Our 'home away from home' apartment

Our apartment is really nice, well, in comparison to the hotel room, it's luxury. It has 2 bedrooms so we've got  space for visitors (hint hint). The views out the windows aren't up to much but given that mostly it's dark when we're here that's no big deal. Daylight savings finishes in a couple of weeks so we'll have the shutters closed earlier and won't be looking out the windows. We're on the edge of Azpeitia in the 'old town' 10 - 15 minutes walk to school and it's probably another 5 or so minutes walk from there to the other side of town. here's the photos so you can see our place for yourself.

Looking down the hall from the doorway

the kitchen/ Barry's space. We found a kettle!

the sitting-room from the hall

the sitting-room from our bedroom door

The bedroom

View from the window of the room at the end of the hall

the spare room, the sofa turns into 2 single beds

the view from the kitchen, sitting room and bedroom

Our building, the 3 open windows on the first floor is our place

this is our street. Our building is the 2nd to last one on the right

Our address is - Soreasu, 2 - 1° Dchr, Azpeitia 20730, Gipuzkoa, Spain. Just in case you find that you're passing through here you'll know where to find us.

Our landlady is totally wonderful and looks after us very well. Anything we need she brings and, no, we're not taking advantage. Pretty much everything was here apart from sheets and blankets for the beds in the spare room, mugs, plates, cutlery, and such like and she's brought it all to us. She's even orgainsed for us to get intercity bus cards which will make bus/train travel a whole lot cheaper. For example the cost for 2 of us to San Sebastian is almost €9, with the card it will be between €3 - €4. 

Talking of cards, last Friday we went to San Sabastian to put in my application to renew my NIE which is my identity card and proof that I'm legally allowed to be here. Last year the process was so, so stressful and only with the help of 2 teachers it got sorted. So with that in mind we set out on the first bus, 7.35am, thinking it would take most of the day and not really looking forward to it at all. We found our way to the Oficina de Extranjería, through security, got our number and sat down to wait. Not for long, it turned out so off we went to the designated desk and to our surprise, on the other side of the desk was a really lovely, friendly lady who took the opportunity to have a little English language lesson, and helped me with Spanish, while she helped us through filling out the form, made sure everything that needed to be attached was there etc, etc and then sent us on our way to find a bank so we could put money into a bank account to pay  for the NIE. That done and the form duly stamped we went back to the oficina, handed in the form and that was that, all done and it wasn't even lunch time, english lunchtime that is, not spanish lunch time which tends to be between 2 and 3 o'clock. 

We spent the rest of the day wandering around the city. We walked along beside Zurriola Beach and La Concha Beach after eating some very tasty empanada atún and patata tortilla along with a couple of beers outside a bar looking out across the Bay of Biscay. Oh yes it was lovely.  

there were a lot of hopeful surfers sitting on their boards out in the bay on a rather flat sea, probably be hundreds more in June and July. Then around the old part of the city which was really lovely and very interesting. Full of people, though. I can only imagine that it is jammed with people in the summer time. The bars had lots of very delicious looking pintxos, small portions of finger food, out along the counters, sometimes 2 or 3 tiers of them. We thought that when we came back to San Sebastian we'd wander the bars having pintxos galore and maybe the odd beer or red wine to help us along the way. I've read that most of the people in this part of the city are tourists so I imagine that the prices will hiked up a bit. We wandered our way  to the bus stop and back to Azpeitia and home. no photos because I didn't take my camera, didn't even think about it given the time of the day we set put, it was still dark, along with feeling somewhat anxious about what was ahead of us in getting the NIE.  Next time we get to San Sebastian there'll be heaps of Photos.

It is a really nice feeling knowing that we can hop on a bus and be back in San Sebastian within an hour when ever we want. Nice to go and nice to come back to our little town.