10-2 The Night in Algeciras

I left you last en route to Algeciras. As we arrived I called my roommate Maria, who is also an English teacher at several different schools in Algeciras, but she is from Jerez, Spain. My other roommate (who is also participating in my same program) connected Maria and I so all three of us could get an apartment together. I’d only ever talked to either of them a couple of times through email so I had no idea what to expect.

Maria was nice enough to make two trips to the bus station because all of our luggage wouldn’t fit in her car at once. She was very talkative and I think she thought something was wrong because I was so quiet, but I tried to assure her that is just the way I am. After a random stranger on the street helped her parallel park her car, because she was unable to, we unloaded and painfully battled the hill as we dragged our suitcases up to the apartment building. The sun in Algeciras can be very fierce, making the city hotter than Madrid. Then we discovered that the electricity was turned off and so we would have to carry the suitcases up 3 flights of stairs. Not exactly the home welcoming I would have wised for, but we were promised that it would be turned back on in 4 hours.

After staying with Louie and his 4 roommates in their cramped apartment, my place seemed rather grand and spacious. It was so nice have my own space again. It has been two month since I moved out of my apartment in San Marcos. After I unpacked (really I just threw my stuff around my room because I could) and Maria came back from her meeting we went to the store and got something to cook. By the time we came back it was almost dark and the electricity still wasn’t turned on. Unfortunately in the grocery store we were so concerned about not buying something that needed to be cooked in the oven (because we don’t have one) that we forgot about the lack of electricity. Of course we also didn’t think that it would still be off at 10:00pm when we were so starving that we attempted to cook our microwavable food by flashlight over the gas stove. Orquid and I got to know my new roommate by the light of Orquid’s small flashlight (we didn’t even have candles to light). Oh and I forgot to mention that they had turned off the water as well.