not for the weak

the rule is, when moving your family to another country later in life, just don't freak out at the same time. take turns.

Jul 24, 2024

just a random little street near our house in our adorable little town.

listen, this picking up your life in your 50s and moving to another country, to a house that needs a lot of work? it is not for the weak. NOT for the weak. thankfully, so far, massi and i have kept our freak-outs on separate timetables, so we haven’t been in the “what have we just done” mode at the same time. suerte tenemos.

there is so much to figure out: where’s the good grocery store? who has sour cream? how do we get our child in school? how do we open up a bank account (banks are notoriously not easy to work with, customer service is Not their strong suit, but i did finally have my first good experience with a bank-BBVA). all the normal moving-to-a-new-place stuff is overwhelming on its own.

then you add that we are in a town of 7-800 people (no, not seven thousand eight hundred. seven hundred or eight hundred only.) this means that there are two restaurants in town, one tiny-even by spain’s standards-grocery store, one bakery, one pharmacy… you get the idea. everything you need, but the choices are vastly more limited than what we had access to when we lived in barcelona. here, we’ll have to go to stores in various small towns 10-30 minutes from here. that was frustrating me, until i realized that’s what i did in grand rapids. if i wanted to go to target, for example, that was a 20 minute drive. favorite grocery store, bridge street market, easily 20 minutes, more if the traffic is bad.

there are so many things to set up, learn, navigate. we had to get phones and figure out a new mobile phone system. we’ll need to find a new doctor, and get all of our health needs set up with a new system. on the list goes. it’s a lot.

so THEN to add onto that, we gave ourselves another layer (yay?): figuring out how to fix up a 300+ year old house in a country where you are not familiar with their hardware stores AND though you may be able to carry on a conversation in spanish (and are just getting started in catalan), you don’t know hardware store terms for things like skim-coat plaster, or trowel, or …hardly anything.

the layers!

as you can imagine with all these layers + a wicked case of jet lag + getting sick, things are going much more slowly than we had anticipated. we have been here a week now, and it would be easy to think we haven’t got much done. but we have phone plans, a bank account, visited the mayor’s office for a variety of things, and even started peeling of layer upon layer of wallpaper in preparation of painting. so considering, when not overwhelmed with how much is left to do, i would say we’re doing pretty good. unfortunately still, the energy to create regular content on tiktok and instagram is… fleeting at best. plus the urge to just pasear with the neighbors and just live life here is much more appealing than the socials. we’ll keep sharing as we can, i promise! in the meantime, we’ll keep navigating new systems, finding the right resources, and pulling wallpaper. i mentioned the layers? yeah, the layers of wallpaper is overwhelming too.

but as long as we take turns freaking out, i think we’ll be okay.