Tuesday, September 06, 2005

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.

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