España

Here's a little story of me and Spain. I graduated from my university last June and I had no freaking idea what I would do next so I applied to some weird job in Fuengirola, doing phone interviews by provision mainly. I got the job and I was totally crazy about the idea of moving to Spain! I found a really small and really cheap apartment next to the beach and I loved the apartment the first 5 hours. And the neighborhood I loved soo much, because it was really beautiful and I had really nice neighbours, who became my good friends. Every night we used to hang out there on the benches and I tried to learn Spanish. Fun!!!

So, I spent about 5 hours in my apartment until I saw the first cockroach. (After that I saw them there maybe every other day, sometimes more than one in one day.) I had NEVER seen a living cockroach before in my life, although I've always been travelling very much, all over southern Europe and Thailand. I freaked out and asked my new neighbours what to do with them and they told me to chase them with cockroach spray, but that didn't really make me feel any more comfortable, because that didn't prevent them from coming inside again. Later, maybe a week after that, someone gave me some extra poisonous cockroach poison that I had to spread all over the place after I almost had a heart attack because of the insects. I was just about to fall asleep when I noticed that there was one on my pillow! That was when I started to sleep with the lights on. This is how the place looks like then:

There were some days when I couldn't think about anything else than the cockroaches. I taped all the windows and holes and put salt around my bed (useless tip btw) and covered the drains and sinks etc. until I realized that the cockroaches always come under my laundry machine! There was a huge hole in the wall and the laundry machine was in this hole and there must have been a really nice hole also for my pets because one morning I woke up to the sound when one of them was climbing out from the detergent box. Then I jumped out from bed, went to supermarket, bought more tape and tinfoil and did this:

COOL, EH?!? At this point I kind of already had decided not to stay in Spain so I preferred to block the hole and thus deny myself the pleasure of using a laundry machine, but I really really didn't want to share my flat with those gross bugs anymore so I didn't care. After this they didn't come anymore. Happy ending!

End remarks: I loved my time in Spain and I recommend moving there, but you should try to find a flat from a new building or get it as high as possible in a block of flats. Ground floor was just bad. Or you can party every night until the sun rises and sleep in the day time, because the cockroaches only come when it's dark :D