The strange people we find

I've always sworn that I have this special attraction for some interesting characters out there. And here's another example involving a used car. What started out as a simple search for a second hand car for me turned into phone-tag, Judge Judy style.

In the Mercadillo de Toledo, a local classifieds newspaper, Jose and I found a car that we were interested in. Our suspicions were raised with the first phone call. The woman who answered told us she would have to call her sister to find out how many kilometers the car had and hung up. We wondered about that until she called us back the next day. After asking if the car was hers to sell, she explained that her sister was using the car on her vacations, and that's why she couldn't answer our question the day before. But the car had 47,000 km. And that she'd call us back when the sister returned from vacation.

The next day she called us again with a different story. She said that she bought the car a few years ago but didn't really use it. She agreed to let her sister use the car as long as she paid the monthly payments. As it turns out, a few months ago the sister lost her job, so she can't pay for the car. BUT, she also can't pay for her flat. So she's trying to sell the flat, and if that sells by the 7th of September, then the car isn't for sale anymore. But if the flat doesn't sell (which, let's face it, what is selling these days), then she'll sell the car really cheaply to us.

It was all sounding a bit strange. We decided not to wait for this particular car with the interesting story and Jose agreed to call the woman to tell her. But when he called, the woman's husband answered the phone. Jose told him that we had been talking to his wife about the car for sale and the husband gave us another explanation. He explained to us that he couldn't really help us because his wife's sister has the car and they have such a bad relationship with the sister that he doesn't even have her phone number. We hung up and haven't looked back!

But the story has a happy ending: we found another car, a Kia Picanto, in Madrid and bought it 2 days ago. One thing more checked off the to-do list!