L’Auberge espagnole

It was one of the movies I watched in order to prepare for my life here in Barcelona – L’Auberge espagnole. Similar to the movie, I was resigned to the fact that I was headed back to the days of cramped apartments with a cultural assortment of roommates. If my search for a flat was any indication of what was ahead, I was going to be in trouble.

In proper last-minute-student-form, I grabbed the last two people looking for roommates and began the search. It would be my first time living with men – two of them yet, before I knew it, two became four. Me and FOUR men….in one apartment? I had visions of dirty dishes piled ceiling high, dirty clothes strewn across the house and queues for the bathroom. It was developing into a nightmare.

So four of us settled into a popular US coffee chain to scour the internet and find a flat for five. A week transpired in scorching temperatures and excessive humidity levels and still we had found no apartment. Eventually I put my foot down and shaved the number of men down to 3. And then we walked. We walked half of Barcelona in the August heat wave to find some of the city’s most unattractive flats - my fears from L’Auberge epsagnole were coming into focus.

In a twist of fate, the outlook for the next 15 months changed quite drastically. After stumbling past a curious doorman clad in his royal blue top, we soon found ourselves peering into a flat originally on the market for sale. It was empty and a thin layer of dust covered the black and white marble floors. The ceilings were raised higher than a typical flat and they were all decorated with ornate molding adding a bit of character and charm. The four largest rooms were flanked with frosted glass French doors and another set of doors led to a balcony shaded by a solitary tree. The lobby was home to an old-fashion elevator that may or may not work at any given time. It was adorned with a red carpet that led the way to the front door where Andreas – the doorman and town gossip – stands daily, perched at the ready for the next big thing to walk by.

We would have to furnish the flat ourselves, but with only that caveat, we were sold on our new home. I was convinced by now that my time was going to play out less like the Erasmus experience and more like the lives in L’Elegance Du Herisson.

Our little Balmes flat has taken on a life of its own. I fear that Andreas the doorman isn’t an intellectual in hiding, but we do stumble through whispered conversations as our paths cross in the mornings. The boys and I survived a few multi-hour trips to Ikea where I felt like a mother to three kids with varied attention spans. I herded them through the Ikea maze and we all tried to make sense of the Swedish product names with Catalan descriptions. We couldn’t decide what to do with the four extra rooms so one is home to a Television that has never been turned on, our laundry hangs to dry in another and guests from near and far crash in a third that is equipped with a guest bed and drawers.

Our landlady initially acted as if she wanted to be a bit of a grandmother figure. She brought us pots and pans and before we knew it she showed up with massive furniture that she clearly had no use for in her own flat - as time went on we noticed we were getting a significant amount of second hand dilapidated furniture. We still see her from time to time if the pilot light goes out and we can no longer stand to take ice cold showers or when she stops by to see her son the Veterinarian that has office space on the ground level. The flat has its oddities – like the world’s smallest kitchen in a 200 m² flat and so what if my window vibrates - ok shakes - when the trash is emptied at 1130pm and again at 230am.

The flat has seen its fair share of guests and probably has been the catalyst to more rumors than we deserve. We have even hosted MBA orphans for weeks at a time over the summer. We can speak a combination of Spanish, English and German, yet we often have conversations for five minutes using just one word or communicate silently through our own signature dance. And let's be honest, it’s not uncommon to cross paths at 7am when someone is coming home and another is going out.....

But our lease ends at the end of the month and we’ll move on to our new adventures which are still left largely undefined.

I’ll miss the regal red carpet that greets me every day. My next flat probably won’t have the same frustrating ability to trap you in the lobby, but out of your flat – total fire hazard in my opinion. Andreas will probably miss flirting with my friends back home on Skype and our cleaning lady will have to find a new place to take breaks from her adult-sitting job for the old man upstairs.

I will miss the boys.

I will never again have three people deny claim to the bottle of champagne that sat idle in the freezer for three months after exploding. No one will fog the house with the aroma of aerosol spray at 4am. I will miss the orange juice they bring me when I am sick and the Spanish translation service they provide when I need just about anything. I'll definitely miss having the option of them bringing me clean clothes later in the day when I spill my morning coffee. Never again will I possibly live with three people with such odd dietary habits - cookies with caviar? Nutella with a spoon? And the copious amounts of microwaved eggs?!? I will miss them standing at the threshold of my door narrating the previous night’s debauchery or listening to my gripes of the day.

And I will miss peering out my bedroom door to see three men scampering about the flat like children in just their underwear….It's been a fun 15 months.