Follow Up To My Last Post.................

Aloha kitties.................

Thanks for the comments, everyone. Please excuse the huge gaps in the post. When I upload my pictures, the spacing gets thrown off and I can't fix it.

I should also mention that yes, there were female roommates during my stay. I did live with women while I lived abroad. I moved about 7 different times in Barcelona. About 5 of those times I did live with a woman in the house. When I first arrived, I lived with a female. But I had to move out because school was out, and I stayed with her while I had class. She was a piece of work though. She overcharged me for my room, and stuck me in a little shithole room with a view of the neighbor walls while my other roommate got a huge room with a nice view. The apartment I lived in was over a hundred years old. I liked the old charm, but not my little room. I complained about it to the school, and she didn't like that. She was an English girl, and she made no attempt whatsoever to help me. We were both foreigners, lol. She also told me to study in my room, not the living room because I had a desk in there. I was glad to get out of there.

My roommate directly after her had the same name as I. She ran a restaurant that specialized in snails and she was nice. I liked her and her roommate, Anna. I rarely ever saw them, because they worked long hours. I was lonely there, but that wasn't their fault. I lasted a month because the place was expensive, I was running out of cash and I went to San Sebastian to be an au-pair.

After that last place, I moved in with my fellow American who I wrote the post below about. I lasted for three weeks there. I was in such a hurry to find a new place, so I planned on touring various places. Instead what happened, was I said yes to the first nice place I saw. The guy seemed very cool at first. He had a nice place, he was a native Barcelonean, he was around my age, and lived across from his mom. I had never lived with a guy before (besides the American for 3 weeks) so I decided to give it a try. I found him on Easy Piso, which is like Roommate Finder.

I could've looked around further, but:

1.) I really wanted out of my last place, and was ready to take any place that seemed nice.

2.) Roommate searching in a foreign country is never easy. My Spanish wasn't as strong, I had no car and had to take the metro all over town. His place was nice, he seemed nice and I felt like it would work. I lived with him for a total of 5 months. Three of those were peaceful and without incident. He never laid a hand on me, but he kept wanting a relationship with me. I knew he wouldn't take no for an answer so I had move out. It was his mother who took care of me when I was bedridden with the flu for two weeks and celebrated my birthday.

After him I swore off male roommates and I moved in with a girl from Germany. She did modeling on the side and studied French. She had a beautiful view of the city. She was nice to my face but underneath I could sense that something wasn't right. She would also let her boyfriend hang around a lot. After pretending he didn't exist for a while, I finally decided to say hello to him and talk to him in front of her so she wouldn't think I was rude, and so he wouldn't think I didn't like him. But as I was talking to him, she gave me the stink eye. A few nights later I heard her mention to him that I get on her nerves. She went on and on, and then told him to be quiet as I may hear them. I had just been there for a week or two. I was heart broken because I had just gotten out of a bad situation. And I liked her, and really thought we got along.

But I decided to get her back. I knew that finding a roommate wasn't easy for her either since she wasn't in her own country so I decided to move out by the end of that month and let her find someone else. I made some excuse of something happening back home, and how I was broke and had no more money to stay. Interestingly enough, she tried to accomodate me and let me stay a little longer or something like that. At that point, I decided that I wanted out of her house and I wasn't going to stay so I told her I had to go back home, and bolted out of there by the end of the month to the last place I would live in Barcelona. She tried to find other people, and she had to work at that. I was quiet, I paid rent on time, and didn't bother her. She had a Brazilian girl come over and spend the night, but it looks like she couldn't afford to move in after all. By the time I left, she wanted to remain friends with me and told me to call her if I needed anything, but I made up my mind that I was gonna move, so I smiled accepted the number, but moved anyway and never talked to her after. I never told her about the conversation I overheard.

After that I moved in with a female coworker into her apartment (Colombian but lived in the US for years) and two gay male friends from Argentina. The funny thing was she and I were slobs, but those guys were neat. We had no boyfriends, but they had boyfriends. She and I bonded and we would take trips together, but something about her underneath wasn't quite right. She was nice to me, but nasty to the other gay roommates and called them faggots and said she wanted to kick them out on the street. Those men weren't perfect either. They were like whiny girls and got on my nerves, but I wouldn't have said those things about them.

She had a streak of anger that I knew would be directed at me in a matter of time. At the firm I worked in, she was one of the brokers who was very good at getting rich men to part with their euros and invest in the "stocks" the company sold. She would smile at me while talking, but after a few seconds her eyes would turn to ice and it would kind of disappear. I knew that I couldn't stay there with her alone. My instincts were telling me that something was off. Sometimes I would ask her a simple question and she got upset. I remember asking her about her cancer or something like that, she said she diagnosed herself . I was asking questions about how she diagnosed it or how she knew, but she was getting a little short with me. I shut up, but put that in the back of my mind.

Luckily at the end of the month I flew back to the US. I still kept in touch with her, but to me, she was one of those friends you keep at arms length, or in other words, don't live with.

See my little kittens, look what you pulled out of me, lol.

I've been wanting to write a detailed entry about my roommate experiences in Barcelona but never got around to it until now. I am glad that I am finally writing about it in a little more detail.

As for male roommates, I have lived with male roommates here in the states, and have not had the issues I had in Barcelona.

My last roommate was male from South Africa, but he was very respectful, and we were respectful of each others' boundaries and maintained our own lives. He was the best roommate I had, and it's a shame he lost his job and work visa. It was a nice apartment too.

Anyway, above are the pictures from my first apartment in Barcelona. The elevator was something else, that I tried to avoid at all costs. It would only hold one person and I think it only took you up. It wouldn't go up and down, just own direction.

I will have to show you some other pics sometime.