Find new apartment, check.

It's official!  I found a nice place to live in Lisbon.

I'll be moving in on Saturday, so I finally have justified the fact that I never really unpacked into my room here by the University.  Haha, that's right, I've still got most of my stuff in my luggage.  But now, I'm glad I do!

So, it all kinda fell into place on Wednesday, I had been looking online and at a bunch of listings for rooms and apartments and houses, and I got in touch with 3 people and made arrangements to view the places during the day on Wed.  That way I would only have to go into Lisbon once (it's about a 45-60 min of transport to get there).  The first address I went to was this super sketchy door leading to a dark and sketchy stairwell, with 2 guys in an "office" at the top floor.  And by office, I really mean a room with a round card table and a pile of papers and a laptop on it.... Oh, and the stairwell smelled like death.  So, no the best first impression.  At all.  However, I soon realized that one of the guys, a really short but super friendly Portuguese man, was going to lead me to the building where the room was actually located.  It wasn't in the scary stairwell, yay!  We walked about 15 min and rang the bell at this tiny door in a little alley, really cute place, looked completely "local" with laundry hanging between the buildings above us and everything.  A cute girl comes to the door and introduces herself (I have since then forgot her name) and says that she will show me the room.  At this point the guy departs and the girl takes me to yet another building!  By now I've gone through "oh god, this building is terrible, let's get this over with" to "this place is really cute, I wonder what the interior looks like" and still haven't actually seen the place that they are offering.  We round the corner of the alley and she pulls out a key to open another door, this time glass.  We hop into an old elevator with the iron gates for doors and head up to the 5th floor where I finally get to see the room!  The guy who lived there was just starting to pack, so the room was mostly still lived in (which was actually kinda nice to see it that way), but it was a nice looking room.  It's maybe 10'x8' or so, with what looks like a full bed (a nice little improvement over my single in my current room) and a desk, full closet with drawers at the bottom and a cork-board on one of the walls.  As I walk in, I immediately head for the most tantalizing feature: the glass door leading to the balcony!  Being on the 5th floor I can barely see over the rooftops around and it's a pretty awesome view of the city and the bay.  Plus there is a grill out there (and I am already imagining a hookah as well), so not too shabby.

Inside I see the kitchen and meet the 2 residents who will continue living there, a girl from Germany and another from . . . . well, I don't remember.  I want to say Czeck Republic, but I think I'm mixing that up with another apartment I visited.  Anywho, they were having lunch in the kitchen, which is a bit small and has some paint peeling on cabinets, but is fully equipped.  Fridge, freezer, microwave, stove, oven, all the basics.  There is even a little "greenhouse"-esque balcony on the other side of the apartment with a washing machine and racks for drying clothes!  I chatted with the girls for a bit, (they seemed really nice and have English as their common language, so I will have an easy time with that.  Not sure if that is a pro or con though...) and then told the girl showing me the place that I liked it a lot, but had a few more to look at today and would email them that night with an answer.

By now it's about 1pm, so I grab some lunch at this little cafe with some tables in the back.  The food is cafeteria style, but it's quite yummy and cheap, so I'm happy.  It consisted of french fries, pork, rice and some red sauce with lots of cabbage, and was ready and on a plate in front of me in about 30 seconds.


My next apartment appointment was to call after 4pm and arrange a time which meant I still had a few hours to kill, so I wandered off towards the main square to explore.  I'd been there before, so once I reached it I immediately decided to aim towards the castle to the east and see if I could navigate the winding labyrinth of streets that surrounds it.  As it turns out, the neighborhood in that area is beautiful!  Lots of little cute things, hard to sum it up without pictures though.  The highlights included a building in a row, where they usually share walls, but one was missing and had been recently, within the last few weeks, been filled in by this really cute garden!  Another was the answer to the age-old question "what do you do when you convert a building into apartments..." a doorbell for everyone!

Another highlight was the view of the city I got from the top of a hill, with this cute little cafe/restaurant and a nice garden with benches.  My phone wasn't quite up to the task of capturing this view, so I'll have to return and bring my camera next time.  I never actually made it to the castle, so that will have to be another adventure sometime.

By this time I had to head to see the next apartment.  I called at 4, but no answer, so after calling again at 4:30 and still not getting through, I had to go meet my 5pm viewing.  This time I got SUPER lost.  It turns out that Lisbon has 2 mechanisms for screwing up my map-reading abilities (which I usually take a lot of pride in): first, the map I had is full of lies.  There was definitely a street about 50 meters before where it was drawn on the map and after missing that, I had to walk around a hill and a train station.  The hills themselves are the second confusing factor.  Roads that look like they intersect or are parallel on the map are actually 30 feet different in elevation, so many of my simple "first left, 2nd right, on the corner" type mantras actually led me quite astray.

I finally made it to the next place, and called the number they gave me.  I won't go into as much detail about this one, as I crossed it off pretty much immediately.  My phone call was answered by a woman while I was expecting a guy named Antonio.  I said as much to her, and eventually realized that he was not around, and she did not speak English.  As our conversation grew more difficult, she said in a very un-hopeful tone "espanol?"  Ahha!  I can do that one!  I'm a little rusty, but it's better than my Portuguese.  So, they showed me around a cramped apartment with a nice little interior patio and a 4-bed bedroom.... yes, 4 beds, shoved into one long room.  It looked like a nightmarish cross between a hostel and a hotel.  I'm all for meeting people, but that's ridiculous.  I said my goodbyes (still in Spanish) and told them I would send an email later that night, and responded to the text from the girl I was supposed to contact after 4pm.  She wasn't at the apt, but her friend was, so off I went for my last viewing. 

It was a super nice new place, but the room they had available had no windows... and what looked like a giant filing cabinet for a wardrobe and no desk.  It did have a double bed though, which was appealing, but not worth living in a cave for.  So, as you surely can guess, I decided to accept the first place I saw! 

In an interesting twist of fate though, the first and last apartments are really near to each other, so when I told the girl from the last place that I found something else, I also asked if she had any recommendations on where to go and what to see, and she responded that she has some friends from London in town this weekend and will be showing them around, and I should join them!  So, I'm not even living there yet, and already am on the inside track.  I've got a great feeling about this year, this is just what I was hoping for.

On Saturday I will move into my new place, and I will post pictures as soon as I can.

There is always more to tell, but this post has gotten long enough!  Short summary of everything else on my mind: 

• My first/trail language class is tomorrow.  
• I gotta figure out how to get public transport to IKEA and what is the largest object I can realistically carry home.
• I hope I can get all my stuff (including all purchases since landing like kitchenware, food, and towel) to the new apartment in one trip.
• The other 2 people in my program, Tatiana and Tewodros, just found an apartment in the beach town near the university, so I'll have a great place to visit when I want to be by the beach, and they will have a place to visit in the city.  A nice compromise I think!
• I love and miss you all, and finally have a floor to offer if you wanna come visit!  It's not super big or comfortable, but it's free and in the heart of Lisbon and has an awesome host.

How many lives can one blog have?

Whew!  Let's try this again.  Every time I leave the country I'm all gung-ho about blogging for a few weeks or a month and then it all falls apart.  Well, here I am starting my 3rd year in Europe, and by golly this time it's going to be different!  After Laurel's impressive example of once a day blogging, I feel like I can commit to at least blogging once a week without being too unrealistic.  And for all of my avid readers out there (yes, all 4 of you), feel free to call me rude names if I start dropping the ball.  So, with that established, let me tell you about Portugal.

First, I live in student housing which is about 5 min walk from campus.  The building is pretty isolated on some property, so it takes a bit of a walk/ride/something to get anywhere other than campus.  It's pretty standard student housing, but it's a bit older and run down.  I live in the "basement" (we're on a hill, so one side has windows, the other does not) and unfortunately this also brings along some new roommates: ants!  I've only had 2 fiascos with them so far, and they were both kinda my own fault for leaving yummy things accessible, so I think they will be manageable.  The kitchen in the basement is also kinda lacking, and has a really poor people-to-fridge-space-ratio, so that will be a bit interesting.  However, all of these little negatives only serve to fuel my search for an apartment or house closer to the beach!  The student services office keeps a huge list of private offers for renting, so I grabbed that and have been wading through the list, which has well over 100 offers.  It turns out, I can read Portuguese about as well as I can read Italian, so that has been helpful in sorting through everything.  I've sent out a few emails, and the next step is to learn enough phrases in Portuguese to feel comfortable calling some numbers and trying to set up viewings. 

Other than my housing hunt, I have been working to deal with all of the business for registering as a student and getting a bank account, residence permit, etc etc, as well as getting some of the essentials that I wasn't able to pack, like silverware and food. 

My friend Tatiana who was in Bolzano last year arrived yesterday so today I showed her around campus and registered her with the student office and then we took the bus to see the beach.  It's bea-u-ti-ful.  This long, long stretch of really great soft sand.  Sadly the water is a bit, how you say, fucking freezing, so that might put a damper on any swimming till next summer.  Some of the apartments I'm looking at are right on the waterfront though, so I might have a balcony with a view of the sunset over the Atlantic!  It kinda blows my mind, but I'm super excited.

So, for now I'm just getting settled into the area and working on my Portuguese but trying not to get too settled into the student housing.  I've still got a lot of stuff to figure out though. The next big things are getting a SIM card with a data plan, getting my tax number so that I can open a bank account, and figuring out which hoops we have to jump through to get our residence permit or extended visa, or whatever it ends up being.

It hasn't quite been a week since I got here, and things are definitely starting to fall into place which is a great feeling.  The courses and academic program are super unorganized, but that's about what I expected this time and it isn't really my focus here anymore.  I'm excited to finally live in Europe outside of academic housing!  I am also looking forward to making some trips to Spain and also visiting my friends in their new homes around Europe.

Sorry there are no pictures to go with this blog, I haven't even unpacked my camera yet!  I'm bad about pictures, but I'll start taking some tomorrow so that next time you'll have something other than a wall of text to look at.

I love you all, and I hope that many of you can come visit me this year!