A catch up post after a bit of radio silence :)

Well today is Friday and after an eventful few days I am returning to bring you up to date on a few events that have happened here this week!


On Tuesday we revisted two homes we liked from the previous week's viewings. We decided on one house in particular and made an offer on Wedsnesday. We got to Thursday before we knew if the offer process had gone in our favour. Now we have to wait for legal checks and surveys to be done by our solicitor here in Spain to make sure there are no issues. Once we have got these out of the way we will update officially with the news!


Other than that this week has been another landmark week. Last week we learned that buying a car needed another piece of bureauracy to be completed called a Padron. A Padron basically registers you at your local town hall and logs you as living in Spain. We were under the impression that we would not be able to do this until we bought a home. So it was a catch 22 we were only renting an apartment so would we still have to keep renting a car until we completed our house purchase? Thankfully a meeting with our solicitor gave us the clarification we needed. We could go into our local (Turre) town hall and register there. All we needed was our passports, our NIE number and the rental agreement for our apartment. Once we buy our home and re-register in our new town or village the registration will automatically move to our new location. 


To that end on Thursday we visited Turre Town Hall and registered for our individual Padron(s). On Friday we picked them up at a cost of 1.50 Euro each! You may have read elsewhere that on Monday we opened a bank account with La Caixa. Well on Thursday evening we each got a text message telling us that our new debit cards were available for us to pick up at our branch in Mojácar Playa. Now I know we did a lot of pre-planning before we got here to try and help smooth our passage into life here in Spain *BUT* some factors were always going to be affected by the so called mañana factor but in our experience that has not been an issue. We also learned on Thursday that the funds we needed to make our house purchase had landed with the company we were using for transfers and by Friday morning we also had them transfered from London into our account here in Spain. All of these events were very heartening and finding that the Spanish mañana reputation were largely proving, so far, to be unfounded and unfair as everything we have needed to happen have been very smooth and efficient.


Once we had been to the bank on Friday we went on a little bit of a spending spree. First we bought a stapler! Then we went to Ferreteria Lopez (our fave hardware store!) to buy a 10 socket surge protector and a 101 piece toolset in a toolbox as we'll need allsorts of stuff like that as we are setting up here from scratch in the main. We had been passing a local furniture place on the way to our apartment and decided today that we would drop in there to look at their range. We didn't expect to buy anything as until we actually have a home and a completetion date we would only be looking at what we might purchase on the furniture front! Well we saw a gorgeous 110 piece cutlery set in a lovely wooden display case in a design we both loved. Well what the hell, we made our biggest purchase so far in Spain! It was gorgeous and we thought if we waited they might have sold that set as they only had one of that particular design and maybe they might not have got that one back in for a while. 


The other major purchase aside from a house was always going to be a car. Now in the UK & USA we have a wonderful system where you can go in and test drive a car. Not so here in Spain due to the fact that they don't want to put mileage on the clock and the dealers don't always have demonstration models either! As both the cars we are interested in are relatively new models we felt that would have been important for us. The cars we wanted to test drive were a Kia Optima and a Hyundai i40. The closest major dealers with lots of models on their forecourts/lots were in Almeria or Lorca. Whether we would be able to test drive a car was debatable! So as making the trek into either city could have been a wasted journey we decided to offer our business to smaller local dealers as we thought that given the depressed state of the Spanish car market we might get more attentive service. Again we'd been led to believe that we'd get better service from Kia in Mojácar Playa as there was an Englishman working there and that the Spanish dealers might not be as helpful. We wanted to buy a diesel automatic and in Spain there is this wierd machismo thing attached to driving a stick shift vehicle! So it is viewed that you have no balls if you have an automatic car! LOL so we are both singing soprano! We both prefer driving automatics and Stuart hasn't driven a shift/stick car in 20 years. I have been driving since we got here for that reason as we have a shift/stick VW Polo to make things smoother for us! 

A scan of the Hyundai i40 Sedan off the brochure we were given - nice!

Well obtaining a suitable vehicle would always require us ordering a vehicle and waiting it for it to be brought to where we bought it from. Initially we found out there was a Kia Optima in Grenada, it was in a colour we liked and if we went for that we were told we could have it within about 5 days. But this was without seeing it, or test driving it as they didn't have one in their showroom. We'd have to go to Almeria for that and even then it wasn't likely we'd get to test drive it. Plus we'd have to put a deposit on it and pay the balance when it arrived. The English salesman was on holiday until today so we went back in to see him to find out more information on it today. We again told him we were also interested in checking out the Hyundai dealer in Cuevas De Almanzora (who at least had an i40 in for us to see) with a view to possibly buying either. He said he'd make enquiries to see if the car was still available in Grenada. If not we might have to wait up to THREE months to get another car from Madrid or outside the country. Ironically he called us back just while we were walking around Cuevas De Almanzora waiting for the Hyundai dealer to reopen this afternoon after their siesta break. He told us that the car in Grenada had now been sold but there were two automatic models available in Madrid and that they could be obtained for us in about two weeks. *BUT* unless we paid 2,000 Euros deposit and agreed to buy the car he would not find out the colours of the cars available, this was on top of the fact we hadn't seen the car or even got to sit in it! As you can imagine this pissed us off greatly. We then went into the Hyundai dealer not expecting much in the way of service. Our experience of car buying in Spain so far having been rather shoddy. Well we waited about 10 minutes longer than their reopening time for the showroom people to arrive back, hey after all this is Spain! But we had a completely different experience than with Kia! OK we could not test drive the car (we knew this in advance) but we had a vehicle there for us to check out, albeit a stick shift model. We had two Spanish people to assist us, one a girl called Victoria the scretary who spoke some English and José the salesman who only really spoke Spanish. This wasn't a problem as Stuart understands and speaks spanish enough to get by and what we couldn't manage Victoria helped with. Now they were a revelation, remember we'd been led to believe we'd get indifferent service and it couldn't have been further from the truth! We were treated to a full and detailed explanation of the differences between two different models of the i40, they answered lots of questions besides, configured both models on their website and gave us a price breakdown on both options. We were also offered a bigger discount than their website would have led us to believe as well.  We ended up being with them for two hours! Well I think you can guess the outcome! We paid a deposit on our new car in Spain and basically Kia can go and you know what themselves!! They will aslo let us know early on next week if they can hurry the delivery for us as they are aware of our rental car situation. We were extremely happy with their service! So from a stapler we ended the day with a new car! ;)


So all in all another amazing week. We are three weeks in to our new life this coming Sunday in Spain. We are in a postion now we thought it would take until possibly late May to be at! I am sure we will bring you more good news in the coming week too!