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And now we live in Spain...5 years on [1]

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Date: 2022-08-02

The Catalan city of Vilanova i la Geltru as seen from the terrace of the house we lived in during 2020-21.

We moved from the US to Spain five years ago. It was a coincidence that TFG had been elected just as we started the paperwork (honest!). Since then, we've moved twice, visited (let me count...) 14* European countries (Italy alone 5 times), and settled into the Spanish lifestyle pretty fully.

What's that mean? Breakfast rarely happens before 10 a.m., Lunch is never before 2, and dinner can be as late as 10 or 11 p.m. When we moved here, none of that was normal. But Spain gets under your skin. We've learned that restaurants are happy to serve lunch until 3:30 or 4:00, but your favorite dinner places probably don't start serving until 8:00 p.m.

We’ve learned to navigate the government agencies quite well. After we let a specialist law firm file our income taxes (for Spain) the first year, I decided I could do it myself. And I've had no trouble doing that for the past four years. We have learned to wriggle through the morass that is the government website to make appointments and submit paperwork for our visa renewals.

Our initial residency visa was for one year. The renewal was for two more years. Then another two year renewal. Now, after 5 years, we qualified for (and have received) a “long duration status.” Essentially, it means they've thrown their hands in the air and said, “I guess you're not going away. Stay as long as you like. In fact, you can get a job if you want and you can bring your parents to live with you, too.” Considering the mambo we had to dance to provide renewal paperwork before this status, it was surprisingly low key to get long term residency. [Details available. Ask in the comments if you care and I'll expound.]

Spain handled Covid better than most countries. We were locked down hard for a while, then the national health system coordinated vaccinations. We had private insurance and weren't in the national system at all when Covid started. We got registered in the system and they immediately treated us as though we'd been in the system from the start. We got reminders and notifications about boosters and such. They surprised my wife by making a breast cancer screening appointment; they made the appointment for her and sent her a text saying, “Show up on .” Today, I think Spain's the most vaccinated European country. I know more than 89% of eligibles have been vaxed.

The reasons for moving to Spain haven't really changed: groceries and rent are far less expensive than in the US. Health insurance is gold plated and way cheaper than America (we're paying about $400/month covering both of us 60-something-year-olds). Travel within Europe is getting back to being convenient. With travel getting back to normal, we'll be out and about, visiting the places we still want to see. We just made reservations for my first Oktoberfest in Munich. My wife Andy is itching to get to Macedonia, so that's very high on the list, and we have friends from Croatia who urge us to see that beautiful country. And I really want to go to Scotland — maybe next spring.

Our Spanish is still progressing at the same rate as our residency. We speak it live five-year-olds. We can read it pretty well now, though, and I feel pretty comfortable reading signs written in Catalan. Haven't even *tried* to speak it, though. That's a bridge too far.

We've gotten pretty involved volunteering with Democrats Abroad. Andy supports Spain quite a lot and both of us do work for the global IT support team. We work online with wonderful Americans around the world now and have had a chance to meet people here in Barcelona and also when we're traveling. We (Dems Abroad) know how important our votes are and we work pretty much nonstop to help people vote from wherever they are. If you've read this far and you know someone who lives overseas, make sure they know about VoteFromAbroad.org — it's a nonpartisan effort that DA runs to make it easy to register and request ballots from every state and territory.

Originally, we were thinking this move would be for the five years that it would take for us both to be eligible for Medicare. That happens this month. But the US still feels a lot like a dumpster fire, even as the Dems try to put out the blaze. So we're in no hurry to move back. We do have parents in their 80's on the east coast (NC for me, GA for Andy) so trips back across the pond will continue to be part of our lifestyle. For now, we'd just prefer to be based here, a block from the beach, with 300 days of sunshine every year.

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* — Austria, Czechia, England, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Malta, Portugal, Serbia, Slovakia, Switzerland. If you'd like my impression of any of them, just ask in the comments.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/8/2/2114017/-And-now-we-live-in-Spain-5-years-on

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