First weeks in Alicante: surprises and life lessons

NO. 1:

I landed in Alicante at 10:15 in the morning. Full of hopes and excitement as I stepped out of the plane to see the beautiful palm trees and no clouds in the sky. I found it funny that I wasn’t that scared of being in this new place of wanter and had no problem with just finding my new place to live (dormitory). I applied for the Buddy Program, I highly recommend it! Although I’ve heard some unsuccessful cases where ‘buddies’ ditched some people, and was supposed to meet my ‘buddy’ on a bus stop who declared to take me to my new place.

I stepped out of the airport (before that I was wandering around the airport trying to look for an information centre where I could ask where the bus stop was, as the signs were not very clear). I must add here that at that stage I could not speak any Spanish, I mean, of course I did learn a little by myself before my journey, but you might guess what level that was.

Ok, I found the bus stop. Now, where was my buddy? I figured out that the bus comes every 20 minutes, so I decided to wait a little. (Which, I didn’t realise at that time would be wise to do as I later found out that most of the Spanish people are usually late). So I waited. And waited. And started stressing out. What if she bailed on me? Ok, that’s fine. I printed out some maps before how to get to the dormitory. I will manage somehow.

Alright, 30 minutes is quite a while, so I decided to go back to the airport and catch some wifi to contact the girl. If she wouldn’t have replied, I would have just tried to go by myself. So that’s what I did.

Life lesson no. 1 - Always have some cash on you. In my case, I was lucky to had some as the bus in Alicante does not accept cards. And then while was riding the bus, I see a familiar face on one of the stops as the bus was slowing down. "Familiar" is a bit of an exaggeration as I only ‘checked’ her profile out once to at least have a little idea about how she looks like. The doors were already closing as I saw the girl waving to the bus driver and I managed to get out of it in the last minute. So there she was, my buddy!

Life lesson no. 2 - Be specific on where exactly you are going to meet. This is quite important especially when contacting a foreign person (whether it is you or someone else for whom the language is not their first) as there might be some misunderstandings. In this case, she was waiting for me while I was waiting for her… a little of a waste of time. Anyway, we took a bus to San Vicente, where my dormitory was located. Then, we walked for around 20 minutes in the superb heat (with an enormous suitcase) and finally, we arrived! And… there was the first surprise: no one was around, just like in the “Let it go" song from Frozen (“Not a footprint to be seen”).

NO. 2:

So we walked inside the dormitory only to find out that there was no one sitting in the lobby, if I can call it a lobby of course. My buddy called the number that was on the door, what would I’ve done without her? The owner announced that he will be there in an hour. So… we waited, big surprise there. In the meantime we went to a supermarket around the corner and there was the surprise number 2 - the smell in the supermarket. It was very strange. I would say a combination of a basement and meat that went bad.

Maybe add the smell of your school backpack from primary school after you forgot to throw out the sandwiches that your mum made two years ago (I later found out that this was just the Spanish ‘jamón' which is the ‘iberian ham’ made out of pork’s legs). After doing some little shopping (water, water, water! ) we went back and waited for… what turned out to be much more than an hour, but as I said before, people in spain tend to be late… like a lot.

The guy showed up and started talking so fast, fortunately I had my dear “buddy” with me, that turned out to be so helpful. He explained some stuff, the girl, well, she tried to explain it to me, although I didn’t get much of it, there was some paperworks to be filled in and then we went to see my room.

NO. 3:

The room was very nice, for dormitory standards that is. The last dormitory I had during my 1st year of university was a 3-persons room and we had to share one bathroom between 10 girls. And here, I had my own room, my own bathroom and even a little fridge and a microwave. I mean we are talking Cesar Palace standards compared to what I used have. Awesome! Well at least at the beginning.

As I opened the bathroom doors, a tiny, black (…) fellow greeted me. Don’t think I’m racist for saying “black", it wasn't a person. It was a cockroach. (He didn’t technically ‘greet' me, as he was dead). The girl said something about it being there and the guy cleaned it up. But once I’ve seen it, I couldn’t “unsee” it anymore. Dont let the bed bugs bite right. So here I was, on my first independent Erasmus journey.

NO. 4:

If I was to recall and describe my first weeks in Alicante, I would call them ‘busy’. A lot of paperwork, visits to the police station (in order to report legal stay) or other offices (monthly transport cards - I will write about all of these in another post).

During our second weekend, on a Sunday, my friend (who arrived a couple of days after me) and I decided to look for a place to have a nice lunch around the neighbourhood. We had a walk and here was another surprise - everything was closed. Although I did have an idea about this fact before, I didn’t realise that it was actually a ‘real' thing. As well as the “siesta” (sometime between 14:00-17:00) during which all of the shops, supermarkets, etc are also closed. So as we hopelessly tried to make our way back to dormitory, we came across this little restaurant (the only one which seemed to be opened around the neighbourhood) we started reading the menu when a kind old man started to chat with us, he invited us to come inside. My friend knew a little more of Spanish than me so she tried to reply him in some of the words she knew.

Before we even realised, we were already sitting down and waiting for our “menu of the day for two”. As it was our first weeks, we insisted on having ‘pescado’ (fish) as we don’t usually have them in our country (they are not as fresh as we thought in Spain they will be). I must mention that before I came to Spain, I had quite high expectations towards food… Anyway, after which seemed to be half an hour came our food, yay! And it turned out to be… a big salad. Alright, salad is fine, we thought it’s gonna be a “menu for two” with fish but no worries, a healthy salad is always welcome in my tummy.

So as we were halfway there, another dish came along… what?! Another dish? Okay well great, we are almost full but we won’t say no to food come on… It was the fried jamón with a fried egg on top of chips. Everything was leaking with oil. I mean it was literally swimming in it. Well, let’s try it anyway, we aint wasting no food aye… (not mentioning the fact that we were both disgusted when we saw a little hair on the side of the jamón).

And there came the third dish! Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat? how are we supposed to eat all of it? And it was a fish, finally! On top of chips and guess what…it was very oily. So that was another surprise: food. The amount of it was just enormous, and it was all very oily and very salty. If it wasn’t enough, the lovely man came up to us and asked us what we would like for the dessert. My friend tried to say that it’s way too much food and we won’t be able to finish it all and there is no way we will have space for dessert. He seemed a little disappointed…