Once upon a time I spent a semester abroad in the gorgeous city of Santiago de Compostela, Spain. There were 16 people from my university who went, and we basically all had to compete for housing. We could choose the new zone or the old zone, and in spite of all the apartments in the old zone basically being shit holes, I really wanted to live there. Eventually I found a place. The location was PERFECT! My bedroom window looked upon the bell tower of the world famous cathedral that people walk from all over the world to see, and my front yard was the plaza of the church. There was a super cool bar directly below us, and another that became our second home, right around the corner. Every day on my way to school I would pass through some archways of the cathedral where a bagpipe player would create the soundtrack for my morning “commute.” It was magical. However, the apartment was pretty awful. It was super old and decrepit with no heat and no hot water heater, and was basically a long narrow hall with 5 bedrooms off of it on one side, and then the kitchen and bathroom on the other side - no living room. There was also a separate bedroom outside the front door, but the woman who lived in it, Amelia, shared our kitchen and bathroom. Aside from that woman - who was probably in her 50s, and I’m completely convinced was a real witch - there was another older woman in one of the rooms, Sole, an Italian girl, Vera (who sadly moved out right after I moved in), me, and another girl from my program, Amy.

Oh, Amy. Where do I begin? Amy and I were basically complete opposites. I had a long term boyfriend who was also studying abroad with me, she was single. I would sit in bed and read my Bible every night before an early bedtime, and Amy would wake me up around 5 or 6am every morning to have me let her in because she was out clubbing and forgot her key again, and needed a nap before our 8am classes. In our apartment, instead of a water heater, we had a “bombona” or propane tank to heat our water, which meant once it went out, you had to wait until the “bombona” guy drove around and brought a new tank that you could change. Inevitably it would go out every time Amy or I were taking a shower, so in her infinite wisdom, she signed up for a gym membership just to go shower at every day. I was too cheap, which meant that I was stuck taking cold showers all the time. Also, I bought a space heater for my room, but Amy refused, so sometimes she would run down to my room to “warm up” before running back to her bedroom and snuggling up tight in her sleeping bag to sleep in her freezing cold room.

Anyway, the older women who lived with us were basically hermits. We rarely saw them, and if we did, they would scurry back to their rooms, or they would yell at us for touching one of their pans, or having something in “their” cabinet out of place. Also, since Amy and I had different schedules, we eventually realized from various conversations with the women that they thought we were the same person - we’re both blonde Americans, so I could get that I guess. Eventually Sole started to warm up to us a little and still wouldn’t really hang out with us, but she wouldn’t run away either. Amelia basically was just crazy the whole time. One time I was reading my Bible while cooking (there was a lot of Bible reading in college, y’all) and Amelia freaked out and started yelling at me about how the Bible was a farce, and I should be careful about what I put in my mind, etc., etc.

About halfway through the semester, Amy invited her friend Chris to come visit. Chris knows Amy through water skiing. I learned a lot about the world of water skiing living with Amy, and my main take away was that water skiers party harder than any other population in the world. So Chris comes to stay at our apartment, and they immediately start drinking. At some point they decided it would be a great idea to shave Chris’s head in our bathroom. In true Kelsey fashion, I was in my bedroom, reading my Bible in bed. (I just remembered, I was trying to read through my entire Bible during Lent that year - which I completed - thus all the reading.) Amy and Chris were drunk and laughing hysterically at the fact that they were actually shaving his head in the middle of the night, and generally being super loud. All of a sudden, Sole flung her bedroom door open and in a rage started screaming at Amy and Chris about how disrespectful they were being, and she would not stand for it and was going to get our landlord, who lived just one floor above us, and stormed out. So what did Amy and Chris do? They ran giggling into my bedroom to hide!

Pretty soon there was a knock on my bedroom door, and when I opened it, there stood our very elderly landlord, obviously frazzled, and with his shirt tail sticking out of his fly, Sole standing sternly behind him. Looking directly at me he gave a big lecture about rules of the house and respect, and how from then on we wouldn’t be allowed to have visitors and it would be quiet hours after 9pm. Did he once look at Amy and say anything to her and Chris? Nooooooooo, he sure didn’t. Just yelled at the girl reading her Bible in bed!

From then on, Sole avoided us like the plague, and Amy stayed on her best behavior while at home. Surprisingly though, Amelia warmed up to us after that because apparently she and Sole were mortal enemies or something, so she was tickled that we had riled her up. I still watched my back around Amelia though because I definitely heard weird chanting from her bedroom many a night, and just couldn’t take any chances on being cursed or something.

Overall it was a super strange semester, but I wouldn’t change it for the world, and especially not living with Amy, who by the way, is now a stay-at-home mom of 3, living out her wildest dreams of living on a lake and water skiing with her family as much as possible. Life is funny sometimes.