The next few days

I was having my TV & DVD player installed on Saturday with a 4 hour window 11-3. Early in the morning I went out to explore the neighborhood again. It was a nice hour walk and I found a store that had a lot of household odd and ends. I ended up filling up two bags of items then back to the apartment to wait for the TV & DVD delivery. Two hours passed and I was getting a bit nervous - did they not get the address right or are they trying to screw me. After another hour they finally showed up. Between broken English and Spanish conversations everything was all set. However, I realized the DVD player was not a multi region one like the clerk said in the store. It played a few of my burned movies even though it was set up to only support EU region DVDs. I knew getting the DVD player to accept all regions would be a straight forward hack. I jump on the internet and realize the apartment complex router (shared between all apartments) was not connecting to the internet - it was barely working for the next few days so I was cut off from my research.


I love my black out metal shades in my bedroom - complete darkness. Jet lag must of caught up to me on Sunday along with complete darkness allowing me to sleep until 11 AM. I was shocked I had not slept that late since we had children - going on 6 years. It felt great. I took a short morning walk and then some lunch. After lunch I looked at the Mediterranean in the distant and just started walking to it. I did not make it all the way but it was a nice long walk. Of course with the sea on one side the mountains on the other meant the walk back was a slow incline all the way.

I tried off and on to get onto the internet from my apartment with limited success trying to find the hack for my DVD player. I have such luck, instead of a simple combination of secret key strokes on the DVD remote I need to download a file and burn it on a CD - this would be as simple as apple pie if the internet connection was not constantly going down. I finally was able to download the small files I needed to burn on a CD after a few days of trying. It worked like a charm.

I went to go get my foreign id Monday morning with some help from Vistaprint HR. The foreign id is the Spain equivalent of a social security number. We arrived at 8:45 with the single form and my passport. Apparently, there is only one location in Barcelona to get your foreign id and we were lucky there was no long line. We got in and took a number, just like at the deli. Once my number was called we went to the desk and handed the guy our form and passport. A few minutes later that step was done. We then had to go to the bank to pay the government. I am not quite sure why you can't just hand them 10 Euros at the office. We went to the bank and processed the payment which returned a receipt that we had to go back and give to the foreign id people. There was another line for this step and luckily we were first in line. Overall, it was a very simple process. It probably keeps a dozen or so people employed as for some short money the whole process could be moved online.

The metro is very nice over here. It much cleaner and simpler then Boston. However, I think a scooter maybe in my future. It maybe took me 45 or an hour to get to work from the foreign id office and it takes less than half an hour by scooter.

I hope to finish my to do list for the family soon so I can get in some more sightseeing.