My Housing Adventure, and an Afterthought on Coffee

I think I’m the only one in my program that has been homeless here three times. The university’s student services coordinator has told me I must have done something particularly wretched to deserve all that I’ve gone through these past three weeks, which is apparently more than average.

She was right to attribute the blame to me, but hopefully not due to my alleged past crimes. After viewing one apartment early on, quite frustrated, I gave up and decided not to look for more for a week. This was probably a mistake. The university here gave us until September 19 to find living arrangements and vacate the dormitory, so at the time I didn’t feel I was shortchanging myself too much. On the contrary, I thought I was saving myself some discomfort in the search by giving myself some time to reverse the summer’s Spanish skill atrophy. As it turns out, all the super awesome apartments went really fast, and all that seemed to remain were either super expensive or were occupied by super creeps.

Like everyone else in the program, I was homeless when I got here, but unlike them I remained homeless for almost the whole three weeks. At last I found something that might have worked. An apartment near the university, occupied by a recently graduated couple and a medicine student, had a room available for rent. The price was reasonable, it was near the university, and the roommates seemed amiable and fun. I said I’d take it, and they told me I could move in on the first of October, after they had done some painting and other improvements.

The day after viewing my apartment, I called back and asked what time I could bring the deposit over. They told me not to worry about it until I moved in, and that they had showed the room to a few other people. This confused me a bit, since I was under the impression that it was my room, but they told me not to worry, I’d probably get it. September 19th came and went, and, concerns assuaged, I moved into a hostel while my apartment was being painted. The hostel seemed nice—I had my own room with a shower and a balcony, and it was relatively cheap. This is the point where I was robbed. While at class one day, someone broke into my room and stole 200 euro and my precious, precious iPod.

Coming back to my room after class that day marks a turning point in these early weeks here in Spain. I had two possessions to which I ascribed an unhealthy amount of sentimental value. The first was my CRX (which I sold in August). The second, of course, was my iPod. It’s like when you’re forced to sell your first child into slavery so you can afford to go to Spain for a year, only to have your remaining child kidnapped when you get there. I’m extremely glad I had my computer with me at school at the time.

So that was disappointing. That was when this whole thing stopped feeling like a great adventure, and I started to feel like I was on an overly long vacation and I was very ready to go home. I didn’t feel especially safe in my hostel anymore, so I called my roommates to see if I could move in early, even if I had to sleep on a couch, or even if they charged me for every day until October 1st. There was no answer. When I called back later I got a recorded message telling me that incoming calls to their number had been restricted. Today, I still have no idea what happened. I can only assume that someone else took my room and they've been ignoring me. I couldn’t even go to their door to ask them, because I never got their address—when I saw the apartment they met me at a metro and they took me there in their car.

For a second time I was homeless. Still wanting to vacate the hostel as soon as possible, I called a guy whose house I had looked at earlier in my search. Happily, it was still available. Unlike almost every other home in Madrid, this guy had an actual house, in a sort of development colony thing between some apartment towers. It was slightly closer to my school, better connected to the metro system, with a beautiful garden and a façade and outward atmosphere that would have made it fit in at Hawk’s Cay, and above all, it was incredibly cheap—230 euro plus utilities. The reason I didn’t go with it the first time I looked at it was the interior. It was a bit run down, with water damage on the ceilings, exposed electrical work, grubby walls with peeling paint, and it needed to be swept pretty badly. Also, the guy. There was something a bit off about the owner, who also lived there. He must have been about 80, for one thing, but he was strangely enthusiastic about the prospect of throwing parties. The old guy and the other two who lived there were all students at the university, with the old guy working on his doctorate in Basque linguistics.

I told him that I had thought it over, and I wanted to take the room after all. It was a small room that looked out over the fantastic garden, an aspect I hoped would outweigh the negatives. So I showed up at his house, laden with all my worldly possessions on this continent, and hauled them up the stairs to what would be my room. Once there, with money ready to change hands, he began to fill me in on some particulars that living in his house entailed. He handed me a typewritten list of home improvements and their costs that “urgently needed” to be done, like building benches for the garden and reconstructing the fountain. Not only did he expect me to help pay for the improvements to his house, he wanted me to do them. He also handed me a list of some thirty house rules, of which I read only number 26: “You must leave the kitchen door closed. Mortal danger.” Naturally, I enquired. Turns out that the furnace and water heater, located in the kitchen, constantly leak carbon monoxide, and if the door is left open, the gas “rushes upstairs to the bedrooms within thirty seconds,” explained the guy.

Needless to say, at this point I was gathering up my bags to go. But the guy wouldn’t let me leave with even the most miniscule lingering desire to live in his house. He went on to detail how one of his former tenants is now on the point of being convicted for attempted murder, because, allegedly, he purposefully left the kitchen door open at night in an attempt to kill the old guy in his sleep. I immediately thought, “What the hell did you do to drive him to that point?!” I slowly backed out the door and made a break for it.

Homeless for a third time—and this time thankfully so, considering the previous alternative—I went to the student services coordinator to lament about my housing trouble. She directed me to a woman in whose apartment students have lived in the past, with high evaluations. I visited the same afternoon, and immediately gave her the 300 euro she was asking for (extremely cheap in Madrid). She’s a kind lady, late fifties or so, who shares her apartment with two other guys and now me. It’s the best located of all three of my almost-homes here, in the student-dominated barrio of Moncloa and Argüelles. My room is relatively large, and the whole apartment has cathedral-high ceilings, about twenty feet. She even does my laundry, and irons it. It's almost perfect. I would have preferred to live with other students, I think, but considering my other experiences, this seems to be an excellent arrangement. So now I have a home, and the homelessness stressor is at last dissipated. I celebrated just now by getting a coffee at Starbucks, which I feel is defensible because for every coffee I get at Starbucks (two so far) I get twenty or seventy at a proper Spanish café.

Afterthought on coffee:

The first coffee I had at a Starbucks here was utterly spectacular. I hardly think that it’s a credit to Starbucks, but rather to the people here who made it and the proximity of some of the world’s best coffees from Africa. I wish I were less prone to hyperbole in my everyday conversation so that I could now convey how unreservedly phenomenal that cup of coffee was. On the contrary, the one that I just finished (the celebratory one, from after getting that apartment), was among the worst I’ve ever suffered through, and definitely the worst one I’ve ever purchased at any Starbucks anywhere. I think it was brewed a few days ago and has been on the burner ever since. But, oh well. It just means that I’ll have to procure another celebratory beverage elsewhere. Probably a Mahou, a Spanish beer I enjoy. I’ll have to write an entry about beer sometime. It’s everywhere—from McDonald’s to the university cafeteria, and of course, the vending machine in the dormitory.

Please write me sometime. Ciao.