At this point there was only one more major decision to
make. Where would we stay for the
remainder of our time in Uruguay? We had
visited the sleepy town of Colonia and found nothing rentable for a reasonable
price. We had looked in various
Montevideo neighborhoods and weren’t impressed by anything we were shown for
the price. Needless to say, we were
becoming a little irritated.
A one bedroom apartment in Montevideo, during January and
February will cost around $1,500 per month minimum. For this price you will have a locking
entrance door and a slow elevator but your toilet seat might be broken. You can do better if you are willing to
accept a more colorful neighborhood.
This was not frugal living!
Further, our expat friends were all complaining about the
recent changes to the residency and citizenship requirements. Some even had legal problems with neighbors
and had found that being a property owner did not come with the same rights as
an Uruguayan property owner enjoyed. In
addition, a couple of law firms that had promoted themselves as experts in
residency, citizenship, importation, and real estate were, well, frauds is the
best way to say it.
We were starting to feel stuck at the bottom of the world in
a place that absolutely did not resemble what we had read in magazines such as
International Living or Retire and Live Abroad.
Ah well; that’s why we were here to put our “feet on the ground” so to
speak.
Realistically, we were already in a very nice apartment, in
an admittedly colorful neighborhood and were only paying $800 per month all inclusive. Rather than double our costs for an apartment
in marginal condition in an only slightly better neighborhood we decided to ask
our imobliaria if our landlady would be interested in extending us for a couple
of months. She was, and we took it.
Next up; starting our long overdue blog. We had a couple of other things to accomplish
as well. Uruguay quickly became about
working on our Spanish, exploring Montevideo, spending time with our fun,
interesting and quirky expat friends and writing about our experiences. Finally, we had to arrange our time back in
Spain.
We had developed a plan to surprise as many people as we
could by our return to Granada and decided to enlist our good friends Allie and
Andrew in the process. Unfortunately for
them, that meant that they would need to help us arrange a place to stay; in
their apartment building.
What we thought would be a fairly simple thing became
complicated. The price was agreed on but
the landlord wanted payment of a deposit, in advance, in cash. Oh boy, here we go again!
We were in Uruguay with ready access to both Uruguayan pesos
and US dollars. Of course our US bank
accounts were denominated in US dollars as well. Spain does business in euros so cash is a
very difficult thing to arrange from a distance. We thought we had the answer because we had
sent dollars from Spain to Uruguay through MoneyGram the previous fall. In fact, we could tell Allie exactly where
the location was and we efficiently made the arrangements by pulling dollars
from an ATM, walking to the nearest MoneyGram office (a little hard to find)
and paying the outrageous fees to send cash to Spain, to Allie, in euros. Then we emailed the pickup code to her and, we
thought, we were done.
There’s more to the story though. Allie went to the MoneyGram location and they
told her that 500 euros was more money than they were able to distribute and
that she should try a local Albaycin bank.
Going to the bank, who advertised on their window that they worked with
MoneyGram she was told that they did not, in fact, accept MoneyGram. Finally, God bless her, she went to central
Granada, found a location that would work with this amount of money, obtained
it and delivered it to the landlord.
Wow! Thanks so much Allie!
It was all coming together now and we were looking forward
to seeing our daughter and our friends in Granada again soon.
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