Busy, Busy, Busy
Rental properties in the Spanish village we wanted to live in were very far and few between. Barry had found the only one which was available at short notice, hence it was far from ideal.
The first week of our Spanish life was busy, with trying to clean up our rental property. Really is unbelievable the amount of filth some people live in and the amount of tat they leave in a rental property. We moved all the things we didn’t need or couldn’t clean into one of the bedrooms, it was full. Then we stored all the items we had brought with us but didn’t need straight away in the most unusual bedroom I have ever seen. It had a toilet plumbed into it but in the middle of the room, what’s that about?
We found a bar where the landlord spoke some English, he would turn out to be the person who lead us in a direction we never in a million years thought we would go! His wife was a teacher, so we arranged to start having Spanish lessons with her. It was already frustrating not speaking the language, I would say ‘hola’ to the people I pasted in the street, but when they tried to talk to me, which most did, I was lost, no clue what they were saying at all. I wanted to fit in and be a real part of the community. To do that I had to get at least some Spanish under my belt.
It turned out that I found it very difficult in the classroom setting, even though the class was just for Barry and myself. Having had not the best English education I had no clue about verbs and grammar, let alone past, present and continual.
However I wanted to learn, I needed to be able to communicate, I found going for a coffee after the class was working much better for me. I needed a more practical approach.
This wonderful couple would help us in so many ways, our teacher even set up the appointment for us to get our residences because we didn’t have NIE numbers we were able to do them both together. She made sure we had all the paperwork we needed and yet again we travelled to Almeria, this time knowing where the new offices were.
This time it was easy, we went in for our appointment and bingo came out with the documents we needed.
*Top tip: getting your paperwork does not need to be as hard as we made it, go straight to an asesoria and save yourself time, money and hassle.