Apartment hunting and thunderstorms

A girl from the program I am in had a birthday while on the plane to Madrid so last night we all got together to celebrate. We had enchiladas and various salads which was nice because Ben and I realized it'd been almost a week since we'd had some vegetables! (Sorry Mom and Susan! :) It was fun getting to know everyone better and hearing more advice about what to expect at our schools. 

While there, Ben came in from the living room to the kitchen to tell us there was a thunderstorm! At first the people who had lived in Spain the last few years laughed at him but when he said he was serious they ran to the window. It was indeed thundering and pouring rain. One of the girls said it had probably rained 6 times in the entire last year! It was pretty fun to look out and see how people were going crazy since there are very few thunderstorms in Madrid. 

Before the birthday party Ben and I came early to walk around and look for apartments and get phones. It almost became a failure of an afternoon because one, I forgot a pen so we couldn't write down phone numbers to call and two, every single phone store had ran out of prepaid phones! Apparently they don't stock their stores the way we are used to in the States. Once we realized we couldn't get phones we decided we NEEDED to find a pen. So we walked into stores and asked "Se vende plumas?" (Do you sell pens?) Most people gave us a weird look and said no. In one of the last stores we went to I explained we were looking for apartments and needed a pen to write the numbers down. This particular man pulled out a cup of pens and said "One euro". Perfecto! We got our pen and went off looking for apartments. I have a sneaking suspicion though that he sold us a pen he actually uses in the store. At that point though we didn't care. 

Most of the places we ended up writing down went for about 1000 euros ($1281). A little more than we want to pay. They don't write the size of the apartment down on the sign so it is hard to tell how expensive they will be. We had better luck online and actually saw one today. It was a little funky. There is a window from the kitchen that looks into the bedroom and the sink in the bathroom is actually located in the shower. Also, there are stairs you can pull out from the ceiling and up above the ceiling is another room! It is probably only 5 feet tall but there are two twin mattresses up there. I thought it was cool in a funky way but we decided to keep looking and we were going to look at two more places tomorrow. Please be praying! We are tired of living in a hotel and eating out. Although, I believe eating out here is much more common. Restaurants are always jam packed with people having little snacks. 

A few other things we have noticed:

1. There are no public restrooms to be found.

2. The metros are NOT handicap friendly at all. Stairs everywhere and very few elevators.

3. There are more people out at 11pm than at 5pm.

4. 11pm seems to be the choice of travel time. I saw more people with suitcases on the metro at 11pm than I have seen at any other time of day.