My wife hated her job. I wanted her to retire so that she could get back to enjoying life. We talked to our financial planner. I planned to continue working — I work online for my brother. Do we have the finances to pull it off? Yes, our planner said, if you can figure out health care because we're both too young for Medicare. Thus was born the idea of becoming expats somewhere.
I'll spare you the details, but for numerous reasons Spain came up the winner. We started the process of moving, getting the visas, etc., in early 2017 and were able to book our one-way trip for this past Thursday, arriving Friday morning into Barcelona. We live about 30 minutes west of the airport.
So...Hey, Karl, how was your first day with a Spanish address?
Glad you asked...here's the long version...
...we flew from Miami to Barcelona by way of Lisbon, on TAP (Portugese) Airline. [baggage story omitted - maybe another time] The flight was uneventful. The food was only so-so, though the women on the crew had the coolest uniform gloves - two tone leather, says my wife Andy. We landed in Lisbon at 5:[mumble] in the morning and neither of us really slept. We were just there to change planes, but even so, the immigration line was 45 minutes long. We had a little over an hour to make our connection so we weren't actually worried. But we had the pleasant surprise, with 45 minutes before the flight, of hearing a Portugese official say, "Anyone going to Barcelona on the 6:30 flight, come over here" and we were bumped to the head of the line. Five minutes later, we were walking to our connecting gate...
...and walking. How far away can Gate 07 be? Well, that turns out to be lowest number they use and we were coming into the terminal at the other end. So we walked at least 20 minutes to get to the gate, where they were indeed already boarding the flight.
That was all good, though, because when we landed in Barcelona, we got to grab our bags and then leave. Coming in directly from the USA, you have to stand in the enormous line for immigration in Barcelona airport - it was routinely 90 minutes to get through. Doing immigration in Lisbon let us avoid BCN immigration. Skipping that step was a real treat.
...and there was my sister, Dawn, with a smile on her face, to greet us at the exit from the bag claim. What a welcome sight! Dawn met and married a Spaniard while teaching middle school Spanish in Manhattan. When her husband was recalled back to the mother ship in Barcelona some 10+ years ago, she moved, of course. She speaks fluent Spanish and is pretty darn good with Catalan now. Thus, she is the perfect sister. :-)
She scooped us up, and headed directly to Sitges to pick up our apartment keys. We got the keys in just a couple of minutes and headed to the apartment to dump off all of the bags, including a couple of enormous suitcases we had parked at Dawn's a couple of months ago. Dawn finally got a chance to see our place, and took a picture of two jetlagged people on our terrace. It's so easy to second-guess yourself on picking a place to live. Walking into the apartment and seeing the view again helped us realize we had made a great choice. The mosquitos thought so, too. They greeted us in force because the workmen who had been there last week left a couple of windows open. Windows don't have screens in Spain - at least we haven't seen any. So the dust from the workmen plus the mosquitos gave us a to-do item: clean the whole place. [We actually did that on Day 2. First we had some other chores.]
It was Friday so we decided to be daring and try to get some paperwork-type tasks done. Let's go open our bank account. After all, we had a slew of cash with us to pay rent for the next several months, and we wanted to put it into a bank ASAP. Our little town (Les Roquetes) has a couple of choices. The first bank we tried had a sign up saying, basically, "Use the ATM, we're closed," even though it was during posted business hours. Ooookay, we went across the street to the bank that was open. It was roughly 11:30. We got called to the desk of Elia, who was very pleasant and happy to open an account for us. Thank goodness for Dawn, who could answer all 500 questions that Elia had. "Do you want a credit card? Who's getting a debit card?" and so on...One of the questions was, "Do you have renter's insurance? We sell that here. Would you like a quote?"
No, we don't and Yes, we would. Another several questions later, and she had all of the information she needed. Dawn and Elia agreed that generating all the paperwork for signatures would be a while, so we'd leave and come back before they closed at 2:00. So around 12:15 we walked a few blocks to the Ajutament (think Town Hall) to get some required paperwork that we'd need next week.
Mirabile dictu, there was no line. Dawn was delighted because she said it's easy for the lines to be 30-60 minutes and in Barcelona proper, even longer. The lady was super pleasant but she needed a copy of our lease. Andy reminded me that I had it in my e-mail but my phone doesn't have a Spanish service plan yet, so it's wifi only and the office doesn't have wifi. Dawn to the rescue again! She turned on her phone's hotspot, I connected, snarfed up the lease and e-mailed it to the very patient lady who let us sit at her station and do the twiddling we needed to do to make the magic happen. And then she very efficiently printed out the stuff we need, gave it official stamps, and sent us on our way with a parting gift - a little compost container and some biodegradable liners for it. Who'd a thunk it, the Spanish are very big into recycling. Anwayway...Back to the bank, where Elia was ready with a raft of paperwork for us to sign.
We signed our lives away and had a bank account. "Come by here on Thursday and you can pick up your cards. Now did you want to deposit some money?" Oh yes, here's $9000 US. Elia didn't exactly go pale, but she went to check with someone and came back to say, "You'll need to see a teller." She got us bumped to the front of the line - at this point it was after posted closing time of 2:00 - shook our hands, and moments later was out the door. Her day was over. The teller finished up with his existing customer. Yeah, only one teller still working at this point. It took a good 15 minutes for him to determine that he'd have to take our deposit in two transactions - some limitation of the system he had never bumped into before. Of course.
Dawn was delighted that we got both chores done before siesta. We celebrated by eating lunch at a place Elia recommended. Paella, sea bass, drink and dessert all for 10 euros. It was enough food that Andy took home her sea bass and didn't order dessert at all. My dessert was the cremé Catalunya -
creme bruleé as done here. Yum. Dawn had the chocolate mousse, also delicious.
After lunch, how about a little shopping at the grocery store? Major purchases included tons of cleaning supplies and the cheapest bottle of red wine they sell - that would be for 89 cents. We did buy a few edible items but the focus was cleaning. Real food shopping would wait until Day 2.
Dawn ran us up to the apartment where we unloaded the car and then she dropped us off in town as she headed back to Esplugues. We needed sheets for the bed that our landlord had left in one of the small bedrooms. So we walked from store to store to see what we found.
We found a good bed/mattress store. And with not a lot of effort, we found a wonderfully firm-but-comfortable mattress. And bought ourselves a bed. They'll deliver the mattress next week and the rest of the bed in a couple of weeks. Everything is made to order so nothing was available in stock. The nice young saleslady spoke less English than our Spanish, so we both used her computer terminal to Google translate questions and answers. Thank goodness for technology, eh? Figuring out mattress sizes was an adventure in itself.
But we still didn't have sheets for our bed. So onward we trekked, across the street to Conforama (I call it IKEA-Lite), and after a bit of digging and guessing, found sheets that would fit. Then walk back up the hill to home - Dawn told us the next day that it was 2.5 km, which is about a mile and half. We were completely zonked at that point. We drank a bunch of water, but it was still light out so we didn't go right to bed. Sunset here is at about 9:15 or so. We sat on the deck and enjoyed the view for a little while.
Bedtime came quickly enough and we slept from 10 until 8 in the morning. And now we're on Spanish time, just like that.
More stories from Spain as I get the chance...