Piso

I really lucked out on my living situation here in Logrono as my apartment is cute, large, in a great location, and I really like my roommates AND they're far cleaner than I am. After paying to sleep somewhere for two weeks in Barcelona, Madrid, and finally Logrono, as well as living out of my 90 plus pound suitcase of summer clothes, I was really anxious to find a place to live when I arrived here. I stayed for one night in a Catholic girl's dorm a la the Exorcism of Emily Rose, and promptly relocated to a one-star hotel and then a pension.

I think on the Sunday after the Thursday that I arrived in Logrono, I made three appointments to look at apartments. Maybe it was only two, but regardless, I was in a hurry to find a place, and my over-the-phone Spanish skills are, well, not actually skills at all. I'm awful. Besides the point, I talked to my now-landlady first, Maria Jesusa, and she was really nice and seemed to ask me four or five times if I was a student, which I wasn't sure how to answer because I feel like people sometimes want to avoid renting to students. So I told her I had just graduated and she was really excited. I met her on Monday or something and looked first at the apartment that I now live, and I wanted to sign the lease then. Which might have just been laziness/anxiety. But I looked at one or two other apartments that day, and then called Maria Jesusa and moved in the next day.

I'll get to my roommates at the end of this post, but here is my best attempt at a "virtual tour." The first picture is, obviously, as you walk in. And so is the second one. How cute is our coatrack?
Above is our foyer and below is if you do a one-eighty and face our front door.


To the right in the photo above you enter our spacious living room/dining area pictured below:




Huge, I know. That is indeed my laundry on that drying rack. Spain is not a country of dryers, and since it rains almost everyday in the fall in Logrono, we have no choice but to display our garments in the living area. Also in the above photo is door to our smaller, street-facing balcony pictured in the two photos below.


So if you skip the den/dining area, you turn down the long hallway. That first door on the left is our one bathroom (there are 5 of us, and 2 are guys, and I've really never had a problem). My door is opposite the bathroom, and then there's a half-bath (currently non-functioning) right next door to the full bath.

Above, the bathroom. Below, my bedroom. It's very small, but I like it AND my landlady knocked 20 euros/month off of my rent. I was the last one to move in. Note the purple pillowcase I bought at Zara Home (along with the rest of my sheets that you can't see).


Below are two views of the kitchen. From the top one, along the right side are four floor-to-ceiling pantry doors. We do have a toaster and a microwave, but we do not have a dishwasher (which is common, of course) or a freezer that is not literally a block of ice on the inside. The door you see below is to a large terrace. The view isn't beautiful or anything, but I think it's cool. It faces the back terraces of the buildings a few meters away. It 's really nice to sit on when the weather is nice.


The washing machines are in the kitchens here for the most part. As you can see.

Now for my roommates: in the first two pictures, it's Robin, Sylvie, and Jennis (who doesn't live with me). And then in third picture it's Sascha, Sylvie, and Robin, who are all my roommates, and then Sylvie's mom, who came to visit a few weeks ago. Not pictured is Vanessa, our Spanish roommate. She's really cute and nice from what I can tell, but she works in Pamplona so she doesn't get home until late and then she always goes home to Burgos for the weekends, which seems pretty typical. I'm also kind of afraid to ask to take a photo of her because I don't know her that well (language barrier, etc.) and it's weird enough that I have a blog, much less that I'm putting pictures of other people on it. And then talking about them.

Sascha, Robin, and Sylvie are all from around the same area of Germany. Robin and Sylvie are Erasmus students, and Sascha is doing some exchange program. He's 19 and just out of high school (they have an extra year in Germany) and plays football (soccer), and sometimes does things that highlight the fact that he's only lived with his family that picks up after him and that he's slightly sexist. But overall, he's pretty nice. He lived in Dallas for a year during high school, so he speaks practically perfect English.

Sylvie and Robin are studying Spanish at their universities and they go to university together and came to Spain together, etc. They're both really cool and nice, and we are all the same age. Sylvie also lived in the US for a year, in Boston as an au pair, and has some pretty funny stories about her host mom and her obsession with the Weight Watcher's points system. She was Amy Winehouse for Halloween and I've seen pictures and she looked hilarious. The eye makeup was perfect and she made an effort to look really strung out in every photograph (although in real life, of course, she was not).

Robin is really nice, too. He's pretty quiet, so for a few weeks I always wanted to hang out with him, but found it kind of difficult. But then one day, he discovered that you could see other people's music on iTunes and he knocked on my door and we talked about music for a while. I'm really into hanging out with them. Last night Sylvie and I ate chocolate on my bed and looked at Google images of Germany for an hour or so. The three of us are going to start reading Spanish books together to improve our language aquisition. That is the one downside of living here--I don't speak Spanish except to Vanessa and she's hardly ever around. But both Robin and Sylvie are exceptionally clean, and I am really enjoying getting to know them.


I posted two of essentially the same photo because you can't tell how pretty/adorable Sylvie/Robin are in one or the other.


(The flourescent lighting in our kitchen is pretty bad.)