Settling into Oviedo

We've now been in Oviedo for a few days. Already, I'm feeling really good about being here. I think it's going to be a great place to live and work for a few months. My post today is mostly about the mechanics of moving into a new place abroad for a medium-term stay. More after the jump.

We have about two months in Oviedo. That's not a short stay. But it's not that long either. So if we're going to be comfortable living here, we need to get settled in pretty quickly. In a matter of a few days we've already made a lot of progress toward that goal. Here are some essentials:

• Make sure the accommodations are suitable and get any corrections made as needed
• Done. Most of this can be credited to good planning and good fortune. Our apartment is right in the heart of the historic part of the city. The place is in great shape. It's well equipped. It feels lived in. Much of this could be surmised from a distance from pictures and maps and good old Google Street View. But you never really know until you move in. And we are really happy with the place. Here it is: apartment description. The pictures are pretty accurate, though the blue bedroom is now white. The apartment feels more like a place that a friend has invited you to stay in than a standard rental. It's just really, really nice to have a place like this for a long stay. We could have found a cheaper place if we could have rented longer term. But for a two month stay, I think we did very well.
• Locate essential stores and services
• Done. First thing we do when we get to a place is figure out where to buy food. The primary market of Oviedo is less than 5 minutes away walking. It's wonderful. Meats, cheeses, local and national produce. Friendly vendors. I already know who my meat person, my cheese person, and my vegetable person is going to be. Met them yesterday morning making my first trip to the market to buy ingredients for a local specialty, chorizo cooked in sidra (hard apple cider). Found a friendly meat purveyor who was even kind enough to show me exactly how to cook this dish. That's service, and I'll be going back there regularly. Went back for some fish this morning and found a good supplier, though nothing about the interaction was special, so I may try some of the other seafood vendors before settling in on one provider. We also located a standard supermarket (Mercadona) for things not available at the market. And there is a convenience store less than a block away in case of a late-night need. We also located a store to buy kid gear. Needed a portable booster seat for the table. Got great service from a place about a 10 minute walk away. Found it on google maps. Also found a store filled with random stuff run by some Chinese owners. This store has a little of everything, completely unorganized. But the owners were very helpful when I asked for a garbage basket and power adapters. And cheap too. Found this place on a walk. It's about 3 minutes from the apartment. So we're doing well on this front. Some photos on this point:

Exterior of Fontan Market, 3 minutes from the Apartment

Interior of Market

Baby Store: 10 minutes walking

• Make sure communication is set up
• Done. All included in the apartment. That makes things easy.
• Find child care
• Done. Since this is a working trip, we need child care for the LL. We asked the owner of our apartment about child care facilities and she recommended a place about 8 minutes from our apartment on foot. We went there our first full day here and it looked good. And it's about half the price of child care in the US. Bonus. LL has already spent partial days at the day care and she seems to love it. New toys and new friends always make her very happy.

Daycare

• Get familiar with the neighborhood.
• Done. I've been walking as much as possible these first few days. Today was really pretty so I took LL on a pretty long walk. We discovered a park with birds and a playground and just beautifully manicured grounds. Oh, and there is a kids library there as well. We are three blocks away from "Cider Street" where a bunch of sidrerias are located. And there's great old architecture all around us. All of this is very cool. Pictures below, everything within about a 10 minute walking radius:

• Learn about local wines and other culinary matters (maybe not COMPLETELY essential, but close in my )
• In process. We've already learned a bit about Asturian (that's the region we're in) cuisine. The food is not going to be too much trouble given the market. I can learn a lot there from the folks running the stores. And we've learned that hard apple cider is the thing here. It's cheap and it's good. It needs to be exported. We'll drink a lot of it here I'm sure. But Spain is pretty good at wine, too, and I don't have the foggiest yet about where to get good wine values. That will be a work in progress, sampling stuff from the grocery store. Keeping an eye out for specialty shops, and asking around when given the opportunity.

So Oviedo seems like it's going to be a good place for us to hang our hats for a while. Really, the choice of Oviedo was mostly luck. I looked at several possible locations that had the sort of climate we were looking for and then it was mostly a matter of finding an apartment that was the best fit for us. As long as the place wasn't too hot and we could live affordably in a central location without a car, that was going to be fine with us. So far, I don't know how we could have done much better. We'll have to wait and see what hiccups come our way as we're here.