we’re in the process of finalizing. Hopefully done by Saturday!
With that we got the ball rolling with enrolling the kids in school.
Lots of details we could share about that and the apartments we saw and everything else we’ve seen in the city so far and the processes we’re going through to get set up, but that will have to be later.
So it’s been a lot but it’s happening!