Our new apartment is interior, meaning we aren't bothered by the sounds on the busy streets outside but we do get a very intimate sneak peak inside the lives of our neighbors.
Jk, this is your view:
The neighborhood we live in is called Lavapiés. It's known for its great food, the high population of foreigners, and the very open drug use.
This sign is posted on an apartment down the street from our place and says "buy your drugs outside of this neighborhood, Lavapiés is our home"
This is a grow shop where you can buy pieces about a block away from the hand made sign above.
As you can see, there are conflicting views in Lavapiés.
Jordan and I joked that we would learn to survive in this neighborhood by being euntrepreneurs and becoming drug lords, but we've recently learned that to survive and thrive we should probably learn Russian.
My favorite neighbors at the moment are the Russian mafia that lives across from us and one floor down. Because our apartment doesn't have air conditioning everyone has their windows open at all times. The Russians seem to believe that no one else lives in this building or maybe they just don't care. It seems the only way to get your point across in Russian is by screaming it. (There's a warm spot in my heart for these guys since they're so similar to my own family in this way).
I picture them sitting around a wooden table, playing cards in hand and a jug of cheap vodka being passed around. Snowden is sitting with them, enjoying his freedom but also wondering if life in prison and political resentment in the US might be safer than the life he's living now. It is always winter in their apartment and they are never without their fur hats, lit cigars and AK-47's. With that being said, we have yet to ask them to speak softer.
The neighbors on our other side are a wonderful Bengali family. A wife, husband and two young girls. If we're lucky, at early hours in the morning the girls will turn into screaming coyotes and run up and down the hall. After we're certain they aren't being abducted, Jordan and I make up our own screen play reflecting the drama we hear outside the door. Sometimes we even play dramatic music on top of the action.
I like to imagine we've been cast as one of the robots in Mystery Science Theatre 3000.
The other day Jordan and I met the father of the two girls in the elevator. Because it takes about 16 min for the elevator to get to the 4th floor, we learned a lot about each other. He said our Spanish is good for being American which means the fact that we're American and care to know another language at all means we're pretty much fluent. He then told us he was from Bangladesh and we responded with "oh wow what a beautiful country" he laughed and said "yeah but the people are horribly unattractive." I made a mental note to seek out therapy sessions for the girls who will thank me later in life.
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This morning I though that someone had donated a tv to us and was blasting a very dramatic telenovela but I quickly learned that there was a fight going on between the only Spanish family in the building who live directly across from us (you'd think that there being only one Spanish family in an apartment in Madrid would be strange but nope, not in Lavapiés). This is fun because not only do we hear everything they're saying but we can also watch everything they do.
I can't be certain that a murder didn't take place at 0800 hours this morning but to go with the flow of the Spanish culture I'll just say it's none of my business.
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So kids, when you are without wifi, fear not, because you might have been living over the Russian mafia for years without even knowing it. And that's when the adventure can begin.
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