Today I went for the first time to see a movie in Barcelona – Sherlock Holmes. Which sucks, by the way. It’s a really boring mixture of Murder, She wrote, old Chinese kung-fu movies and lame “2 police officers save the world” movies.

We went to Yelmo Cines cinema, where I paid 6 euros for the ticket and another 7 something for a medium sized bag of popcorn, a Coke and a hot dog. Basically sitting for two hours in a room and get bored by caucasian kung-fu fighters faking British accents yielded a final toll of around 14 euros. Great!

Of course, that wasn’t money totally wasted. I mean, the food was decent . And I’ve learned something new about the city I’m living in. In Spain, most movies are dubbed in Spanish, so if you don’t speak Spanish, is generally a bad idea to go to see a movie at random, without some prior research. Pictures marked as VOS or VOSI are the ones non-Spanish speakers should look for. These acronyms mark pictures that haven’t been dubbed and have Spanish / Catalan captions. Of course, it’s a little confusing in the begining, since one might try to read the subtitles – it’s a habit I guess – and not understand what’s written there. But it’s easy to get over it and look “at the movie” rather than “read the subtitles”.

Finding a place to live in Barcelona is quite easy. The first thing you need to do is your budget. If you have €3-4000 available then you can consider renting a place on your own. A decent rent is somewhere between €700 and €1000 per month, but the tenant must pay a fee to the real estate agency that’s roughly equal with one month’s rent and to pay another 2 months in advance as a “security deposit”. So, even if you choose a really cheap flat, around €600, be prepared to pull at least €2400 out from your wallet.

If you don’t have that kind of money available, there’s an obvious solution: sleep in the railway station. It’s located near the Placa de Saints subway station. Just kidding :p The solution is to share a flat. It’s quite popular here in Barcelona for students and young professionals to share a flat in order to cut down the costs. You can look online for potential roommates. A popular site for this is www.easypiso.com.

It’s there that I’ve found my current roommates – 2 Catalans – a female journalist, you can see here in action here and a male lawyer. They’re both great, funny and friendly people and now I’m glad that I got to live with them, since they’ve showed me around the city and gave me an insight to Barcelona that only a local can.

Usually one should be able to find a suitable place to live in Barcelona in about one to two weeks. There are a lot of flat sharing related scams, where people ask money in advance and insists that the tenant can’t see the flat until he makes a deposit. But if you use common-sense, it’s quite easy to avoid scammers and find a great place to live. I did!