Hello, friends!

It’s a new year and a new era up in here: after nearly four months in Madrid, WE FINALLY GOT INTERNET INSTALLED in our apartment.

It’s been quite a journey. Back in October, when we first moved in, the worst case scenario seemed to be that we may have to wait up to 3 weeks for the installer to arrive. It didn’t look like there was any way around it, so we signed a contract with a provider, Vodafone, and resigned ourselves to waiting for the technician’s call. A whole month later, we’d heard nothing, so we went to another Vodafone location for an update.

There was no record of our account, she said. Perplexed, we returned to the store we’d visited originally, where they also had no record of our account. Nothing in the computer, not a physical trace of the application we’d filled out or the contract we’d signed (luckily we hadn’t paid any money yet). We couldn’t ask the employee who’d helped us, Eduardo, because apparently he’d been out sick for several weeks.

What could have happened to our information?

“Eduardo, emmm, maybe he go home after work and… he… go to sleep, and he… forget everything,” was the (actual, verbatim) reply.

Oh, Spain.

So we spent the better part of a day (nothing in Spain involving any paperwork happens in less than a day) trying to re-apply and sign a new contract, only to be told finally that it was actually impossible to get internet until we received our Spanish residency cards, or we paid a massive deposit that we had no guarantee of ever getting back.

We tried out most other internet providers in Madrid, followed up on a lot of false leads, and finally gave up and accepted that we’d have to wait until we got our residency cards — a whole long bureaucratic circus of a process in and of itself.

For all those long Internetless months, every time I wanted to work on a blog post or accomplish… much of anything, I had to head to the bar down the street to use wifi. And to justify taking up a table for a few hours, I’d always feel obligated to order a beer or two, which needless to say was a bit counter to my intentions of productivity.

Anyway, we’re back on the information superhighway, and I’m excited to start putting a lot more work into this blog and other projects! Over the past few days I’ve been updating my old Iceland posts to fix the photo formatting, add some maps that Haider made, and make them a little nicer to look at. If you’re new to the blog, I definitely recommend checking them out because Iceland is a magical wonderland. Click the menu button (three lines at the top left of your screen) to view the posts by category.

I’m also trying to learn more about blogging in general, using WordPress better, and getting more exposure for my work (because marketing myself on social media is an absolute nightmare to me).

You can now follow my blog with Bloglovin, a website for discovering and keeping track of all kinds of interesting blogs about travel, fashion, and more.

You may also wish to check out the new Tumblr, where I’ll be posting my favorite photographs from our travels.

One of the aforementioned other projects is the food travel blog ParTASTE, a great resource for any world-traveling foodies. I recently signed on as an Editorial & Research intern, and published my first big post a few weeks ago about German Christmas markets.

Finally, if you’d like to get to get an email alert every time I publish a new post here on Find Me In The Air, click the “Follow” tab all the way at the bottom right corner of your screen.

That’s all for now! Stay tuned for posts about our amazing two-week journey through southern Spain, and, of course, all the new adventures that 2016 has in store. In the meantime, if you have any feedback, suggestions or questions for me, I’d love if you could leave a comment!

Thanks for reading.