What do you mean you're dropping me off in a foreign country with five days to find an apartment?

No, really, this is how things work here. Oh, but if only it were that simple. It gets better.

Okay, we're dropped off in a hotel, as I said previously, jet lagged and cranky and just not happy and all you really want to do is get some food in your stomach and take a siesta. And, so, that's what we do on Friday.

So now we have Saturday through Tuesday to find a place, oh and by the way your first day of work is on Monday. So you'll be working and searching for a place to live, and getting a cell phone, and setting up a bank account while beginning work at school.

Oh, and P.S., the entire city shuts down on Sunday, banks close by 2pm on the weekdays, might not be open on weekends, and if you want to do anything between 2 and 5:30, you might as well just forget about it, because most of the city goes home for a siesta.

So how the hell are you supposed to get anything done? Please tell me, who thought this was a good idea? Who thought, oh, I know what I'll do, I'll give everyone 5 days to find a place to live in a foreign country and one of those days will be a day where NOTHING IS OPEN.

Can you tell I was frustrated by this? Just a tiny bit.

Well, as it turns out, Spain has a very strange apartment culture, as in everyone has a piso (flat/apartment) for sale, and everyone is looking to rent. On top of that, agencies have jumped in on this business and charge you a boat load for using their service to find a place. There are, however, news papers that come out every month with all sorts of piso listings and phone numbers to call.

A girl who's on the trip with us was incredibly efficient and found a place that Sunday, and thankfully had a ton of numbers for us to call and check places out. The first place we look at is beautiful. It's this stunning Spanish style house, three levels with an open patio in the very middle that reaches all the way up to massive terrace on top with plants and bamboo and shade and it's out in the open air. There's marble and tile and a huge kitchen... but there are two catches.

Catch Number 1: You split a room, 250€ a piece, but all the bills are included. Okay, that doesn't sound too bad.

Catch Number 2: You live with the flats owner, a 68 year old man who loves wearing track suits and has a 28 year old girl friend from Morocco.

On top of that, the first thing he said to Carol when she introduced herself is that she's "muy guapa" (very pretty) and then laughed for about three minutes while the rest of us were uncomfortably staring at one another. Creepo.

And boy does he like to talk. He talks. And talks. And talks talks talks talks talks UGH. Stop talking to me you creepy old man!

Can you say red flag? I can't. I was down to live in this place. I was ready to move in. I was gung ho. "Let's do it!" I kept telling everyone, "It'll be fine!" I kept telling everyone.

No. No no no no no.

We visit the place Saturday. I'm fine. Visit the place Sunday. Still fine, whatever.

We visit the place Monday for the third time. Not fine. Noooooot fine. NOT fine at all. Yes, it took me that long to figure out that this was, indeed, a rather poor idea.

So Carol and I are on the way back to the hotel, practically running through the streets of Córdoba because it's Monday and we must must must must have a place by Tuesday.

#%@!

Okay. Okay it's fine. We rush back, crack open our laptops and start searching. We now have ONE day to find an apartment. One day in a foreign country. Okay, well if we absolutely have to we can get a room in the hotel for one more night, but in spite of the intense freaking out we're all doing we some how manage to be incredibly productive and within 30 minutes of getting back to the hotel we've set up an appointment to go see a four bedroom apartment.

We walk in, and it's beautiful. It's perfect. Huge kitchen, everyone has their own room, two bathrooms, a HUGE living room, and it's in a very decent part of town. Did I mention it's about a 10 minute walk from my school? Sign me up. Well, we did. We signed the lease the next day, moved all our stuff in and, finally, found ourselves a home in Spain.

Did I mention our Landlady is not a creepo? Actually, she's probably one of the most awesome people I've met in my life. She let us move in two days before we signed the contract, and two days before we even paid rent. On top of that, she's only charging us until the 7th of June, but has said we can stay here the entire month if we like as long as we pay bills. She loves to talk, is a genuinely fantastic little lady, and is, thankfully, not a creeper. 

So in case you are wondering, no, moving your entire life into another country, and then moving your entire life into a different city in that country, and then finally moving your entire life into a apartment every five days is not, surprisingly, the most enjoyable experience in the world.

But the sense of relief you have when you finally have a clean bed you can call your own to fall asleep in... It's priceless. It's beautiful. It's amazing. And suddenly the sun in Córdoba shined a little bit brighter.

The Great Move To Córdoba, and Random Things About Gypsies!

Have I mentioned all ready that if you ever need to lose weight you should just move your entire life to a foreign country and live in hotels for about a week and a half? Because you will.

(a) You'll get frustrated with having to eat out every single meal.

(b) You don't have a fridge, or a microwave, or an oven, so you can't cook or keep anything.

(c) Eventually the stress of moving your entire life in two pieces of luggage will cause you to just give up and stop eating all together.

Okay maybe give up isn't the proper term. How about "suspend optimism"? I like that better.

In any case, after a few days of me being a cranky, crotchety Bryan we move to Córdoba to another hotel where I'm pretty much hoping that I can just no longer be jet lagged. We wander around the town once we arrive to sort of get situated and ... well ...

Okay, so there's this lady standing by The Mezquita handing out little bits of olive leaves. How dangers could she possibly be? And, since she told me "It's just a gift!" she, clearly, must just be some person working with the tourist department welcoming foreigners, right? She seems friendly enough.

No. Not friendly. Not friendly at all. As soon as I take the olive branch, the lady snags my wrist with one hand, her acrylic nails digging into my skin, and starts tracing a line down my palm as if she's reading it.

Uhm. Excuse me. What.

Thankfully Kyrie, being ever vigilant, jumps in instantly, throws the lady off of me while saying "No! No, Bryan, no!" and pushing me away by the shoulders. Essentially whapping me on the nose with a newspaper.

Oh, you mean that was a bad idea. Got it. Okay.

Bryan/Kyrie: 1. Gypsies: 0.

In terms of Gypsy experiences I found it rather tame. For those of you who haven't heard, a common trick they like to pull is they take their babies and throw them at you (I'm serious) and then when you catch them, they all swoop in steal all your cash out of your pockets, so pretty much from the very beginning I was saying that I really was hoping that someone was going to throw their kid at me, so I could let it fall to the ground and see the angered look in their eyes. Maybe they'd even shake their fists at me while I got a picture of them. It'd be, in my opinion, kind of fantastic.

But no, no baby throwing, not yet.

We have, however, made it to Córdoba, and I still have my wallet, so it's a good day.

Others, however, were not so lucky.

Take, for example, the sad case of Denise and Tyler, two other people placed in Córdoba. Imagine with me, if you will.

Both of them are over 6 feet tall, and are pretty much what you would expect photoshopped starving fashion models to look like, except their not photoshopped or starving. Bright blonde hair, and on their backs as they're traveling there are, of course, backpacking backpacks with all the pockets and straps and gadgets.

Well here they are in Madrid, ready to get on a train to travel south. The train pulls up and then something very strange happens -- all of a sudden a huge group of people starts shoving them against the train as people are coming out, shoving shoving shoving until some woman behind them starts freaking out and yelling about how she's tired of being pushed and everyone better knock it off.

So Denise and Tyler and shoved on to the train, the group of people magically disperses like they weren't even there, the doors close and away they go.

This all happens in the course of about ten seconds.

Now get this -- Denise's purse had a zipper and a flap over it as well as a latch to keep the flap closed. On top of that, she was holding it under her arm and holding it close against her ribs. In all the pushing, they STILL managed to get into her bag and steal her wallet without her noticing a thing. And of course Tyler's wallet was stolen out of his pocket in no time flat.

In their very own words, "They're good."

Needless to say I'm a little careful when I'm wandering around, and I'm not keeping anything important on me when I don't need it. But don't worry, no one else had any problems, and they say that pick-pocketing is the only thing they really have problems with here, and violent crime is never an issue. Still, better safe than sorry.

Moving on.

Now here's the funny thing. We arrive on a Friday, still jet lagged and still cranky (at least me, anyway), and we need to begin hunting for an apartment. No, they don't arrange housing for us, we have to find it ourselves, and not having cell phones makes that rather hard.

But wait, just wait, because the next bit is going to be about Paco, aka Creepy Creepy Track Suit Guy.

Sevilla

So, finally, we have arrived in Sevilla. We have our hotel room after a 30 hour travel day and we're pretty much just ready to pass out. I, on the other hand, am incredibly stressed because I haven't eaten, I haven't slept, and now my adaptors don't work so I can't plug in my dead computer to charge which means I can't call my parents!

Needless to say, I'm not pleased.

To top it all off, they gave us a room with one bed, so the three of us (Kyrie, Carol and I) squeeze into one bed for the night and sleep the kind of sleep you can only have after a 30 hour travel day -- sporadic and constantly interrupted.

The next morning, however, we awake to the breakfast buffet, a feast of eggs, meats, juices, and breads. We gorge on the bounty before us, thanking god that we're staying in such an awesome hotel with such an awesome breakfast and we walk away full and happy.

Thus commences the orientation. Five days of following a schedule so that we can receive some important information (and some useless information as well) but so that at the end of the week we still walk away not having a clue as to what we're doing aside from playing games with kids and teaching them words like Red and Apple.

But! We do get to wander around Sevilla which is fantastically beautiful and full of life and light and love and a huge cathedral in the middle of town. This thing has got spires that just stretch up into the sky, and around it all the German tourists wander about taking pictures. You can sit in a cafe out in the open sun right before this monster of a church that's been around since the 12th Century, and you can drink your café, eat your ice cream, and talk on your cell phone all before this gorgeous building.

Then there's the Plaza de España which is perhaps the most romantic place I've seen in my entire life. So romantic, in fact, that on the day we went to go visit it, there were three different women getting their pictures taken for the wedding ... and then on my second visit, there were two. It's just that romantic.

I can imagine the conversations now:

María: Oh, so where'd you end up getting your wedding pictures taken?

Julieta: Just down at the Plaza de España, you know, where everyone gets them done.

Or how about:

Rosa: Where'd he take you on your first date??

Carmen: Oh it was totally lame. We went to the Plaza de España, life I've never been there before.

Thankfully, it seems like the Spaniards appreciate the historical significance of the place, and if not them, then at least all the German tourists do!

Okay, so I haven't gotten to the bit about the Dancing Dragon yet, but I'll get there.

More to come!

The Fight To Get To The Airport, or: The Amazing Race

I honestly believe that whenever I travel somewhere, it essentially has to turn into an episode of The Amazing Race. Like running through an Osaka train station during rush hour and getting in the way of the crazy mob of Japanese business men as they also run around to get to their train.

No, it's nuts. No traveling for my life can ever be easy, and here's why.

The morning began at roughly 3:00 at the hotel, to be at the airport by 4:30. The six minute drive between the hotel and the air port was about the easiest part of the entire journey.

Well, you see, we have two separate flights. One to Madrid via Chicago, and another from Madrid to Sevilla, with only an hour in between these two flights. You see where this is going already, don't you?

We arrive in Chicago just fine, where we sit about for about three hours and I spend $5.40 on 4 pieces of fruit because, uh, airport fruit is made from gold.

Now we board for our 8 hour flight to Spain, and of course, we're an hour late. See how this works? This, my friends, is why you always leave several hours in between your flights, so that this very thing does not happen.

On top of this, Carol (one of the two girls with whom I'm traveling) sent her luggage straight to Sevilla, so who even knows where her stuff is going.

I'm stuck right in front of the tiny child who is absolutely SCREAMING for his mother, even though she's sitting right next to him. This led me to believe that the poor child was kidnapped, but due to the intensity of the headache he ended up giving me for several hours, I figured he deserved it and thus did not alert the proper authorities. Meanwhile, all the suave Spanish people are milling about the plane, standing around and chatting. Yeah, like, standing around the plane for hours, just chatting. No one's telling them to remain seated, so they just stand about and chat in Spanish. All the while my poor stomach is in knots because we've missed our flight and god knows where my luggage (aka my entire life in two suitcases) is going to end up.

Fantastico.

Now, the funny thing about traveling to Europe in the early morning is that you get about 8 hours of day light before the sun goes down, and then as you fly into Europe the sun comes back up. Mix this with leaving at 4:30 in the morning, and arriving in Madrid at 11:30 in the evening our time with about 2 hours of sleep on the plan is really helpful when you now have to wander around a foreign country in search of a new flight to your destination.

So we start asking around. And, as most customer service in the States work, they send us to another person, who sends us to another, who sends to a fourth, a fifth, a 23rd, and so on. Thankfully, they became progressively nicer, at first saying we'd have to pay for a new flight, and then finally putting us on Stand By and checking all our luggage for free.

Another 4 hours to kill in the Madrid airport. We end up passing out on benches, and I finally, for once, felt like I was having a Europe moment.

Several hours later we're in a very long Stand By line waiting behind some woman who's screaming at the customer service rep in Russian about (I think) how she needs to get home for her daughter's wedding. There's a family from the UK behind us who's patiently waiting, and the more I stand there, the more I feel the urge to join the crazy Russian lady in her screaming.

I shove Carol up to the front of the desk, cutting in front of several people because our plane is boarding NOW, and she asks a few quick questions and finally we receive our tickets.

Here's where the Amazing Race bit comes in. We are at gate 27. Our plane, boarding now, is leaving in a few minutes from gate 98.

So imagine, if you will, a long stretch of air port, and three American 20 year olds running through, pushing over little old ladies, because I refuse to spend the night in an airport. Refuse. Not interested. I can't even remember the last time I went to the gym. I'm sweating profusely, my calves are burning, I'm dragging two heavy pieces of carry on luggage and a roll along and all I know is that the person sitting next to me on the plane is going to have to deal with the fact that I haven't applied deoderant in 24 hours.

Sorry buddy.

Thankfully! At Last! We board our plane, reach Sevilla, get our luggage, take a taxi to the hotel, and pass out.

Por fin, we've made it to España.

The story gets better. Ever heard of Murphy's Law? Just you wait.

Ah, Spain!

Yes, Spain!

The land of Sangría, Paella, and perhaps the most beautiful invention of all, the Siesta. I mean, let's get real, why wouldn't you want to live in a country that shuts down in the middle of the day so you can go home and take a nap. It's no wonder they like to dance until five in the morning, or that they don't normally finish dinner until ten.

And so, here I am at last, in the city of Seville for five days before moving onto the equally historical Córdoba where I will being teaching kids between the ages of 3 and 12.

Let's just say that it'll be a growing experience for me. Well, mostly for my patience. As the Spaniards like to say, ten paciencia!

Updates with sweet pictures to come!