rex + hill

So I know its been 2 months since the last post. And not because nothing has been going on…

In May we enjoyed a visit from Bev and Neil, and were later joined by Louisa and Gomez from London for the long weekend. We had a great time, but Im not going in to details as Bev has agreed to post a guest post on our blog soon. …stay tuned! What I will say was that it was great to have some visitors and we had an absolute ball. It was very hard to say goodbye at the end of it and it took a couple of days of feeling depressed and far away from the rest of the world in recovery.

Since then I have been in and out of negotiations with my work trying to get them to let me work part time, from home on the copywriting part of my job. Basically the four hours daily commute in and out of Barcelona was getting to be too much.

I had to ask myself why I had come all the way to Spain to be working the daily grind and travelling for half again the time I spent in the office. I had a lot of waiting around for reviews and management meetings spanning about 5 weeks (gotta love corporate working environments) and basically the answer was no.

Luckily for me, another job offer came along in the meantime, which I readily accepted, and will be starting tomorrow! I will be working for a company called Barcelona Homes, which rent holiday apartments to visitors in the beach district of Barceloneta for short terms. The guy that runs this business also manages about 25 other websites relating to travel and holidays in various cities around europe. I will be writing website content as well as articles about travel and each destination to post on travel forums and blogs as a way of getting more links to the pages and hopefully getting more traffic coming through to each site. In between that I will also be letting people in to their rented apartments and doing some other office admin as required.

The working conditions are great- its located 20 mins walk from our apartment, which is about 2 blocks from the beach. I will be working in the afternoons from 2-8pm which means I can go back to Spanish classes in the mornings, or sleep in, etc and I will be getting paid about the same money, but will be working 10 hours less per week! The only downside is that I have to work on Saturdays so I am there to let people in and out of the apartments, but this is only for 3 months and it only in the afternoon so it wont affect me being able to go out on Friday night or sleep in or do something in the morning on Saturdays.

As you can probably tell, Im very happy about the job and look forward to starting tomorrow. It will be so nice to stroll along the beach to work or go for swim in my lunch break. Summer is well and truly here now as we’ve been enjoying temperatures of high 20s for the last couple of weeks.

Alex is still working hard as usual but is happy and is looking forward to his birthday at the end of this month. He and I have taken up a new hobby- thanks to Lou and G’s present while they were in town. We have been taking part in weekend Scrabble tournaments in local cafes. Sometimes for several hours at a time. Of course I’m winning overall, although on my off days Alex has managed to slip past me once or twice. We’ve recently introduced a new rule that all the words you put down are only allowed if you can give their equivalent in Spanish or be able to explain the word in Spanish to your opponent.

What else is new…well we just got back from a weekend trip to Sitges- a beachside holiday town south of Barcelona where our ex-flatemates Edu and Carlos are now living. We went over for our traditional family dinner of Arroz con Pollo ( a delicious Peruvian dish of chicken and rice with seasoning and lime dressed salad and onions on the side). After that we had a few drinks and went out to check out some of the clubs in town, better known as meat markets. Yesterday we slept in and went to the beach, where I enjoyed another victory over Alex with the travel scrabble set, and then dinner and movie back at the house. What capped it off was a call from my new boss to let me know that I don’t have to start until tomorrow as today is a bank holiday in Spain!

So, you should be hearing from Bev shortly, and after that I promise to write again and tell you how its working out with my new job, etc. Mean while, Happy birthday to Adrian for the 1st June and Helen for the 2nd and Linda for the 5th and Dad for the 7th. Many happy returns!

Bye for now…
xxx
Hill.