Living in Spain

It was probably 4 months ago now that my landlady and I started talking about kitchen reformations. I´ve been living in my apartment for over a year now and been dealing with a kitchen that was in dire need of some updating. Exhibit A, my exhaust fan. And check out that gross tile. And the outlet secured with tape? Pretty sure that´s not safe.
Although it does not fully demonstrate the monstrosity of the horrible blue flowers randomly placed throughout the pattern...













If you are not familiar with the oddities of Spanish living, let me give you a glimpse of the greatness that is living in a 1960´s apartment building. First of all, the stove and oven run on butane. This means that every once and a while, depending on what all runs off of the butane tanks, you have to refill these orange beauties.

So we lived with the joy that is running out of gas in the middle of making dinner to have to call and order a new tank that would be delivered a couple of days later. Carry the 50 pound tanks up and reconnect them to the necessary source.

I´m told we´re lucky because those people who also heat their water through butane have to refill their tanks every 2 weeks! In our case, in the year we have lived here we have only had to do it twice. But look at those things. What kind of country still runs on this kind of system? Craziness.

Apparently the company Gas Natural is beginning to make some headway installing systems into the apartment buildings who agree to pay for the cost of installation. This replaces these tanks with an equally big water heater in the middle of the kitchen that has a pilot light that has to be ignited. I dont´know. The whole thing is just a bit weird to me after living independently in the US, a couple of places built just after the turn of the century (the 20th century that is...) and never having to deal with this kind of thing. Maybe we´re just spoiled.

So needless to say, when my landlady started talking renovations and showing me beautiful pictures of green mosaic backsplashes and WHITE! {hallelujah} tile, I was jumping for joy. Not soon enough would I have an oven that actually had a temperature reading! No. But literally. Not soon enough.

As I mentioned before, we started talking about this in early May... Please note that I just ran out of the last ounce of butane this weekend right before I was going to make a huge pot of chili and some buffalo wings to celebrate opening day of college football season. I was dis-a-ppointed. My house is covered in dust. I´ve spent more than a few mornings having to be at the beck and call of builders and I am ready to be done with kitchen renovations already! It´s going to be so nice when it´s all done.

Check back for pictures and anecdotes of the differences in our cultures throughout the whole building process!