Wells flew back to the states today and left me with a broken washing machine. Yep. I broke it. Th
ose stupid front-loaders are so flimsy and I quasi-ripped off the handle. Nothing a few phones calls and 45 Euros can’t fix, right? This was my repair man to the rescue.
On another note, I survived Friday the 13th without any bodily injury. Whew!
Yesterday was the lowest day we have had so far here in Nerja.
Telefonica
was supposed to arrive at 10 am to install our wireless. He arrived at 2 and said that he needed a buddy of his to help and would be back at 5. He called me at 5 and said that he would come with his buddy at 9 a.m. a punto, or on the dot. We were frustrated but couldn’t do anything about it so we went to H2O Bar to get coffee and use their wireless. I left Wells there to work and went shopping.
While in the grocery store I was trying to read the price tag on the beach mat I wanted to buy. The box was haphazardly located near the door and as soon as I bent over to read the price the sliding glass doors rapidly closed…with my head in between them. Closed VERY hard. The next thing I know I am sitting in a chair in the grocery store with a bag of ice on my head. —Now let me pause the recount of my day here for a minute to inform you that the previous day I whacked the top of my head so hard with my own gate that we dubbed me ‘Unicorn.’ —
So two days in a row of my own headbashing put me in an increasingly foul mood. Wells was cranky because he had a conference call that he needed to be on at 8 pm Atlanta time, so 2 a.m Nerja time. He needs wireless to make his calls and since Telefonica could not perform he set his alarm for 1:30 a.m. to go back down to H2o Bar for the call.
In the meantime Wells accidentally erased every song off my iPod. This simple accident caused some serious marital unbliss. Then we went to dinner – SEPARATELY! We got home, kissed and made up and went to bed. We figured that it can’t get worse, right?
Two hours later his alarm went off for his call. Two hours after that he came back to bed. Two hours after that I was jolted out of bed by the sound of Neena having a severe diarrhea explosion. Let me reiterate that the mere sound of it woke me up. Wells frantically popped up to take her outside and I could not help but to notice that she missed my precious Tory Burch slippers by TWO INCHES!!! We got everything cleaned
up but the smell was so overwhelming that we couldn’t go back upstairs. I yelled for Wells to, “Come to the Lily!” and the two of us started huffing the Stargazer lilies that I had bought for an odor reprieve. So here we are with a sick dog, a pungent upstairs, no sleep, and huffing a flower like it is an illicit drug. The next thing I know Wells is moving the downstairs furniture and rolling out the futon. And there we slept…I in my clogs again and Wells in blue jeans.
Telefonica did arrive the following day…just 1 hour late. And I bet Wells keeps me in yummy smelling lilies all spring and summer long!
God bless her, because she is trying harder than anyone I know to learn how to use a computer and GMAIL all by herself. I made this picture for her from my computer and sent her today. Pictures say 1000 words. Go MOM!
So ill today but had lots of help.
Today was not a great day for me. I woke up with a little rumble in the belly and perhaps a low-grade fever. I have been sick all day and I can’t stop complaining to Wells. To my defense – it is frigid here!! The dogs are taking care of me.
We are still waiting for Telefonica to come to our house to set up DSL so we are at a bar and Wells is working and I am, well, drinking red wine. Who guessed it?!?! The first first is that today I signed up for my first tennis lesson. It is on the 18th at noon and I am very excited. Another first today is that I made bean soup from scratch for lunch. Now I know this does not sound all that exciting but I had to soak the beans overnight and I don’t even have salt or pepper or anything in our house. There is no pre-packaging here so everything that you cook is from scratch. I was planning to make chicken for dinner but the grocery doesn’t sell chicken so the only meal that I could figure out was bean soup. The only meat the grocery sells is ham (of course) but I have not found the butcher yet. Still working on that one. The soup was awesome if I do say so myself. I cooked it for a million hours.
The other first today was our first load of laundry. We have a front loading washing aching and no dryer. The clothes literally took about 2 hours to wash and then we had to hang them up to dry. I don’t think I have ever hung clothes on a clothesline and I am pretty sure that Wells does not even know where the “on” button is on our own washing machine at home so he sure didn’t have any experience hanging clothes on a line. He came inside and said, “Kate, I feel like this is sort of ghetto,” after he hung our sheet on the line. Very funny.
Our dogs are not quite used to so many cats. There are a lot of cats here, but they are not nasty if that makes sense…just many of them. Anyway, Foxy and Neena start to salivate when they see them.
We are all tighter! I can’t tell you how happy I am to have Wells and the dogs here! It was an adventure for sure. So…………………I rented a car (A Blue Euro-Speed Skate) to drive to Madrid, which is 6 hours north of Nerja. When I got the car I noticed that it was a stick and just started dying laughing. The last time I drove a stick was in college, a la Christy’s beamer for those of you who remember. I can count on one hand the number of times I have driven a stick. Anyway, for the first 45 minutes of the trip it was one small town after another so I kept having to shift in and out of first gear, which gave me hives just about. I was so tense that I actually started counting out loud to relax. I arrived Madrid and had an uneventful evening in hotel and waited for Wells to arrive early the next morning. I was a mess thinking about the girls flying but all arrived unscathed. We drugged the dogs so they were out of it. The car was so small even thought it was the biggest I could rent that the dogs had to sit in our laps for the entire ride back to Nerja. It was snowing and raining and totally awful and we drove 45 minutes out of the way on the Madrid equivalent to 285 until we found our way.
I had been telling Wells how hard the bed was and he didn’t really understand until he experienced it last night. The next thing you know we are purchasing memory foam to put over it – our most expensive purchase by far. Definitely worth it.
The only problem we are having is that there is virtually no grass in Nerja, or any Spanish town for that matter. The dogs just will not ‘go’ on concrete so we are having a bit of an issue. But overall they seem to be adjusted and happy but they slept all over us last night.
Miss you all! I am utterly and completely happy now that we are all “juntos”!
Hi all! I promise my emails won’t be this long in the future!
I won’t bore you with all of the details of my trip thus far; I will just do you a favor and describe the highlights. To begin, my delta fights were perfect. I arrived Malaga on time and ready to catch the 30 minute shuttle to Nerja. Let me translate the 30 minute shuttle for you: First, wait 30 minutes to catch a bus from the Malaga airport to the center of the city. Then, wait 1 hour to catch the Malaga – Nerja bus, which takes a mere one and half hours. There you go, the 30 minute shuttle from Malaga to Nerja!
I arrived very tired because I could not sleep in the plane. The coldest day Nerja has had in years was, of course, the day I arrived. It was cold and windy. I checked into my Pension and the room was the size of a queen mattress. It is hard to make a room smaller so I included a photo for your disbelief. Anyway, it suited me fine and I went to sleep for 16 hours. Yes, 16 hours.
My first meal in Nerja was delicious and creepy. I am sure you can all understand delicious so I will get to the creepy part. The name of the place was Common Grounds, A Small Flock. It specialized in Amish breads and generally healthier fare. Three hippie-looking people asked me how my meal was so I asked if they owned the restaurant. They said they were a “Community” so they all owned it. Hmmm. I asked more and they are the 12 Tribes Communities. They live on a compound, share meals, don’t have a TV, etc. Keep in mind this was my first interaction with anyone from Nerja other than my bus driver. Not good. They were proud to tell me that they have a community in Brunswick and Savannah. Thanks, Julia. They extended a sincere invitation for Wells and me to their Friday night Sabbath service. Creepy.
Internet access is still regarded as a novelty here in Nerja. Seeing as though Wells and I are both unable to breathe without internet access this has been a problem. I had a brief connection the last few days from an unsecure wireless user but he apparently caught on that I was stealing his internet and promptly locked his connection. So I have spent most of the morning walking about town trying to pilfer wireless connections. My best bet so far has been sitting on a step across the street from the hair salon. But they can see me from the window and something about my pink Dell laptop in my lap gives it away that I am online. I have spent three days investigating how we can stay online without stealing it but no solution yet. You know how frustrating it is waiting on Comcast? Imagine that but 10 times worse here.
The dogs. I am very pleased to see so many here! Most are on leashes with well meaning masters. I even got to hold this lady’s perrito this morning. So far as I can tell they treat their dogs like we do. Unless you are trying to rent an apartment, that is. I can’t wait for mine to be here!
Renting an apartment in some ways was easy and in others not-so-much. We only had two options to rent because of the dogs. When I told people that I was trying to rent a place for two people and two dogs they looked at me like I had three heads so I feel very fortunate to have what we have, which is a two bedroom, 1.5 bathroom townhome on two levels. The kitchen got hit pretty hard with the ugly stick but we have a charming outdoor patio that overlooks the common area (grass). We also have a pool!
Things we don’t have: dryer, air-conditioned or heater (I slept in my clogs last night), dishwasher, garbage disposal.
What we do have: marble floors everywhere, pool, hot water, big closets.
It is very narrow and I can hear our neighbor’s TV but it is also very sunny, gated, and has high ceilings (this will make my mom laugh out loud!). Our apartment is four minutes walking from the center of town, 30 seconds walking to the Mediterrean, and is five minutes walking from the Balcon de Europa – the big tourist spot. Our neighborhood has a grocery, 4 billion hair salons, a Chinese restaurant, lots of bars, shoe store, small grocery, fruit stand, and an internet café. The streets here are t-i-n-y. If a car can fit down a street, it does. If it can’t, oh well. There really aren’t sidewalks to speak of so it is a little bit of a free for all with the cars, scooters, and pedestrians.
Two days ago I went into a knitting shop and the owner made me come back the following morning. She spoke no English but still somehow re-taught me to knit. I am working on my first piece de resistance for Sibley.
And for the ultimate in transitioning. Last night, after finally renting our place and shopping for the basics I was exhausted. You have no idea how tiring it is to have to think about every word to communicate for everything! Anyway, I was too tired to go out to eat or cook. I just sat on the couch watching the red carpet in Spanish (that is our red carpet of course) and I decided to eat the rest of the pack of Mentos that I had in my bag. Sure enough…the $&*% Mento pulled out a filling! Yes, a filling in my upper molar was pulled out of my head from a Mento. ( I am suing Mentos by the way) And the best thing is…I swallowed it because I sure as hell could not find it. So now I am thinking that I am going to die from swallowing a porcelain filling and panicked about the hole in my head. It was too late to do anything about it so I just went to bed (in my clogs, mind you). Lindsay, I thought of you here because this of course happened to me only because you are not here. If you were here, you would probably lost all your teeth or something!
The faucet in the bathroom was leaking so the real estate office (imobilario) arranged for a plumber. He arrived exactly on time this morning at 10:00. Because my sleep schedule is still off I was not up yet. This is my first morning in our apartment and I wanted to make coffee. I have never used a French press and that is all we have. The plumber had to teach me how to use it. The hot coffee did not go over so well with me being toothless and all.
So who did I call to help me with my tooth??? My Realtor, of course!!! All of my agent-friends will really appreciate this. She looked at me like I was crazy because how do you translate “filling”? Anyway, she made an appointment with her dentist for me for today at 6 pm. Let’s be honest here – this is a terrifying thing to do in the states with your own dentist that you have known your whole life. Try getting a large filling by someone that doesn’t speak your language and is about to start drilling into your head. Crazy! They didn’t bother with any paperwork and the total cost: 45 Euros.
To recap I have done the following in the last four days in Spain: rented an apartment, learned to knit, learned to make my own coffee, and gotten a new filling.
I miss you all tan mucho!
