¡Estamos aquí!

(¡Estamos aquí! = We are here!)

After over a year's worth of planning, setbacks, and pivots, our change-of-life adventure has begun. For those of you who want to follow along (or who just want to peek in occasionally to see how we're doing), I'll be chronicling our story here; check in for pictures, slices of life, and my occasional pretensions at literary merit.

For those of you who haven't been in touch with us in a while I'll try to briefly recap the last year and a half: Amy and I had long dreamed of retiring to Europe in the mid- to near- future (7-10 years). But one day in late Spring 2024 we both came home from an exhausting day at work, thoroughly heart-sick and weary of beating our heads against management and bureaucracy that seemed more concerned with erecting roadblocks and causing misery than actually getting things done. Amy turned to me and out of the blue said "You know, we're not really living any more; we're just existing." The conversation that followed snowballed quickly, and after some consultations with our financial planner we came to the conclusion that we could pull off an early retirement.

Thus began a year-and-a-half long process of research, missteps, wrangling with the Spanish bureaucracy,¹ then agonized nail-biting and worst-case-scenario planning while we waited to get our long-term residential visas issued. Our visas² do not permit us to work. In fact, we had to quit our jobs and supply proof of that fact to the Spanish consulate with our applications, which made the waiting even more nerve-wracking: We had crossed our personal Rubicon, burned our ships...there was no turning back. 

While this was going on we also needed to pare down our personal possessions to a level that could feasibly and economically be shipped across the Atlantic. Note: this is not the same as just moving to a new house. Here's an exercise: Mark off two 4' x 4' squares in your living room, den, or wherever. Now go through your entire house -- spare room, garage, attic, etc. -- and try to figure out how many of your belongings would fit in those 4x4 squares. You're allowed to play Tetris and stack items on top of each other, but the stacks cannot be any higher than six feet. The stacks are the stuff you're keeping; anything that doesn't fit in the stacks you have to find a way to get rid of somehow, because your entire house must be empty when you've finished. So for the next several months we held numerous garage sales, gained an intimate knowledge of how to work with Facebook Marketplace, Craigslist, and (later) BuyNothing, and were nearly on a first-name basis with the people at our local Goodwill. By the last week of August we had gotten the visas, dotted all of the "i"s, crossed all of the "t"s,³ and we were off!

Why the mask, you ask? Because the universe has a sense of humor: We both caught nasty cases of COVID less than two weeks before our flight date. Or rather, Amy caught a nasty case of COVID and then thoughtfully gave it to me. I went asymptomatic by the skin of my teeth just before our flight, but was still trying to be careful.

One of the few benefits of the months' worth of effort was that we had plenty of time to save up airline points, which meant that we were able to cross the pond in business class. A suggestion: If one is going to leave the country of one's birth to live in a foreign land where one barely speaks the language and knows almost nobody, I highly recommend lie-flat seats, kind flight attendants who ply you with champagne, and "fresh fruit and a selection of fine cheeses paired with olive oil sea salt flatbread" to calm one's nerves.

We landed in Madrid at around 6AM, but our AirBnB host informed us that the apartment wouldn't be ready until 2:30 PM, which meant that we needed something to do with our jet-lagged bodies and battered bags for six hours. We ended up slumming at a bad airport diner for half of it, and walking aimlessly around the city for the other half, but eventually we got there. We're in a neighborhood called Ibiza. It's a nice mix of residential and commercial, tree-lined streets and businesses, just to the east of the Retiro park⁴...if we ended up finding an apartment here I don't think we'd mind at all.

The AirBnB is cute but, by American standards small -- a 2BR/1BA with maybe 700 square feet. Based on our searches on Idealista (a Spanish website that's a sort of a cross between Zillow and Apartments.com), we may have to get used to that.

...and that's the story so far. More updates on our journey, potentially amusing pez-fuera-del-agua⁵ stories, and hopefully insightful and thoughtful observations on life in Spain to follow. ¡Hasta luego!

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¹ This will be a theme that echoes throughout the blog. If you mark the birth of Spain as a country from 1469 C.E./the marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella/unification of Castile and Aragon, then the Spanish have had roughly 550 years to perfect the art of bureaucracy. The result is that getting anything done involves a multiplicity of ministries, offices, regulations, and procedures, not to mention forms, most of which are required to be submitted in hard copy and signed in ink -- no emailing PDFs here. ↩︎

² Visados de residencia no lucrativa (non-lucrative visas, or NLV). ↩︎

³ The above isn't even close to a complete list of everything we needed to accomplish before leaving, but I'm trying to recap 18 months of prep work without boring you. Don't even ask, for example, about the process involved in getting permission for two cats to move to Spain; suffice to say that it involves a petition to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. ↩︎

⁴ See the old blog (https://robbtravelsandtalks.wordpress.com/2023/08/29/day-5-un-cuento-sobre-dos-ciudades-7442-mi/) for more details on the Retiro. ↩︎

⁵ "Fish-out-of-water".↩︎