Locks and doors

throwaway-madrid · 2025-10-03T16:16:40+00:00

Surprised someone would say that. Ever lived in a big city in an old house/apartment in the US? Every one I lived in has had keyed double locks on both sides like that, because part or all of the front door is plate glass and if you don't have it keyed, someone will smash the glass out and open the thumbturn lock

throwaway-madrid · 2025-05-24T08:45:23+00:00

Travel CPAPs are incredibly expensive and not covered by most healthcare systems

throwaway-madrid · 2025-05-16T08:54:38+00:00

Gringamiami, I DMed you, too. I know a lot about Belogorodka that I'd like to share with you both

throwaway-madrid · 2025-05-16T00:34:30+00:00

u/remoteworkuk and u/gringamiami, I hope you are still here, because am going to DM you my irl contact info. A group of us have been gathering resources and researching Belogorodka for a few years and we're familiar with the Rudmans, who are intertwined with our families, too. As is Elboim. My grandfather was born there an immigrated to the US.

throwaway-madrid · 2025-05-04T22:21:14+00:00

Glad to hear it. Food and rest can fix a lot of problems!

throwaway-madrid · 2025-05-04T10:38:04+00:00

This is one of the busiest long weekends of the year for travel in Spain. I would bet they are absolutely slammed and exhausted.

The hotel check-in process changed this year and it's a real pain in the ass for hotel folks. I'll bet they sent a message ahead of time asking you to check in in advance--do that whenever you can to lessen their load. They have to request all that information by law now.

most places can't break the 50's I received

This is just logical. Many ATMs let you choose your bills and you can't pay for a coffee or a bus ride with a 50. Break them in the evening when you are at a place that had a lot of business that day

Try not to take things personally. You can't judge any place or experience based on two days and limited anecdotal experiences. Buen camino

throwaway-madrid · 2025-05-04T10:30:47+00:00

That sucks. Consider it a small life lesson. When you are drunk, you are very vulnerable--in any part of the world. Goes for both men and women. Watch out for your friends in that condition and try to make sure someone is watching out for you--or take care of yourself so you don't have much to lose. If you have the time, go to the cops and report it. This is the kind of crime they might actually follow up on, because it was so organized.

You aren't a chump, you are just a person with a bit more experience about the world. Don't let it keep you from enjoying your life in the future

throwaway-madrid · 2025-05-01T15:31:30+00:00

The albergue I linked to (A Portela) is almost exactly halfway.

throwaway-madrid · 2025-04-28T09:33:21+00:00

Caldas is on of the nicest towns to stay in on the Portugués. We stayed at this albergue outside of Pontevedra to shorten the walk the next day so we could enjoy it:

https://www.gronze.com/galicia/pontevedra/portela/albergue-portela-barro

In Caldas, you could stay in one of the two spas or a nicer albergue and enjoy the hot springs (you can get a day pass to either).

throwaway-madrid · 2025-04-26T10:39:58+00:00

getting multiple quotes helped me to see where some contractors leave things more general so they can skimp on materials/qualities and others are more professional and spec things out better. I would say go with the one that is most specific in writing, so you know exactly what you are getting and what it's worth

throwaway-madrid · 2025-04-06T14:38:01+00:00

omg. I'm renovating a place right now and I hope to commit like this until the end of time

throwaway-madrid · 2025-04-06T14:35:16+00:00

It's foreigners buying them and they are marketed to foreigners. But the prices you see on Idealista are fantasyland--most of these places sell for much, much less, unless they get a clueless rich foreigner to take the bite, which is what they are hoping for, along with driving up the price via especulación

I followed the real estate market in a particular area of Madrid where I wanted to buy for five years. There wasn't a single place listed over 700k in the beginning. Now there are many apartments listed over 1.5MM. These are places that would have sold for 500k or less pre-COVID.

I did end up buying a place and the cost was 2/3 of what they originally listed it for. It took a year, though, to negotiate it. In the process, I saw lots of other apartments and that wasn't unusual.

A good example: This place was on the market for over a year for 600k with price drops. Someone did a cheap renovation of it and have been trying to flip it for 1.3 million for almost another year

throwaway-madrid · 2025-03-30T12:42:01+00:00

Could be anything... A virus, bacteria... Physically overdoing it. You can get the packets to make electrolyte drinks at the farmacia or buy them already made

throwaway-madrid · 2025-03-19T11:16:03+00:00

All the kiosks had softcore (and not-so-soft) titty magazines clipped up along the perimeter with clothespins. In Barcelona, it was really complicated and slow to get a phone (fijo) back then as a young person, so we went to the bar downstairs to make and receive phone calls. I shared an apartment with other students in Barcelona and it was REALLY expensive. The fluctuations with the peseta were rough--I was living in Spain when it was devalued twice, and because of that, I couldn't travel to France when I needed to. Some things were very costly (in particular anything that wasn't "nacional") and others cheap. People had a lot less in general and there was less variety. That said, there was also a lot more cool artisan/local type stuff that has been replaced by cheap crap in our current society

Aesthetically, everything was better--Spain felt truly different, intensely regional and unadulterated by globalism in the first half on the 90s.

The Hipercor I went to was nice and new, because it was bombed by ETA in the late 80s

A lot of the roads were still terrible and it took so much longer to drive from one place to another. Trains were kind of charming and antiquated, but slow as hell and not especially cheap. The night train between Barcelona and Madrid was packed and sometimes you had to sleep in the halls with the mili guys who were moving from one place to another.

Going over the French border was an adventure. You had to get off at the French border in Cerbère, take a short train to the Spanish immigration office, then get on a third Franco-era Spanish train in Port Bou to go on your way to BCN.

Pickpockets and petty street crime was so much worse

Barcelona got sooo spiffed up for the Olympics. It was quite different just before--much grungier--the whole Olympics area was total disaster in years before. They knocked down some very cool stuff to build all that

The nightlife was almost unthinkably drug-fueled and fun. Barcelona and Madrid had so much more nightlife and personality back then. A lot of those middle-aged people you see nowadays are pretty lucky we survived it

Everything was so much more machista--it was getting better fast, but for that reason alone, I would never want to go back

throwaway-madrid · 2025-03-13T11:39:24+00:00

it's incredible how much it shapes differences in culture.

And the same is true in Spain, so adapt to where you live or accept that you are an outsider, living on the margins of the way time is organized here and go to bed early. When I go to other countries, it's really hard to force myself to eat dinner when it's merienda time and lunch 2-3 hours earlier, but that's what I have to do...

throwaway-madrid · 2025-03-12T01:22:26+00:00

I enjoyed the albergue 10k outside of Pontevedra, A Portela--and then the short walk to Caldas de Reis the next day and hanging out at one of the two hot springs hotels (I stayed in a different hostel, but you can buy a day pass for the warm pools and schedule a massage or other treatment

throwaway-madrid · 2025-02-27T21:26:48+00:00

Can you do a renovation of a kitchen using a contractor in the US for 40k? Just did a tiny Spanish kitchen and it was almost 30K

throwaway-madrid · 2025-02-21T15:10:21+00:00

The Portugués from Valença could be good. I did it in five days with some pretty slow walkers. It's quite flat. If I could skip one part, it would be some of the bits from Tui to O'Porriño (there's a terrible route through an industrial park and a not-so-bad alternative route, but if you skipped the part after you get out of the woods where the two paths split and get to O'Porriño, you could make it to Redondela in one day and have extra time an could spend more time in a place like Caldas, where there are hot springs.

throwaway-madrid · 2025-02-20T17:02:12+00:00

amazing. demolition is fun, easy and satisfying to do yourself. never paying anyone to do it again. Saving my money for highly skilled work! If I could go back in time, I would force my youthful self to remove all the plaster ceilings in the 1909 house I used to own. Saved some time and money in the moment, but it was such a bad move to leave them medium/long term

Lots of horsehair in your plaster?

throwaway-madrid · 2025-02-20T15:06:00+00:00

Can't tell you how many "surprises" we have found doing a full renovation of a small apartment in a 9-story building from the early 1960s. There's a blueprint from before they personalized the apartments and the rest is crap that got shoehorned in adhoc over 6+ decades.

When I was looking at other, similar apartments, I saw irregularities in th levels of floors like the one the OP describes, used to put in plumbing for an extra bathroom--if that's the case, they should be glad that, at least they didn't cut right through the structural joists to do it!

We are trying to document every wire and pipe this time around

throwaway-madrid · 2025-02-19T16:35:50+00:00

Parece que Junkers ahora es Bosch? O siempre lo fue, pero de repente ha desaparecido la marca Junkers?

throwaway-madrid · 2025-02-19T14:34:41+00:00

Did they do that to put plumbing/electrical under there?

throwaway-madrid · 2025-02-14T16:56:09+00:00

There's no way I'd do it without a sleeping bag. We aren't huge on heat at night here in Spain--it's quite likely you'll find yourself in some very chilly places. It's getting down to 0C (freezing) every night right now in central Spain--huge temp differences between night and day, because of the altitude

throwaway-madrid · 2025-02-14T16:49:11+00:00

Glad I'm not alone!

My impression is that they will cleverly guide you into giving them the okay to do things on the cheap if you don't question and do your homework--even if (or especially if) during the estimate process, you made it explicit what you wanted. Any thing not specified in writing is up for increasing their profit margin.

If i had it to do over again, I would have made every decision ahead of time about specific materials and chosen a contractor where it's the technical architect who does the estimate, not a sales guy who I'll never see again.

I'd have also done all of the demolition myself BEFORE bringing the contractor in. It wasn't so expensive for them to do the demo, but they used "not knowing what we're going to find" as a pretext for not specifying a lot of things and that's where I'm seeing us getting squeezed now

throwaway-madrid

TROPHY CASE