I will sorely miss Malaga and our beautiful apartment in the centre of town. It seems an idilic setting, but there are a lot of down sides to it; the first being day to day shopping. When a granny cart is needed to get your shopping to your house it becomes tiresome to do food shopping in any quantity. Since we have been in malaga the closest we have been able to get our car is about 3-400 meters, which kinda sucks. The lack of environmental control also takes the juice out of you; in the summer it is sweltering and the winter is bone chillingly cold due to the massive internal volume of the space. Even three 2Kw heaters make little difference. There is also the inconvenience of all the hubbub of living smack on the Google pin of Malaga, including air-conditioners, crane alarms, concerts, religious parades.
It didn't take that long to choose our new place, the hours of research paid off in the end. Spanish property websites seem to be in the dark ages, but a light at the end of the tunnel is Idealista, which also has an incredibly useful (and horribly flawed) iPad app. In deciding where to live we wanted to be close enough to the city to pop in, but with the conveniences of living in the suburbs and close to Vanessa's office. The area we settled on was Las Tablas which is the total opposite to where we are now, i.e. completely characterless. I call it Zombie Town.
In essence it is a collection of gated communities, with people appearing from their underground car parks and driving off to the mega-mall about a kilometre away.
What we swap for character is (in order of my importance)
• A dishwasher
• An outside space
• Two parking spaces
• Close cross country trails
• Swimming pool
• Separate spare bedroom
• Scullery
• Ground Floor Bike storage/workshop
Work wise this means Vanessa works in an actual office building, rather than a factory or train depot, and I get to try co-working with the supermegacool people at utopic_US. Which is nice.
We'll see in a few months how we get on.
