Settling In

The river that intersects the city

We're slowly starting to settle into our new home for the next 9 months. Strangely, things have been working out pretty well for us.

Our hostel, Hotel Bilbi, despite being in a questionable part of town, is pretty nice. They have been very accommodating with letting us stay extra nights since it took us longer than expected to find an apartment.

Speaking of finding pisos...it's annoying. On one hand, I thought it was going to be a lot easier to find a place. I assumed there would be signs or flyers all over and we would have a plethora of choices. Wrong. Instead, I emailed about a million Spaniards about pisos that I found online, and have had hardly any luck hearing back from them.

On Thursday, our new roommate, Amy, who is from the UK, called me in a bit of a panic. Air traffic controllers in France were striking, and many of the flights out of London, including hers, were cancelled. She would not be able to get to Bilbao until Monday. This threw us off a little, because how were we going to find a place without her?

However, fate intervened. When we got back to our hostel, we had an email from Amy saying that she had received 2 emails from people who were interested in renting to us, and would we please go check the places out, even though she wasn't in Bilbao? So...we did.

The first place was in an amazing part of town, Abando. It's a higher end neighborhood, and it's near a lot of shops, bars, cafes, and my school. The lady who showed us the place was a typical Spanish woman. Her daughter lives there now, and is a student at the local university. The apartment was clean, in a great location, and within our budget. We told her we had one more place to see, but we would contact her when we made our decision.

We sent pics to Amy, and Matt and I agreed that we had a really good feeling about this place. The location, price, and Spanish-speaking roommate were all things on our list.

The second place we looked at had just been recently renovated. Everything was totally new. However, the price was a lot more (she wanted 2 months security deposit), the location was not as good, and there was a Latvian guy who already lived there. Even though this place was clearly a lot nicer, we went with our gut and decided on Piso #1. We get to move in tomorrow!

Last night was our first Athletic Bilbao game. They played Barcelona, and we went to the stadium to see how much the cheapest tickets were. 55 euro...nope. We decided to watch it in a bar. It was quite a scene, about 8 of us Americans (mostly girls, save for Matt) traipsing in and watching the soccer game. Sadly, and as was expected, we lost to Barca. But I did get to meet a lot of the other assistants in Bilbao, and I think it's going to be a great year with them.

Things to look forward to this week:

-A general strike...not sure what this will entail, probably a lot of transportation

-A trip to Santander and/or San Sebastian

-Starting classes on Friday!

Originally published 9.26.2010