La vida madrileña

I can't believe we've been here for 4 days now! Jessica and I have been keeping very busy waiting for Allison and Bethany to arrive. Yesterday we walked around some neighborhoods we're interested in living in and searched for "for rent" signs on apartment buildings to see if any fit our criteria. It can be difficult to find a 3 bedroom place here, so we didn't have too much luck and the one we saw wasn't a good fit. However, we met some really nice and helpful people in the process. I've definitely noticed that people in Madrid seem to be more friendly than in Sevilla. Not that they weren't nice in Sevilla, it's just that people here seem more open to foreigners and want to help us. Tomorrow we have 4 more places to see so I'm very excited about that. Spaniards don't really like to show their places on the weekend so we're having to wait till tomorrow to see the majority.

Last night Jessica and I enjoyed a night out in an area called La Latina which has a lot of bars and restaurants to just go sit and have a drink outside (I love that part of European culture). We finally got to sleep in today which was good because we had a very busy day visiting the schools we're going to be working in. Jessica's school is in a suburb south of the city and mine is far north. We took the commuter trains to our respective towns (each about 30 minutes from the Madrid center) and walked to our schools. My town is called Tres Cantos and is the newest municipality in Spain (according to wikipedia), incorporated in 1991, so it's very industrial and modern which is pretty uncommon here. It looks really nice though and my school looks huge! Hopefully I'll like it. I emailed the school and they told me I should be working with 6 to 8 year olds so that should be very interesting.

Tonight Jessica and I are going to go get some dinner with Elena and then we have a very busy day tomorrow between seeing apartments and picking up Bethany from the airport.

Hasta luego!