OK, we were warned.  “Everything takes at least three times as long to do…” – “Just when you think you have the system figured out, it changes…” – “If you mind waiting in lines you better choose another place to live…” – AND “This is the most amazing, inspiring, beautiful, cool city!”  All these statements appear to be true based on our day today.

Andrew and I started our day with a “start slow and taper off” run along the Mediterranean…the Barceloneta…before it got too hot and when the beaches were still pristeen awaiting the onslaught of bathers and tourists.  It reminded me a lot of the early days of our courtship when we lived in West Los Angeles and ran every morning in places like Marina del Rey and Santa Monica.  We are into a jogging pace these days – it gives us a chance to catch up, sync up the day ahead’s schedule, and still feel virtuously healthy for having gotten out there and broken a sweat.  After a top off of cafe con leche and clean up, we set out to try to conquer the first of what we know will be many close encounters with doing things the Spanish way.

Let’s start with the phones

Our hope was that we’d be able to “unlock” (Jailbreak is such an unseemly term) our US iPhones and use them in Spain.  YAWN…The Apple gurus told us in the States “no way – you will never get those dern things to work on another carrier – it’s the Jobs curse!”. Many of our geeky friends – in the US and here in Barca said: “Ha! No worries!  Ve haf vays to do zis ting…hehe…”  Ever the technology optimists, we sallied forth and allowed our trust assistant here (Popsy) to attempt the deed.  He had done it many times before.  He knew guys who knew guys.  It would be EASY.  Right.  After many attempts, reboots, SIM card swaps and Pakistani interventions, we ended up needing to buy simple not-smart flip phones for local use, and leave our precious souped-up iPhones and Androids for Wifi only surfing.  Bleh!  So – we have local Barcelona phone numbers now, but no apps to entertain us 😦

And now – the town hall incident and getting to the NIE…nearly

The next big milestone in our residency saga will be to obtain an NIE – the national identification number that is your key to nearly everything that daily living involves short of grocery shopping and breathing.  It’s as important as a drivers license or national ID card in the US…and it ain’t easy to get when you ain’t from these here parts!    We have our awesome attorney, Ariadna, who helped ferry our VISA process through to triumph, helping us get to NIE nirvana, but today was just shy of explosively frustrating for all of us.  To just APPLY for the NIE, you need to get a town hall authorization that basically proves that you are living in Barcelona – verified by the owner or landlord of your residence.  This meant we needed our landlord – currently in the US – to write a letter confirming that we were actually her tenants.  We needed a copy of this letter with an ORIGINAL signature of the landlord.  OK.   I will not tell you here how we got that “original signature” lest I incriminate myself and our attorney, let’s just say that we brought said letter along with Eitan’s birth certificate (original), our marriage license (apostiled) and lots of other documents to the town hall to be reviewed. Snag!  The letter from our landlord stated that she is the registered owner of the apartment on the 3rd floor (that IS where we are living)…but the city records state she is the owner of the SECOND floor apartment.  Oy vey!  Who made THAT typo?  Can you see the punch line here????  There was no way the town hall clerk would allow us to correct the city hall record – or our letter – to make them match.  This then required incredible next steps and hair- tearing to get ANOTHER corrected letter and signature (don’t ask)…and our attorney to go to a DIFFERENT town hall to complete this paperwork (you can’t go back to the same place that said NO the first time, right?).  Once that is done in the morning, we need to go back uptown to the police station and wait in a line I don’t even want to think about to just put in our NIE request.  Then we wait about 4 weeks and if the NIE gods smile on us we will, in fact, be able to partake of the many additional benefits of being “official” Barcelona residents.  We will keep you posted.