Barely Comprehensible

My exposure to different languages is pretty limited, having struggled to learn Afrikaans (which was the 2nd official language in South Africa during high school) and reached a point where I understand Afrikaans very well but still get tongue tied if I have to say more than a couple of sentences.   

 

In my 20s I taught at a school where the native tongue of most of the teachers and all of the students was Xhosa.  Without the tools we have today for language learning my language skill only reached the point where I could greet, ask some basic questions and say things like “what are you doing?” or “you’re making a noise” - basic phrases that a teacher might need to know.  

 

I wouldn't really call myself fluent in either of these languages and I suppose I have taken those failures to become fluent as a sign that my aptitude for learning a new language is not high - though it is also true that I treated learning them as a utility - and therefore learning only as much as I needed to get by.

So learning Spanish is entirely new, having been prompted by Anne who was in turn inspired by our twin sons when they both became fluent after living for some time in Central and South America.

Anne and I started using Duolingo daily - she’s been doing it daily for almost  3 years and I am getting closer to 2 years and we have both been taking online lessons with amazing Spanish teachers (fist one from Peru and the second from Guatemala) but neither of us have been able to put any of this to practical use until this, the first of our trips after selling our
house.  You'd think after so many years of daily practice we'd be able to speak it, but in truth the lessons are maybe 5 to 15minutes a day which doesn't really give you more than a little exposure.

So it turns out that my first essential interaction in Spanish was at the airport after we arrived in Spain.  Our house sitting host had insisted that the train to Gandia left from the airport but we could only find a metro (subway) line and not the inter-city train.  We tried at the metro ticket counter and at information but the girl at information handed us a map and pointed at the metro signs but the metro attendant was too harried and impatient to help us.

We decided to go back to the cafe and order coffee and a sandwich and it struck me that, since I was the only one in the line the cashier might be able to help.  In halting Spanish I managed to get out a plaintive “where be train to Gandia, please?” (or something like that) and, after correcting my pronunciation of Gandia, she scribbled on a note the name of a metro station that we had to get to to catch the train we needed.  It was 11 stops away from the airport which made us wonder when our house-sitting host had last used the train.  We used google maps to confirm that after exiting the metro we had to walk across the street to the overland train station in Valencia.

It seems inconceivable, but after a mere 10 days we are making much more confident use of Spanish - in particular after ordering coffee and toast day after day at the same Bar in our adjacent town.  No one here speaks English, though they will use an occasional word in English if we look as though we are drowning in incomprehension.

The waitress, who has been very patient (if a little formal) with us, got a little agitated on Thursday when I boldly walked up at 12:30 and asked her if it was too late for to order lunch.  She gave us a perfunctory “No lunch” followed by a “only Puchero” (all in Spanish) which she explained is a soup with meat in it.  Anne and I slunk off and came back home for a sandwich for lunch.

The next day I asked her to explain to us how meals work in Spain and she gave us a similar description to what our house sitting  hosts had given but with more details on the restaurant times.  I asked if she could describe some other breakfast dishes to us and when she brought me a Chivito which is a baguette with chicken, egg and bacon (along with the complimentary house salad served at breakfast).

I told her that we were getting hungry after a week if eating only “tostadas con queso” (toast with cheese).  

She had a good laugh at that and was instantly warm and friendly, patting me on the arm and having a bit more of a conversation.

She asked where we were from because we didn’t speak Spanish with an English accent which was quite satisfying to hear.

Today we stopped for coffee before going on a long walk and a group of men who stopped on a bicycle ride asked Anne if she would photograph them.  After she did they decided to offer us some of their Moscatel (sherry made from the Moscatel grape) and struck up a conversation with us - they are involved in the Valencian orange export business and told us that they sold to South Africa and had worked in America (San Diego) for a few years as part of the orange export business.  Their English was a little better than our Spanish but we kept talking to them in Spanish as best we could.

Not long after a man sat down next to us and also started talking to us.  His dog, he said, heard us speaking English to each other and he had a favorite person who visited who also spoke English.

If is amazing how these little exchanges work, trying our best to be barely comprehensible…. and succeeding!

 

Small town in Spain

 

Our first stop is a house-sit in a small town in Valencia on the East coast of Spain.  Our house-sitting hosts live in Potries which is named for the pottery produced here since the 1st Century during the Roman occupation of the area.  The town is close to Gandia which is 90min south of Valencia by rail.

Map by Peter Fitzgerald

It is interesting how different reality is from preconceptions about a place.  I pictured a house on a smallholding on a hill in the country for some reason and didn’t imagine a small double story in a street of attached houses.

If I had thought it through a little more I suppose I would have pictured the house on a street like the houses we had seen in Florence (in other words a typical European town street) and would have been closer to the truth.

The town is beautiful with narrow lanes and terraced houses and we realized that the tempo is so much slower than what we are used to.  The streets are deserted for most of the day with roll-up wooden shutters down over the doors and windows.  No more than a few cars drive by the house every hour even though it is on the main road between a neighboring town (La Font) and Potries.  The towns are small and we are able to walk to two other small towns within 15 min.

 The roads are narrow and  pass between orange and olive groves.

 Some of the orange groves are blossoming and on our walk back from La Font we come around a corner and are surrounded by the scent from the blossoms.

Our daily ritual doesn’t align with that of the town because of the way the work day unfolds for town's people.  Our hosts explained that construction or repair work in their homes would follow a similar pattern each time.  The plumber or construction worker would arrive at around 8am with their tools, unpack everything and do a little prep work and then head out at about 9am to the local Bar (this is more than a bar - it offers coffee and light breakfasts as well) and then return at about 10 or 10:30.  They’ll work until noon and then head off to lunch followed by a siesta from 2 to 5 and then back at five to work until eight.  Dinner is at around 10pm at night.

We have settled into the ritual of walking the dogs at 9am and ending up in a bar one town over for “las tostadas con queso”  (toasted baguette with cheese) for me and a “café con leche” for each of us.  

After that we relax for the rest of the morning and then I work US office hours from 3pm to 11pm and in bed by midnight.

The beaches of Gandia (20min drive) on the Mediterranean sea are beautiful and we took some trips there over the weekend.  We’ll no doubt be going there again  a few times before we move to our next location.

Something quite striking about the towns is the number of apartments and land with “Se vende” (for sale) signs up.  Some look pretty run down but some are in fairly good condition.  We asked our guide at the local pottery museum about this and she explained that there has been a general shift in population away from these small towns.  Young people move to the cities and homes become available as the aging population dies out.  Our house-sitting hosts said that the economies of the small towns have also been disrupted by the rise of supermarkets which have made small local shops redundant.

Prices of houses range between 40 000 Euros and close to 300 000 - in the lower range are terraced houses in poor repair and the higher prices are for detached houses on larger properties.  

There are complications to buying property for newcomers that might be significant obstacles.  Some people buy sight-unseen and discover when they come here that the area that they bought in is pretty rough and possibly less accepting of strangers.  Others discover when they have settled down that their neighbor or neighbor’s best friend was born in the house they bought and that they all resent the fact that the family home was sold.  The town officials have to sign off on renovations which may also be a big obstacle to overcome - and of course when the renovations start all the neighbors are intensely curious and maybe even antagonistic to the work being done.

I guess the lesson is to make sure you are someone who can build relationships with those around you so that you are able to work through these obstacles with the community once you settle in.

A common sight in mornings sitting at the bar and drinking our coffee are old women with walkers or shopping carts making their way to or from some shop.  These casual sightings have convinced me that these women are the source of all the power in these cities.  The know everything and have communities of similarly aged women who are matriarchs in their own family.  I could be wrong but I feel that it would be important to stay on the right side of them just to be safe.  In Potries a common scene is a narrow street, empty but for a single woman in the distance with a walker - making her way home or to some meeting where they’ll decide what to do about their new neighbors. 

 

Selling a home

 

We have only owned two properties.  The first we bought and sold in South Africa and it was a pretty simple process - find a listing, contact the realtor, make an offer and sign the papers.  The same was true for the sale.  Only one realtor and only one lawyer representing the seller in the transaction.

In the USA the common practice is to find a realtor who specializes in selling and have that realtor find a buyer who will also be represented by their own agent.  When we bought our home in 2005 we naively assumed that the process would be as simple and that the buying agent would really go in to bat for us - which, while true to an extent, ignored the affect of the buying agent's own interests (getting a sale and working to maximize the commission they get where possible) which don't always line up with our interests.  We should have realized that the buying agent would underplay disadvantages and pitfalls in the purchase and would encourage us not to bid lower than the asking price - both of which could have saved us money at the time.

Seventeen years later we looked into how to sell our house.  There are a few options that you can use:

The easiest option is to announce the house sale “as-is” and then leave the selling agent to set up viewings with the buying agents who have interested buyers. In theory this will work well in a seller’s market if your house is in an area where there is high demand and you are willing to risk the price being beaten down as buyers discover obvious problems with the house.

For us, the market seemed to strongly favor buyers and we were hearing stories about buyers outbidding each other by offering well over the asking price and waiving common diligence steps (like a building inspection by a professional) it seemed an obvious choice to use.

The second (more difficult option) is to spend some time and money preparing the house for sale.  This is much harder to achieve but is the option recommended by realtors to maximize the number of people who might actually make an offer on the home.

The last option is to make a private sale.  This is fraught with problems because there are no protections in place to protect the buyer or seller from unscrupulous actors.

Our first attempt was with option one:

We had been thinking about selling our house for some time.   I wanted to downsize in preparation for us both retiring and we were encouraged to accelerate this because the difficulties of managing a two home condominium over 17 years was getting annoying.  Our driveway was a challenge as well - in New England winters, the long steep driveway took several hours for Anne and I to clear after each storm.

Anne found a realtor in June who was pretty confident that with the market the way it was.  We could offer our house as-is and have people clambering to buy it.  So we cleaned the house and tidied in the yard, removed some of Anne's nude paintings on his advice and put the house on the market in July. 

 

A photo with the stain in the ceiling and clutter on the surfaces

Three weeks later about 3 families were showing interest but we were getting a large number of questions about a stain on the living room ceiling and other minor repairs needed - after these interested families moved on he let us know that we might want to take the house off the market and wait until next year to list it again.  I got the sense that he was used to selling in a more built-up neighborhood closer to Boston and might have found the north shore buyers' realtors less cooperative  because he was based outside of our area.

We also discovered, after consulting our lawyer about the realtor ‘exclusive right to sell’ contract, that while the realtor helping with the sale would work hard to get you a good price they would also try to maximize what they made on the deal which would not always work in our favor.  We had to get this realtor to explicitly waive the contract before trying to sell within 6 months because it said that he would be entitled to 5% commission on the house as long as his contract was in place.

Second pass (option two)

Almost as soon as the house was removed from the listings our phones started ringing with realtors looking to jump into the action on the promise that they could do what the previous realtor had failed to do.  Anne answered one of them and invited the realtor to come over and persuade us that she had a good plan…. and boy did she.

The plan included bringing someone to advise us on how to “stage” the house and offering some help from a person who could come over and fix many of the small things that needed attention.  She had in mind that we could spend one to two months preparing the house for sale and then listing it late in September.

 The person making the staging recommendations wanted all but one plant per room removed and wanted each room to only have furniture in it that fit the purpose of the room - so extra cupboards, storage/organizing furniture were to be put in storage or thrown out.  She also didn’t want any rooms colored brighter or darker than off-white.  Anne was immediately annoyed at the lack of interest in how we had made the house a home.  

Not only had she cultivated a plant that grew along the walls in our living room but most of the downstairs was full of plants.  She had painted decorative gecko’s and fish in our room which was toned orange and turquoise and her art studio was full of storage and art materials.  She took a break from the staging walk-through of the house to collect herself.  The realtor and staging consultant pointed our that the blander the house was the better people could visualize themselves and their things in it but it didn’t take anything off the sting.

What followed was 5 weeks of crazy, intensive work.  Our realtor's helpful handy man arranged for a dumpster to be dropped off and he started repairing and painting the “trim” on the outside of the house and looking into repairing and painting things both inside and out that needed work.  Anne arranged for a storage unit about 10miles from the house and she started packing boxes while I worked with the handyman to get the dumpster loaded and paint all of the rooms that where deemed too bright.    

 

The stain in the living room was a source of some contention because we were pretty sure it was just that (a water stain) but rather than paint over it I asked the handyman to cut a hole (2ft x 3ft) so that we could look into the source of any possible leak.  
It was apparent that the bath and washing machine area did not have particularly good water insulation in place so any large spills from the bath or washing machine would make their way down there.  He noticed that the washing hose was not fastened properly to the outlet and repaired that - but other than that there were no sources of leaks.

Sealing this large hole in the ceiling of the living room was something he was not confident doing so John (with whom I’d done many hikes in the past) drew on his experience gained as the son of a plumber and offered to come over with his son one night after work to demonstrate how to do the “mudding” - spreading a white paste that is used to seal holes and smooth out problems in the dry wall (sheets of a plaster-of-paris type of substance called “sheet rock”).  
The process took days - applying the mud, waiting for it to dry, smoothing it with a wet sponge and repeating.  At the end after some sanding, a coat of primer followed by a coat of ceiling paint the ceiling was in better shape than it had been in all of our time there.

After 5 weeks we were emotionally and physically exhausted but had reduced the house to an off-white and rather sparsely furnished home.

The before and after photographs of some of the rooms are quite striking.

The house went back on the market and after the first weekend of showings the realtor told us that there were two very interested buyers who had a deadline to submit offers of the following Tues.  By that Wed we had an offer that was more than the asking price that was an easy choice to accept.  Within 45 days of that we had the closing where all the paperwork is signed and we had sold the house.

Postscript (option three)

When we were preparing for our sale we had to get some documents signed by the owner of the second unit in our condominium and he told me a horror story of a private sale which serves as a cautionary tale.

When they bought their unit the seller (my former neighbor) had approached them with a private sale offer of an amazing real estate deal.  He pitched to them the entire building (both units) at less than the price of one of the units.  He had previously asked me to give him photographs of the inside of our home on the promise that his realtor might be able to sell our house as well and he used those photographs along with a walk-through of his unit to persuade them that they were buying both units.

After getting them fired up with the prospect of this “steal” of a real estate deal he had a lawyer prepare the papers for the sale of only his unit and relied on the buyer not reading the documents carefully enough (who reads all the docs?) which they didn’t.  After the sale and on the first visit to the condominium they discovered to their horror that that the previous owner had left a massive mess but had also lied to them about our unit being part of the deal.  I remember him confidently telling me they had bought the whole condominium when I met him on that day and me having to let him know that my unit had not been for sale.  I had not realized until I heard this story that my neighbor had been scamming them all along!

At this point, since they had signed the deal, they had little recourse and, of course could not track down the previous owner to hold him to task on his misrepresentations.  They had paid more than what that single unit was worth but considerably less than what both would have sold for.

When we sold our unit through the realtor there were so many checks and balances in place.  Our realtor made sure that we cleared out the house and garage for the showing - well before the sale - and guided us through each of the regulatory things that were needed.  We had to organize and/or make the house available for various inspections leading up to the acceptance of the sale by the buyer and before the closing (radon, smoke detectors, home inspection) and our lawyer - we found our own lawyer rather than take one offered by the realtor - made sure that we understood the implications of the documents that we were given.  

The new neighbors had no such protections when they made their private purchase of their unit.