Centrally located ...
So, I'm trying to find a place to live here in Madrid until the end of October, when I head off to Barcelona for a month (unless, as mentioned before, I head to Barcelona for October and return to Madrid for November, which might be wise, as that way I could take advantage of late-season beach weather, and leave all of my winter clothes in Madrid and not worry about transporting excess baggage halfway across the country to just transport it across the Straits a month later). This is proving to be difficult: everybody wants to rent to people for a full academic year, or somesuch.
People also have strange concepts of what constitutes "close" to a metro, and "centric" zones. For me, closeness to a metro can't possibly be too much farther from a metro than Chabot is from the Rockridge BART. There are places out there that list a bunch of metro stops and say that they're close to all of them, and then later in the ad mention that the closest one is a fifteen-minute walk. There are also housing listings for centrally-located places that are a twenty-minute metro ride from the center. While Madrid is a sprawling capital city with no real natural boundaries to prevent it from spreading infinitely, when I think central, I imagine something other than identical five-storey apartment buildings as far as the eye can see. Alas.
I went to look at one place today (the first place I've seen), and it was beautiful, and less than a five-minute stroll from Sol, the 0,0 coordinate for Madrid. Of course, they wanted someone for a longer term, and it was in the middle of being fixed up and wouldn't have been available until at least the fifteenth of this month anyways. Sigh.
So, I'm trying to find a place to live here in Madrid until the end of October, when I head off to Barcelona for a month (unless, as mentioned before, I head to Barcelona for October and return to Madrid for November, which might be wise, as that way I could take advantage of late-season beach weather, and leave all of my winter clothes in Madrid and not worry about transporting excess baggage halfway across the country to just transport it across the Straits a month later). This is proving to be difficult: everybody wants to rent to people for a full academic year, or somesuch.
People also have strange concepts of what constitutes "close" to a metro, and "centric" zones. For me, closeness to a metro can't possibly be too much farther from a metro than Chabot is from the Rockridge BART. There are places out there that list a bunch of metro stops and say that they're close to all of them, and then later in the ad mention that the closest one is a fifteen-minute walk. There are also housing listings for centrally-located places that are a twenty-minute metro ride from the center. While Madrid is a sprawling capital city with no real natural boundaries to prevent it from spreading infinitely, when I think central, I imagine something other than identical five-storey apartment buildings as far as the eye can see. Alas.
I went to look at one place today (the first place I've seen), and it was beautiful, and less than a five-minute stroll from Sol, the 0,0 coordinate for Madrid. Of course, they wanted someone for a longer term, and it was in the middle of being fixed up and wouldn't have been available until at least the fifteenth of this month anyways. Sigh.
posted by AV at 6:23 PM
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