Hunting for a 'piso'...

Everybody that goes to Spain knows how it works:
or, you look for little papers in the streets and in the 'loquotorios' (internet/telephone-pubs),
or, you surf to:
http://www.loquo.com/
http://www.kamicasa.com/
http://www.easypiso.com/
etc.

As an exception, in Barcelona there are only a few places where you can encounter those little papers and most of the announcements found at the 'loquotorios' are old.
The best way here is to surf on the WWW, to write down a couple of phone numbers, to call immediately and to arrange a visit.

All rooms are expensive, many have the size of a dog cage, but if you want to pay €400/month or more, you can find relative fast a -for Belgian norms- normal to good room in a nice flat. I didn't want to pay thát much, so I knew it could take me some time to find a room I like for more or less €350/month...

It took 7 days to be sure I had the room I liked and it took 5 more until I could enter it, so 12 days in total! Nowadays, I'm still spending my time at Kurts place. I can't wait until it's Monday, the day I can finally install myself and get a life here...! :)

It's incredible what I've seen in those days.
My requirements were: a bed, a closet, something that looks like a table (honestly: I wrote my bachelor paper in VLC on a white painted door laying on two supports...), some space between those furnitures, a shower, small kitchen/sofa, internet (neighbours, everybody needs good neighbours) and a close metro stop.

This is a summary of what I found during my search:

• no friends can visit me ("aquí es un monasterio"= this is a monastery)
• friends can only come over to 'have a coffee'
• friends can come over and spend a night @ €10/night (even for my little sister)
• no window at all
• the window is small and on the other side is... another room!
• 1.5m x 2.5m (the dog cage I was talking about)
• all of them were smokers & the flat was filled with their smoke
• available from October (played a more important roll during the first days)
• an old mommy with youngest son (27) (-> no thanks, I'm not looking for a new family)
• no desk
• no living room (was converted in another room)
• my company would be an old smoking man (trying to let me rent his stockage room)
• to far away (I would loose a lot of time by going to and coming from the campus in Bellaterra)
• bad neighbourhood (there is nothing: huge blocks, no shops, no life when it's dark)
• room of a few square meters on the 1th floor, next to the around-the-clock traffic of Gran Vía (even only beautiful girls were living in this flat (Libanese-Spanish) and Lesbian couple... hahaha)
• smelly, like it was never cleaned before
• no internet ("Internet? Wifi? Qué es?")
• a small hairy dog lives in the kitchen (dog hair all around, newspapers on the floor to catch up the poopies)
• a woman in midlife crisis trying to drag me ("Eeey guapo, que no olvidas mí numero, ;) ;) ;), bajo el precio para tí guapo,...") => HILARIOUS! :D
• no shower (only small bath)
• Chinese mom with her son: "we sleep at 10 p.m. and no visits, well, maybe for coffee"
• I was 'on the list and they would contact me'...

Mostly it was a mixtures of those singularities above. So now you'll understand maybe a little bit better why 12 days will have passed, before he encontrado mí habitación...

But I never got worried about what I've seen! It's normal here... This is, yep, Barcelona!

The best announcement was of a girl from Extremadura (Spain):

"No entiendo a esa gente que pretender pagar el piso a tu costa y encima sacar dinero y ademas poniendonte reglas absurdad que esta fuera de una convivencia, encima de putas apaleadas, me indigno cada vez que leo algunos anuncios, que buscan compañeros de piso o a la mujer de su vida?"

Meanwhile I met a girl from Paris and a boy from Munich telling me similar stories. We laughed about the things we were telling eachother.

It's part of being abroad... Another great experience!