Another week in Quintanar

As of today, I've been in Quintanar for two weeks. Time is really flying by! I'm looking forward to starting my teaching job on Thursday, and I have orientation for my program in Toledo on Monday, so I'll have the opportunity to meet the other people in my program. I'm very excited about that.

Since my last post, I have done a lot of hanging around, honestly. I've been reading, watching movies, and coming to the library. And of course, I've just been getting acclimated to my new apartment, as well as my new town.

I remembered to take a few pictures of my apartment for all of you! I know you're dying to see them.

Living room

Bedroom

Nothing like a room with a view!

I also discovered that I live at number 2 Cucumber Street, so that of course made me laugh for at least an hour.

I love my apartment and I'm genuinely happy here, but I would be lying if I said it wasn't an adjustment. First of all, my toilet runs. In my experience, jiggling the handle usually works, but of course, Spanish toilets don't have handles. They have buttons on the lid of the toilet. So that means that every time I flush, I have to take the lid off and shake it around to make it stop running (And yes, it is just as ridiculous as it sounds).

Another interesting thing about my apartment is that it doesn't have an oven. This is actually relatively common in Spanish apartments, but I do miss having one. I do, however, have a microwave as well as a stove top, and last week I bought a pot, so now I can make pasta! One step at a time, as they say.

I also don't have a dishwasher in my kitchen, not that I necessarily expected to have one, but what I do have in my kitchen is a washer, no dryer. The priorities in Spain among appliances confuse me, but really, I do have everything I need. It would make less sense to have a dryer and not a washer, right?

I have also discovered that while I got really lucky because I live on a quiet street, it turns out that the walls in my apartment building are very thin. I've heard my neighbors yelling at each other (although of course it's very fast Spanish, which makes eavesdropping difficult), and one night last week, I started laughing when I realized I could hear my neighbor snoring. Can't say I've been bored while I was spending so much time at home.

Lastly, I found out I have a very interesting neighbor who lives across the street. I'm not sure what he does, but I like to pretend he's a DJ. From about 10 in the morning until maybe 2 in the afternoon, thumping beats pour out of the open windows in his apartment. I can't ever hear music, just beats, so like I said, I like to pretend he's a DJ and he's laying down his own tracks. Maybe it's dubstep. It's hard to tell. However, he has an adorable French bulldog that likes to occasionally wander onto the terrace. The dog alternates between barking at the many stray cats in my neighborhood and staring across the street at me for a few moments before wandering back inside.

Of course, I'm only sharing the funny mishaps of my apartment and glazing over all of the good things, like the comfort of having my own space and the beautiful building itself (It's in pristine condition and I even have an elevator!). The furniture is really comfortable, and I have everything that I really need, just not a lot extra. The street is quiet and I feel really safe walking around by myself, Plus, as I said in an earlier blog post, I'm five minutes away from two different grocery stores and a pharmacy, as well as my new bank.

Speaking of my new bank, I have a Spanish bank now! I opened an account last week, and I picked up my debit card today. I was fortunate to find a lovely bank teller who lived in the U.S. for awhile, so she was fluent in English. It made setting up an account much easier.  As I'm learning in Spain, they don't rush anything, so setting up my new account took more than an hour.

However, while I was there waiting, an elderly woman came into the bank and exclaimed when she saw me. She was so excited that I could barely understand her at first, but she motioned for me to embrace her (which I did, albeit confusedly. I thought maybe she was just extremely friendly, even for a Spanish woman), and of course she gave me the customary kiss on each cheek. I started to pick up on what she was saying, and she was telling me how pretty I was and it had been too long since she'd seen me. Before I had the chance to figure out how to tell her that she was mistaken, the English-speaking teller interrupted and explained for me in Spanish. The lady just laughed jovially and told me to forgive her, she was very confused. Then she kissed me again and walked away. It was my first experience with the kindness of Spanish strangers, but I know it won't be the last.

So as I said, I've spent a lot of time in my apartment, other than coming to the library. And the library is in such a pretty area, let me just say. This is the view from the library doors.

View from the library

Quintanar is full of beautiful tree-lined pedestrian paths, and this is one of them. I take the path in the picture straight through to get to the high school where I'm teaching, and it's a lovely walk. Everything here is really flat, as well. It seems like there are no hills in the whole town. But if I wasn't at my apartment or the library, then I was braving the grocery store again. I'm just trying to learn my way around so that I can get in and out if I need to shop in a hurry (although even writing that down in Spain is probably sacrilege). It's been interesting finding things in a Spanish grocery store. For one example, they don't refrigerate their milk, so that was quite the endeavor trying to find that. I also for the life of me couldn't find regular butter. I found margarine, and low-cholesterol butter, but no just regular butter (I ended up buying margarine). I also discovered that they keep the paper products in the same aisle as juice boxes and cans of tuna. There doesn't seem to be a ton of order in their stores, so I'm making an effort to just learn generally where things are.

I discovered that there's another grocery store very close to my house, so I went to both of them last week. I've found that one is better for produce and the other is better for things like cereal, so I'll probably be going to both of them quite a bit. But one thing that I can't get away from in either grocery store is ham. The only thing I can think to compare it to is Americans' fascination with bacon. You know how the U.S. has double bacon cheeseburgers and bacon cupcakes and bacon pizza and basically bacon everything? Well, in Spain, the bacon is ham. Since I was eating mostly out of the microwave until I bought my trusty pot, I ate more than one pizza from the grocery store. The pizza options were four different pizzas that incorporated ham (ham and cheese, peppers and ham, etc.), a veggie pizza, and two different kinds of cheese pizza. That was it. Furthermore, my colleague was the first person to show me the grocery store, and she explained that she would actually like to be a vegetarian except that she wouldn't be able to give up ham. So ham really is the Spanish bacon. Pork products are apparently internationally beloved. Tomorrow, I'm having lunch with the elementary school teachers, and then I have my first day of school on Thursday! Normally, I'll be in the elementary school on Wednesday and Thursday, so this week is a special case. I'm very eager for my teaching career to begin!