Jamón, Más o Menos

We’re here!

On Friday morning I flew out of LAX (after getting charged an extra $100 thanks to a woman who doesn’t know what she’s doing, but… I shouldn’t complain) then after having a little problem with a gate checked bag not coming back (solved), I met up with Dietrich, Dan, and Poonam by the gate.

We arrived in Madrid, and then proceeded to stuff a cab full of luggage, Dietrich and myself to take it all to the hotel. Dan and Poonam followed by subway. In the hotel lobby, we met up with Sam and went in hunt of food. While we were hoping for a menú del día, we forgot it was a Saturday and ended up getting bocadillos instead. The title of this post comes from that meal, actually. Sam asked was lacon was and was told, “Pues… Es jamón, más o menos.” Love it.

While we ended up crashing for an afternoon nap, we still managed to get a proper Spanish evening in. That is to say, we wandered through the park, met some friends for really great tapas, and then went to a bar. By the time we fell asleep – much to our surprise – it was almost 330am.

The next day we woke up really late and went to the Prado during free hours. Gotta love it. And most of Monday we spent on the train to Jaén.

Today was pretty epic in terms of productivity. The main thing we wanted to accomplish was to find an apartment. We wandered Jaén a bit yesterday and made a list of apartments we found online, but today was the day to visit and hopefully nail one down. We decided to head into Martos and do double duty by visiting our schools. Dan had heard back from his, Dietrich’s email bounced, and Poonam and I had complete radio silence. So we figured we’d drop in.

Martos is a small enough town that you can pretty easily walk from one end to the other, so we managed to visit all the schools and talk with all our coordinators and get an idea of what we were in for. My coordinator, Pepi, suggested I make my first day tomorrow instead of Thursday and then she would have a couple apartments for us to look at in town. But Dietrich’s had already taken him and Poonam to see a place, so Dan and I visited it later.

We’re going to take it. Beautiful, furnished (with changes as we like), cheap (it’ll cost us €350 a month – a little over $500), with a balcony, roof access, and three bedrooms towards the center of the city. I wanted to look at other places, but this has pretty much everything we need and we may not get a better setup, so I’m cool with it as long as I don’t take the small bedroom, which currently houses an ironing board and a chair and no bed. Everyone else is ok with that, so we’ll be moving in on Thursday if all goes as planned.

A handful of the people we’re working with seem confused as to why we want to live in Martos instead of Jaén. Well, I may elaborate in a future post, but basically we like the small town-ness of it. Jaén is a small city, so either one would be smaller, but we think it will be cheaper, more convenient, and a much better experience all around if we live in Martos.

Now if only I can find a gym…