What Anthea did next

Soooo, why did it take so long to set up this blog?

Well, first things first, we had to find us a place to live. We came out to Vigo during my Easter hols last year, not actually Easter because the festival was so early that my college just took off the Easter weekend and saved the holiday itself for a couple of weeks later. Whatever! We came out in early April and, in between visiting places of tourist interest (all rather windy and slightly damp at that time of year), we trundled along to a few estate agents, told them about THE IDEA and left them our details, swapping emails so that we could arrange to visit some flats when we arrived in September. We also had the great good fortune of being put in contact with the sister of one of my La Coruna friends. Now, Pili turned out to be an angel who drove us around Vigo, pointing out good places to live and pooh-poohing others; just what we needed, a bit of insider knowledge!

The estate agents trawl was a good plan but in the event only one replied when we emailed them prior to coming here. Of course, by then la crisis was starting here as well as in the UK and estate agents were going out of business by the dozen. The one which replied fortunately seemed to be the best possible, with the MOST helpful people, prepared to go the extra mile to set up things that we needed. At my most cynical, I could say that, of course, they were guaranteeing business for themselves but all the same they were amazingly useful. A very big GRACIAS!!!!! to Roseta, Jorge and Blanca!

We looked at a number of places, the bottom end of our budget proving to be dingy and poky and probably likely to drive us mad through living too much on top of each other in the long term. After all, we were going to live here for a year and were used to having enough space not to get on each other’s nerves. We were living in a hotel and didn’t want to spend too long doing that, although you CAN get used to having someone make your bed and clean your room for you, a bit like going home to mum without having to ask permission to stay out late. So we worked at it and quickly narrowed it down to two possibilities one of which we ruled out because it didn’t have anywhere obvious to eat. I’m a sociable person, like cooking for friends and don’t really like asking people to eat with a plate balanced on their knees.

So we ended up with a nice spacious flat near the centre of Vigo with plenty of room for friends and relations (I feel like Rabbit in Winnie the Pooh!) to come and stay, rather at the top end of our budget but we decided that its location made up for that.

As we were shown round the flat by the grandparents of our landlady – they live next door, she lives in Madrid – we were given strict instructions on how to use the water heating boiler, an apparently amazing device, fuelled by gas “from the street” instead of from the huge kind of camping gas 'bombona' which is still the norm for many Spanish haouseholds. They and the young man from the estate agents were amazed to learn that gas 'de la calle' is the norm in the UK and that we only use gas canister for camping holidays and or if you live in a caravan.

We were also advised to go to El Corte Ingles, the nearby department store, for all our household needs. 'Tienen de todo', said the old lady, and it is true they do have everything. However, we quickly found a cheaper source of gadgets such as tin-openers, screw-drivers and so on: the 'Bazar Chino' just a few doors down the road, a kind of Aladin’s cave, run by Chinese immigrants, the older of whom speak little Spanish, selling everything from bras to blankets, from jumpers to jugs, from kites to kettles! An amazing place and mostly dirt cheap!

As it turned out, finding the flat was the easy part. We told the estate agents we wanted to rent it and then hit the Spanish catch-22. To rent a flat you need an aval, a bank guarantee; to get that you need a Spanish bank account; to open a Spanish bank account you need a Foreigner's Number; to get that you need an address. Aaaaagh! Well, the estate agent pulled some Spanish strings and got someone she knows who works in the bank to let us open a bank account using just our passports - hurrah for the Spanish 'it’s who you know' system!

We chose to open our account with the Spanish bank that owns our bank in the UK, thinking that it would be easy to transfer money that way. Silly us! Of course they don't talk to each other in that way! The helpful contact in the bank spent hours finding out what we needed to do to organise a transfer - fax copies of passport, bank debit card, driving license (not quite intimate parts of the body but almost) to the our UK bank, wait 48 hours and expect a phone call. No such luck. No such phone call. Soooo, I started phoning bank numbers, talking to strange people in call centres in unknown places where no-one had any idea what was going on. Finally I faxed them all the details again and then phoned them again from the bank, gave them a million security details and eventually the money came through.

(When we went home at Christmas we discovered a partial explanation for the cash transfer problem. There in the pile of mail which our helpful daughter had been looking after for us was a form from the bank for us to fill in and sign to allow the money to be tranferred. The efficiency of the banking system is truly staggering! Is it any wonder they are in crisis?)

In the meantime our deadline for signing contracts on the flat was running out. We needed to have about 6 months rent in our account for the bank guarantee. So we found a new leisure activity: getting as much money as possible out of ATMs every day and putting it in the safe in our hotel room. Every time we went out we had fits of nervous tension. Would someone work out what we were doing and would we be mugged carrying huge amounts of money? What if the safe in the bank proved to be less than safe? What about the exchange rate? (Hindsight, that wonderful thing, tells us that we did exactly the right thing as we now have no need to transfer money at the current disastrous rate of exchange!) All these problems to take into acount but finally we ammassed enormous piles of 50 euro notes, carried them carefully to the bank, deposited the money, saw the notary, paid his fee, signed the contract on the flat and moved in - WHOOPEEEEE!

In the middle of all of this, offspring number one and his young lady came to visit us. They had been walking in the Picos de Europa and were flying home from Oporto airport in Portugal so calling in on us was a logical bonus for all of us. We showed them around, took them to one of our favourite eateries, paid for a night in our hotel and did not get up to see them off as they were leaving at some ungodly time in the morning. In exchange, they left us with their walking poles which they could not take on budget airline flights without paying an extortionate fee for extra and unusually shaped luggage. A few days after their visit we moved a couple of streets from our hotel to our newly acquired flat, pulling our wheelie-suitcases behind us, our small rucksacks on our backs and walking poles in our hand, for all the world like strange pilgrims on the road to Santiago de Compostela.

Still to come: how to get an internet connection, the NIE and other vagaries of Vigo life.