Finding an apartment in Spain

Even though this program is a great opportunity, living in Spain and all, they do not provide assistance for finding a place to live.  It can seem very stressful at first, "How am I going to find  an apartment?! Can I speak Spanish well enough to negotiate everything that I want?" Well let me tell you from experience that everything WILL work out, it always does right? It just may not work out the FIRST time :) Fellow Auxiliares, learn from my mistake...

 

I was lucky enough to stay with my teacher the first week I was in Spain.  She helped me make phone calls to ads posted online for rooms available in various apartments.  I told myself before coming to Spain that I was going to live with other Spaniards to improve my Spanish.  Well, I chickened out. At the last minute I heard of other English teachers needing one more person to fill a room, so I went for it.  I figured that it would be nice to have a place to go "home" to at night and feel comfortable with my roommates speaking English.  I was right, it's nice to have other English speakers to relate to.  However, we learned our lesson the hard way. 

 

 In late September we found an apartment (piso in Spanish), we had no idea what the "standard" was here in Badajoz so we figured we had found a good one. Our rent was only 137 euros a month (cheap!!) and we had a pretty nice location.  As time went on, we started realizing that our apartment wasn't so great.  Things didn't work properly; our oven, our chairs, our table...things were falling apart.  Not to mention, our landlord was the most annoying man in the continent of Europe.  I could write an entire blog just about how rude this man was.  He would come over to our apartment 4 nights a week, without notice.  No phone call, no "hey I'm going to stop by tomorrow", nada.  Not only would he show up unexpected, he would over stay his welcome.  This man soon realized how much we despised him.  To this day, to hear his name "Antonio" makes us cringe. 

 

It wasn't until late October that we finally all became honest with ourselves and agreed we weren't happy in our apartment.  So we told Antonio that we weren't happy and were going to move.  He tried so hard to convince us that it was impossible to find an apartment and that we weren't going to be able to do it (yeah right, good one buddy).  This battle between us became our first experience negotiating in Spanish.  Let me tell you, it is very hard to get your point across in another language.  It's very stressful because this man thought we were ignorant because there was a language barrier.  Bottom line, we came to Spain to have the time of our lives and we won't settle for a crappy apartment.

 

We started the search immediately and within one week we had found a gorgeous apartment in a fantastic part of town. We are located in the city center with everything you can imagine surrounding us (we live directly above a pizza place and 10 footsteps from a huge mall..this might be dangerous)  Not only is our landlord super nice, he doesn't bother us every night at 10pm! We even have a door man now who collects our garbage! On a scale of 1-10 (10 being the greatest) my happiness has gone over 20+

 



My old living room

My beautiful new living room

yuck, the old living room...

the new dining table

The new kitchen has a working oven, a coffee pot, a dishwasher, all new dishes, a nicer fridge..all upgrades!

My new room is HUGE! 2x the size of my old one

We now have a guest room! Visitors welcome :) We have an additional three beds in this new apartment



The other half of my room (excuse the mess, I just moved in)

As you can see from the pictures, we have definitely upgraded to a great apartment.  I can't tell you how much better this location is too! We are minutes away from everything in the city center.  We have a more modern washing machine as well.  The only thing missing is that we have yet to acquire wifi, but that should be happening soon. 

My advice; No matter how rushed you feel when searching for an apartment, please DO NOT settle! Even though we lost our deposit on the first apartment and our rent is now a little more expensive..It's worth it to feel good when coming home every night, it's also worth it to never see the face of Antonio again :) At the end of the day, the rent here is less than half of what it is in the United States, so do yourself a favor and splurge on a place you love.