Day 1

De andar por casa is a phrase in Spanish that literally means “for walking around the house,” but it’s used to describe anything that technically fits the bill but only barely. Like “phoning it in” in English.

My apartment is de andar por casa. It’s technically an apartment, and just as the description says, it has two bedrooms, an office and an equipped kitchen, but . . . I don’t know . . . take for example the stove exhaust fan, which isn’t plugged in and even if it were, it would just move the air from the stove to 3 feet above the stove and blow it all over the room from a slightly higher point.

Despite being cheap and curmudgeonly, I decided that if I’m going to be here for two months and I can spend $75 and make this place slightly homier, it’s worth it.

Before

After

We shall never speak of this again.

On the way to the store, I noticed police all over the place closing the streets. They were immediately followed by many marching bands and people on horses throwing candy to the people watching. Turns out it’s the festival for Saint Medir, a guy who told the Romans, while planting beans, that the local bishop had just passed by, which was true. Nonetheless, the Romans killed him and then the beans grew really fast, thus justifying his sainthood. Like most religion-based stories about things that happened many hundreds of years ago, this one sounds totally reasonable.

I thought it was all kind of fun but this guy was unimpressed.