Tosca and Amatti. Our little insect hunters.
So much has changed. Have you ever watched a movie and at the end of it you think “Man, the end of that movie resembles nothing of the beginning”. You know? Because so much has happened in the last two hours. Such is our life.
Andalucia is very beautiful and is progressing everyday, but it’s almost like living in two separate worlds. One world is progressive and resembles Canada very much. The other is the old world with houses with no indoor plumbing and horse buggies. It’s not unusual to get stuck in traffic on the highway because a giant tractor pulling a cart of olives just coming in from the fields is pushing 30 km/hour in front. Or to get stopped on a road by a herd of sheep following their shepherd home. They sound so funny with all their bells around their necks chiming.
We are now living in the new place. New to us. Old to the earth because let me tell you this place is OLD. It is definitely part of that old world I just touched on. Ironically enough our address is Casa Nueva which translated means “New House”. I wonder what the old house looked like before this one. Miguel and I actually have a bit of a theory about the name of this place.
Miguel found out some gossip about our place from this guy who’s done some construction work in our neck of the woods and knows our neighbours and a little bit of the history. First off you need a little explanation as to the setup of our house. Our house is actually attached at one wall to our neighbours.
Originally our place was the barn of a much larger house until it was “fixed up” (I use that term loosely) and sold as a separate unit along with 50,000 sq m of land. The story from this guy is that the family ran into a little bit of financial trouble when one of the boys (I don’t know how far back this goes) killed someone and the legal fees trying to keep him out of jail left them in debt.
That’s all the guy really told Miguel except that the name of place was Rey Mundo (King World). Our theory is that there was a lot of bad publicity and negative energy because of this whole incident that when they separated and sold this place they changed the name of the whole place for a fresh start.
Of course this is all speculation and who knows if that guy was even talking about our place. I do have to say that the neighbours are weird. Harmless weird though (except their stupid little dog who never shuts up – I’m gonna kick him one day).
So you are all probably wondering how is the new place. Let me just say – Life is very very real now. Very real. I equate it to camping inside. For starters our bathroom is not part of the main house. You have to go outside. We consider it a glorified outhouse because even though there is a bathtub, sink and a toilet that flushes, the sink is not hooked up and our hot water heater does not work so we can’t take showers. Right now we’re making trips to the in-laws for laundry and showers. I wouldn’t use the shower anyway. Every time I go to the bathroom I play “guess the insect”. The insects are much weirder and bigger here.
Needless to say we will be moving the bathroom inside. We have enough room for a nice big one. First things first though. The water needs to be redone or more like “done”. Our kitchen tap right now resembles a garden hose through a hole in the wall. In fact all our pipes resemble garden hoses. The good thing is that everything in this place seems to be a temporary job which means it won’t cost a lot to rip it out. The kitchen needs to be redone pretty quickly too. The roof needs to be redone ASAP as parts of it falls down everyday.
The other day I could hear something crawling around in it. I thought it was going to come right through the ceiling since I could see it “bulging” around inside. It turns out it was a cat trying to meet our cats. I’ve always wanted to buy a fixer upper and make it something amazing. I just didn’t think there would be such a large draft from the doorways and windows and so many bugs. Thank goodness for Tosca and Amatti our little hunters. Let’s hope they don’t eat anything poisonous. There is a lot to the house though which is good. There is an upstairs which will eventually become our bedroom and a TV room, but for now it will have to be the bird sanctuary that it is. We can hear the birds up there every morning. God knows what else is up there.
I know it sounds dire, but it’s not. It’s different. It’s new. And it’s very real. It actually makes you feel more alive. Everyday there is something new. The air out here is fresh. Our view is ridiculously amazing. We have a well and apparently the water runs 200 meters below our land and flows at 100 meters per second so we’ll never run out of water. We have quince (sp?) trees, fig trees and an apricot tree. We have a grape vine running up the side of our house. We can’t remove any soil from our place because it is protected by law and indigenous only to this part of the world. You can see the end of El Torcal (the largest karst formation in the world) from our place http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torcal_de_Antequera .
So far we have encountered rabbits, vultures, golden eagles, foxes, wild pheasants, and a mother of a frog which is apparently poisonous to touch. Sometimes at night you can hear this god awful scream that sounds like an old witch or something. It turns out it’s a screeching owl. I almost ran over a lizard the other day and the day before we saw 7 vultures circling around a section of the mountains. Obviously something had died. I love this place and I can not wait to make it our own. Quite the change from our little condo in Toronto.
The latest thing to scratch off our list is me getting my NIE which is the number that foreigners get here instead of a DNI. It wasn’t easy to get even though it’s supposed to be. Government workers are unbelievable. I don’t know if they really don’t know their jobs or if their just trying to confuse the foreigners so that they’ll leave and not come back. The only way to really get anything done smoothly here is to go through the backdoor and for that you need to know someone who knows someone.
It turns out that we know someone who knows someone. The guy who sold us our place, knows the head of the foreigners department at the police commission. After all the miserable jerk workers we’ve dealt with I can not tell you how awesome it feels to be able to go to the head honcho’s office in the back of the police station where no civilians go and have him tell the workers who treated you like an old kleenex two days earlier to give you a NIE today (it usually takes 4-6 weeks to get one).
So now I have a NIE. I’m still not legal here in Spain, but the NIE is a big step. My residency card is the next step and Juan Antonio has said that he will get his friend to help with that as well. They have a saying here that goes like this “A person who knows someone who can get things done in the government shits gold”. Well, let me tell you, this guy is shitting bricks of it.
We are slowly but surely ticking things off the list. Still, miles to go before we sleep.
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