Moving to Málaga

If I have a day to get ready, pack and clean a postage stamp-sized apartment, you can bet it is going to take me a day. I have no idea what I have become. Maybe it is part of the aging process – maybe I have just lost the plot. Got up, stripped the bed, showered, took all the linen and my own dirty clothes to the laundrette: put them into wash and then went to the cafeteria at the El Zoco supermarket for a coffee and some scrambled eggs with tomatoes, which wasn’t what I had asked for, but given the levels of my Spanish, I was happy to get. Then went and dried the clothes. Then went and packed and cleaned. My God, the day was riveting.

Checking my texts, I saw I had an angry (if a text can ever be angry) message from someone at the Instituto de Belleza. I chuckled to myself – what the hell have they got to be angry about, I thought. Then I realised I had forgotten to cancel the appointment to detrumpify myself. Make note of that term – it is the first time it has been used, Detrumpify: 1) (v.) to get rid of all vestiges and hints of orange hair, as put into ones head by a nervous, failing trainee hairdresser, in order to remove any similarity to a raging American moron, formerly President of the United States. 2) (v.) to get oneself out of a difficult situation (i.e., one in which one looks like a complete arse) by an act of great intelligence.

As a result, I had to explain I was so unhappy with the result and the wait that I had been forced to take remedial action. I apologised for not informing them of the change of plan, but reminded them that there was no way on God’s earth I was going to walk around for a whole weekend looking like an orangutan on heat. There was no response. For added emphasis, I had gone to DeepL, my failed rival in the translation world, and used it to translate “orangutan on heat”. This I added to the message in parentheses. Should you ever wish to use the phrase yourself, it is “como un orangután enamorado”. You just never know.

Then I had a final look to see if Fran was around, he wasn’t, bade my farewells to the two decent people in the apartment building I had met, and went to wait for my transfer to Málaga airport. When it arrived, it was a 65+ year old Swedish lady, who was lovely, and chatted about how she had bought an apartment on line from Stockholm on one Tuesday in 2018, and then rented a trailer to drive down two days later. Her husband wasn’t happy – but she thinks he has cooled down since the divorce.

I got the car to the airport because I am cheap and 20 Euros is 20 Euros: then I got the excellent Málaga train to Centro Alameda and walked to where my apartment was supposed to be. It wasn’t. The address I had been given, and had I carefully read the document I would have understood this, was of the agency. The taxi I subsequently spent 15 Euros on took me back to the airport – or close enough. I wasn’t overly impressed by the surroundings: insalubrious, some might say: others might say “fucking seedy”. Having tried for 10 minutes to get into my “Picassus Loft” in calle Alcalde Jose Maria de Llaños, number 10, I called the agency and asked how the frig they thought I could get into a building that was not only boarded up but condemned.

“No, no, no, Señor, it is not number 10, it is number 10 – 4.”

Having naively assumed that calle Alcalde Jose Maria de Llaños 10-4 was Unit or Apt. 4 in number 10, I was disabused. 10-4 is four houses down, from number 10. There is also a 10-1, 10-2, 10-3, 10-5, and 10-6. And I thought Ottawa had problems with numbering. So I let myself in to 10-4 and was pleasantly surprised to find a clean, spacious and warm room. It took me 20 minutes to figure out how to work the stove top (Induction Boost – great YouTube self-help videos from Japanese users), but I managed to set up a work station and prepared to hunker down for the next 5 days, because who would ever set foot outside in this neighbourhood?

In the end, I managed to convince myself that a bad first impression is not necessarily the final impression, and went out for a walk. Thank God I did. The place was transformed. All of the shuttered and graffitied storefronts were opened, shining out bright lights, and where the streets had been deserted, they were now full of people, milling around happily and chatting and laughing. I’d forgotten about siesta time. That’ll teach me.

I walked for a bit, found a Supermercado and did some shopping, then went back home to eat, drink and sleep.