Estupidos Americanos

Yup. That’s us. We are flying by the seat of our pants every minute of the day. And of course, it’s our own fault. But, while I’ve spent almost no time in the state of Texas, my philosophy has always been ‘Go big or go home’. Otherwise life is just boring.

When I rented this apartment, the living room looked nice and big, with wide French doors and lots of light. Lovely. So I thought ‘my couch is going to look amazing in here.’ I would imagine myself lounging on it watching ‘Las Chicas del Cable’ and sipping the wines of Rioja.

But we arrived here on a dark, miserably rainy night. Wind whipping the water all over us and our multiple bags, as we struggled to get them up to the door of our lobby. I could tell Jeff was unimpressed with Valencia already.

Upon entering our new home, he walked down the hallway and laughed.

‘There is no freaking way your couch is going to make it thru the door, much less down this hallway. And even, if by some miracle you could, it’s too long. You can’t make the turn.’

I’ll admit, I had not measured and his timing for this revelation wasn’t ideal. But time has marched on. And we’ve learned that people here often crane their furniture into their apartments via the windows. Whew! So that problem is solved- as soon as we contract with the crane company.

‘See’ I said cheerfully. ‘I knew we’d figure it out.’

He just shook his head.

We headed out this am and I found a hair dresser who could get me in immediately and seemed nice. The salon was lovely and no one there spoke a word of English. So I mimed, mixed all the languages I know into something we could use to communicate, and it turned out ok. I looked and sounded like an idiot but I actually like the cut and color. And I made a follow up appointment for 5 weeks from now, so they seemed happy about that.

Then it was time to head to the Worten – Best Buy-ish place. Today we bought a washer/dryer, microwave, computer monitors, printer/fax machine, etc. The woman who helped us was giddy. It will all be delivered in the next week.

Jeff just went out and looked at where the washer goes and came back in rubbing his chin and muttering to himself.

‘I wonder how it hooks up, cause there is no hot water hook up, and in the US the plug is big but since it all 220 here already…’

‘And?’ I asked.

He threw his hands up in the air.

‘I guess we’ll just have to wait and see. That’s what we do now. We just do stuff and we wait and see what happens.’

It’s true. Last night, we took all our luggage and duffle bags out to the dumpster and threw them away.

‘We’re burning the canoes.’ He said.

‘Huh?’

‘Lewis and Clark – explorers?’

‘Yeah, I know who they are. Did they have excess luggage.’ I asked

‘If you consider canoes luggage. There’s no going back now. We have nothing to put it all in. We’re committed.’

We seem comfortable with our new roles as the Stupid Americans. We find it sort of freeing. We are totally ridiculous here, with no clue and it shows. We laugh at ourselves and each other constantly. But now that we know it, we can do anything.