La Mudanza (s.f.) cambio de domicilio
The Move (noun) change of home
During my 37 years of life I have moved house 20 times, the majority of those since arriving in Barcelona. For the decade prior to my pre-emptive mid-life crisis, I'd lived alone, so I knew that I would potentially have a little difficulty adjusting to sharing again.
But never could I have imagined the adventures I would have trying to find a place to call home, and good people to share it with.
As I have a lot to say on this subject, let's begin to delve into what I've dealt with since arriving in Barcelona, The Good, The Bad, and The Batshit Crazy!
Entenca
The first place I stayed here, which was supposed to be just for a month, was very close to the famed Placa Espanya, but I soon discovered that nearby was another place with a reputation- a brothel frequented by wealthy businessmen! The (ahem!) escorts were often to be found being wined and dined in the cheap bar on the corner, and truly were a sight to see, their average age being around 60, years of ill-advised tanning and smoking leaving them with more lines than an ordanance survey, their silicon-enhanced breasts squeezed into unforgivingly small PVC dresses, like water balloons about to burst. The pimps would cruise by every so often to collect the money, pretending to be friends of the client, patting his on the back with one hand whilst using the other to subtly palm a wadge of 50 euro notes. These guys looked for all the world like they belonged to the NBA, towering at over 6 feet tall, dark skin glistening with sweat in the summer humidity. Within a short space of time I could identify the regulars, and the barmen would happily share any gossip they'd overheard during the course of the evening.
The flat itself wasn't bad at all, though coming from the UK it was still a bit of a shock to realise how common it is to not have windows to the outside in rooms here. My room was painted in fluorescent green and orange, and just big enough to fit a single bed and a small wardrobe.
The day I arrived was a nightmare. My plane got in late and contrary to what my mobile providor had assured me, my SIM did not work abroad. I tried to contact the host of my Air BnB, but to no avail, and was starting to panic as I knew that both she and the other tenant were due to be away for the first week of my month's booking. I was supposed to collect the key from her before she left for the train station, the other girl had already left for a yoga retreat the day before. It was August and as I arrived, without a word of Spanish and with no idea what to do if she'd already left, it felt like I was being cooked from the inside out. (That first summer was one of the worst I've experienced here, and being in an interior room didn't help one bit!)
Fortunately, the host was still there, though she was literally dragging her case into the corridor as I arrived downstairs. She helped me to figure out how to use the ancient lift (there was a knack, or else you could sit there forever pushing buttons and it wouldn't budge) and the problematic front door lock (you had to know the trick or it wouldn't open- are you spotting a theme, here?) before taking a proper look at the red-faced guiri girl in front of her, hair and clothes plastered to her like a second skin.
"Water?" she offered, "Then I go, I late, vale?"
"Yes, please!" I gasped.
She walked to the kitchen and then excalimed "Ay! No there is water!"
I was confused. No water? She had a sink. It had taps. I pointed at them. "I can't drink the water from there? "
She looked at me like I'd just suggested using ground glass as mouthwash, but filled a glass for me before running for the door, shouting "Adios!"
I greedily gulped down the water, and instantly regretted it. Tap water here is essentially the explanation for what happens to the water drained from swimming pools when they're cleaned. It tastes that chlorinated in some neighbourhoods. It's perfectly safe, but to describe it as drinkable would be a stretch!
The first week I was either running to and from job interviews or just lying on the bed, dehydrating. No matter how much (bottled!) water I drank, I seemed to be sweating it out twice as fast. I swear I started to resemble one of those photos of unwrapped Egyptian mummies at one stage!
My only companion during that period was a rabbit. Yep, they had a rabbit, let's call him Bob. I was honestly a bit scared of him as he was massive and prone to nipping people. Plus those little blighters shit everywhere! The majority of cleaning in the flat was just trying to keep up with his trail of destruction, trails of pee and black pellets all over the place, clumps of his fur, personal belongings he'd chewed on...but the worst thing was the Wank Bunny. Yep, you read that right.
As we all know, rabbits have a reputation for going at it like a jackhammer every opportunity they get, and our smallest housemate was no exception. The host didn't believe in having his carrot chopped, so to speak, so in the absence of female company he would get quite sexually frustrated.
An angry, horny rabbit makes quite a lot of noise in the middle of the night, and none of us really wanted to be kept awake for weeks on end, so the solution was to give him something to...make sweet bunny love to. Hence, the Wank Bunny, a large plush rabbit for him to go at until he'd got it out of his system.
It was explained to me that Wank Bunny wasn't needed often, but from what I recall it was a fairly frequent occurance for the poor toy to end up in the cage with it's real life counterpart. They were essentially going steady, I wouldn't have been too surprised if Bob had dimmed the lights and put on some Barry White at one stage.
Weird enough that Bob essentially had the domestic animal's answer to a sex aid, but the really gross part was that when he had finished having his wicked way with it, it was just hung up to dry, without actually being washed...next to all the other laundry! Yep, we'd have washed our delicates, hung them out to dry, and right next to them, swinging in the dusty, humid fug that counts as a breeze in Barcelona in August, was a stuffed toy covered in rabit spunk.
There was also the issue of the interior rooms. Bad enough that there was no air flow, the windows opened into an interior 'patio' which the nieghbours used as a communal, never-emptied dustbin. People here will happily throw things out of windows or off balconies without even thinking about it, and these interior spaces are often dirty, smelly, and crawling with bugs. Before Barcelona, I had never seen a roach in real life. Before having that room, opening onto that pit of filth, I didn't know that cockroaches could fly! There are very few things worse than accidentally treading on one in your bare feet, because you just plain weren't expecting it to be there! Rabbit-associated mess aside, the flat was clean, we didn't have roaches, so I couldn't figure out where it'd come from. Then one day I opened the window in the futile hope of getting some air into that torture chamber, and realised that those virtually indestructable, armour-plated, disease-ridden bringers of nightmares had wiiiiiinnnngggggs!
The lack of light could also be an issue. Like the night I came back from a party at 4am, and turned on my bedroom light, only to have the bulb quite literally explode, plunging me into total darkness and showering the room with glass. Everyone else was asleep, my phone was dead, and upon feeling my way across to the fuse box near the front door, I discovered that whatever the problem was, it'd tripped all the power to the entire flat and couldn't be switched back on. The only solution was to shuffle back towards my room until I felt the doorframe, lean in until my hand located the mattress, and jump, blindly, on to the bed, hoping not to miss and land on all the broken glass. If I'd had a real window, I might have been able to see something, but it was blacker than Satan's butthole in there, so it felt pretty risky. I left the door open so that as soon as the girls stirred in the morning I could alert them to what was going on. It took a fair few days before we were able to get the eletrics properly sorted, so it was back to the 17th century for me, carrying a candle with me as soon as the sun set.
I ended up staying there for nearly a year, in the end, rather than the planned month. Not because of the flat, but because of the flatmates. I was quite sad when the landlady announced that she wanted her niece to take over the contract, as we'd been getting along very nicely.
My host, when she got back from her trip, turned out to be a free-spirited Catalan girl who worked like a demon most of the year so that she could take epic trips during the summer and take photographs of far-away places. When she was at home, she let out my little room for a month at a time so that she could experience people from other cultures, maybe learn a little bit of their language, and make a connection with a potential guide for her next trip. No one ever stayed more than a month because she was actively 'collecting' as many people as she could. She had short-cropped blonde hair, laughed easily, collected little trinkets from around the world, and inadvertently taught me my first Spanish words (all 'bad' ones!) by constantly reacting to any news, good or bad, with impassioned exclamations of 'mierda!' or, more commonly, 'joder, tio!' She introduced me to bad Spanish reality TV shows, which she claimed would help my language acquisition, but I suspected were actually her guilty pleasure and she just wanteded an excuse to watch them. I liked her a lot, she was very down-to-earth, sometimes to the point of bluntness, and had a really kind heart. She spent all day and night at the hospital with me once because she knew I'd be scared alone in a place where I didn't really speak the language. I thanked her profusely, but I don't know if she knows how much I appreciated her going to so much trouble for (at the time) a virtual stranger. Because she worked such crazy shifts, I didn't see much of her during the week, but very soon I met the other housemate.
One evening, before the host was back from her holiday, I came home, anticipating the usual routine of making dinner, feeding Bob the Perverted Bunny, and walking down to the beach to watch the waves. I was somewhat surprised to find a girl in the flat.
She was brunette, petite and simply dressed in jeans and a David Bowie t-shirt. Effortlessly cool and chic, she was leaning casually against the kitchen doorframe talking on the phone in heavily accented Spanish. She had a cigarette in one hand, and, impossibly, her impeccably winged eyeliner wasn't running in the heat. I smiled and raised a hand in greeting. She glanced at me, raised an eyebrow a fraction of an inch, and continued talking.
I went to my room, wondering if this very minimal reaction to my presence was an indicator that she might be unfriendly. (I realised later that she was just very French.)
Once we got chatting, we realised that along with a mutual obsession with the aforementioned Bowie, we had lots of other things in common, and for the rest of my time there we hung out a fair bit, drinking endless cups of herbal tea, gossiping, going for long walks to explore all the little hidden gems of the city...She very kindly invited me along on every night out so that I could meet people until I established my own social circle, and I feel very lucky to have met her when I first arrived as it made the first few months in this insane city a lot less intimidating.
Well, in very brief terms, there you have The Good.
Unfortunately, after a positive start with regards to housemates, it was a downhill slide...to the point where it might be more accurately described as an avalanche!