Life in Cartagena

Finding a house to rent in Spain is usually a pretty straightforward process. When I say house I really mean flat because, although it's not impossible to find houses in the middle of a town or city, by far the most usual style of dwelling for urban Spaniards is the flat. I need to qualify this a bit further. It's easy to find a place if you are willing to pay an estate agent. The other options involve walking around random streets looking for to rent signs with your mobile phone to hand. We've only ever done it a couple of times and it has not produced good results. The internet has made it a slightly less fraught process to find an individual renter and the place that Maggie rented in Ciudad Rodrigo came that way. Even then it takes ages to sift through the various websites usually to find that nobody answers your email or phone call except for the estate agents. The estate agent method is the most straightforward but also the most costly. The standard char...

I'm aware that I'm not posting very often. I know this is not a good way to maintain faithful readers. With nothing much to report I have been tempted to start commenting on the things that are happening in Spain rather than the things that are happening to me, to us. Not quite yet though. So, we've been back in Cartagena for a week now. Some observations. True to tradition summer, that's summer proper, ended promptly on 1 September. Temperatures plummeted all over Spain but we added to our personal autumnal descent by moving from Culebrón to here. Cartagena has a microclimate, the locals, the Cartageneros, say that it never gets too hot in summer nor too cold in winter. They quietly forget to mention that the town is incredibly sticky. A wet heat that has one dripping in sweat after a five minute walk. So we lost 10ºC on the daytime highs but gained self moistening clothes. Nothing to complain about really though with sunny days and daytime temperatures of around 2...

Despite having a house that we own - paid for, no mortgage - we have paid rent for six of the eight years that we have been here. All to do with where we work. I quite like renting. No worries about upping sticks and going, no problem with the building maintenance etc. Maggie maintains the majority view that rent is money down the drain. Anyway the handle fell off the washing machine door yesterday. We don't deal directly with the landlord but through an intermediary estate agent. Now a handle doesn't sound like much but basically it puts the washing machine out of action so it needs fixing. "No, that's your problems says the estate agent" "What!!" says I, "Wear and tear," says the estate agent. "And if the plumbing goes phut is that fair wear and tear? - it's their washing machine and they need to get it fixed." I was very cross and surprisingly coherent. I hung tough. Having reminded them of a few jobs that they have fai...

One of my students arrived in the classroom long before the others. He lives in a small development with about 20 houses. He is the only Spanish family, all the other houses are owned by Britons. I'm sure this is excellent for his English. Most housing within Spain belongs to some sort of community of owners. Our house in Culebrón doesn't but that's because it is completely self contained. We share facilities with nobody. The same isn't true of our flat in Cartagena because here we share the front door, hallways, stairwells, the lift, the façade of the building, cleaning costs etc. etc. My student is having some trouble getting his British neighbours to share their burden of the community costs for maintaining things like the street lighting and the gardens. He wanted to know if we don't have to pay for water or electricity in the UK as none of his neighbours wants to! Nobody turned up for a while to the class so we covered lots of ground - water rates versus ...

It's not as though there aren't curtains in Spain. We've got nets on most of the windows in this flat and it was the same in the last place. We even had proper, bought from Ikea, linen curtains at one of the windows there. Not everyone uses curtains though and it's pretty usual to have none at the windows. Where there are curtains they do not serve the same purpose as in the UK, at least not around Alicante and Murcia regions. They are not to block out light, deter snoopers or insulate the house. Drawing them is not the way to signal that your day is over and that you have locked yourself, snug and warm, into your little house. In Spain I think they are there to make the casements look a bit neater from inside and maybe to ensure that the dash from bathroom to bedroom is just a shade less embarassing for any neighbours who happen to be watering their plants as you drip by your window. Spanish houses and flats do have built in blinds or shutters though. Holidaymake...

Little things. We still notice the small differences though more and more the Spanish way has become our normal way. We're still settling in to the new flat. There are a series of letter boxes in the entrance way to our block each with a lock. For some reason the boxes don't have a label assigning each box to each flat. On the front of the building there is a separate lockable post box. I presumed that somebody must collect the mail from the exterior box and then sort it into each interior box. So we set about finding out how to get hold of our mail. The estate agent told me that the President of the Community (each block of flats has an annual President and there are meetings to decide things of communal interest) had the keys. When I asked him for our key today I was told that we do not have an individual box. I can get the key from him any time and go through the post in the external box. Strange system I think but so Spanish. We're also trying to get ...

Despite her tender years Maggie has seniority. She took up residence in Spain on 21 August 2004. I was with her then but I had to return to the UK and didn't finally arrive in Spain, along with Mary the cat and the MGB, for good, until 7 October 2004. We bought the house in Culebrón on 10 January 2005. My diary for that day says, as we turned the key in the lock for the first time: "I didn't feel elated, I didn't feel doubtful. I didn't think we'd made a dreadful mistake. I didn't think we'd got a bargain. I'm not sure what we've got and I'm not sure how it will all pan out when the dust has settled." Yesterday we signed the contract on our new rented flat in Cartagena, that's the fifth flat we've rented here since we started our Spanish adventure back in 2004. This time we're slap bang in the centre of town, within yards of Puertas de Murcia one of the streets with the big chain clothes stores on it. We expect it to b...