So You Want To Move To Spain?

Five things that might drive you nuts when you do

A lot can be said about the wonders of Spain for international expats - the sun, relaxed way of life, friendly people, tasty food, decent healthcare and education.

All well and good. Maybe another post will see me waxing lyrical about the virtues of this Iberian land, my home for the last five months.

But visiting a country and living there are very different, as I have found out. Things that seem quaint and authentic when you visit can drive you nuts when they form part of your daily life.

1. Dead afternoons

It isn’t the same in some of the bigger cities, but here in Vitoria, capital of the Basque Country, everything closes down from 1 to 4 or 5. My working hours as an English teacher tend to be mornings and evenings with hours in the afternoon free, so this doesn’t work so well with my schedule. Even if everyone is at home having lunch, I am surprised I can hear so little. In Cuba, you hear everyone IN their homes, talking, making noise, playing music. Here……silence.

2. Insanely late mealtimes

Many people here eat around 10 pm, and go to bed later than I usually would. If you meet friends with kids on a weekend, it has to be in the morning or after nap time around 6 pm, which is around when I’d like to be heading home and cooking dinner for the family.

I yearn for a typical UK afternoon out with friends and family and then returning home tired and happy, ready to eat, relax and prepare for the next day.

Many times I’ve taken Loren out to play after our lunch before it gets dark and cold, and there are NO other children in the streets or playparks. Poor Loren spends her time trying to spot potential new friends, and by the time they start coming out of their houses after the afternoon indoors, I am thinking of getting Loren home.

I would much rather be outside in daylight hours with some vague sun and 15c temperature than in 7c cold once the sun has gone down. My British internal clock cannot be reset, it seems.

3. Driving here is a little terrifying, even though I’ve been doing it all my life

While I come from a small island where we insist on driving on the other side of the road, that is not the main problem for me. OK, maybe a little. My brain is still a little hardwired to want to turn left on traffic circles and drive in the slow lane on the left.

Driving in Spain is worthy of an article alone but, in short —roundabouts. In Britain, I learnt to move to the centre if you want to go most of the way around to turn off, but in Spain, some use only the outside lane. This means when you come to move towards the edge of the roundabout to exit, you can’t because that lane is occupied by Spaniards going round in circles.

Then, pedestrian crossings are placed just at the start of the roads coming off the roundabouts, so before you even totally turn off the roundabout, you have to stop to let people cross — and hope that no bad driver on the roundabout shunts you from behind. I’d much rather at least get a few metres away from the roundabout before having to stop.

Cars feel free to pass you in any lane they can. I prefer the slow lane to avoid any problems, but if I am in the middle, I have to be super careful switching lanes because cars will overtake me on either side. I am not usually a slow driver, but now I take much more care because getting in my car in Spain feels like going on a fairground ride, with all the stomach-churning and nerves of steel that entails.

4. The infamous bureaucracy

Since we arrived here six months ago, we’ve learnt all about how difficult it can be dealing with officialdom. The most straightforward process was buying our car because we paid a ‘gestor’ to do all the transfer of ownership paperwork. I could not face more rounds of booking appointments on the internet to later discover I was missing some crucial document.

Every aspect of setting up here has been filled with paperwork that sometimes makes no sense — registering our presence with the local authorities to get the essential ‘padron’, this achieved only after moving to a bus on a campsite that was willing to give us a ‘rental contract’ and somewhere to live.

Then we applied for residency and tried to take out a family card to get our daughter into school. We were rejected for living on a campsite, and the school had to petition the authorities to have her admitted.

I went back and forth between three places before getting registered with social services, only once I had payslips could I take out a bank account, and we took out mobile phone contracts only after months of expensive pay-as-you-go.

My daughter is still not registered on my health insurance, and I am trying to figure out how, so I will have to pay for her recent hospital visit for bronchitis. Thankfully this is not the US, but whatever it costs, it was unavoidable. I couldn’t figure out the bureaucracy.

5. Everything Is Dubbed

I’m fluent in Spanish, so I can watch my favourite UK and American movies in Spanish if I need to. However, watching one’s favourite actors without their trademark voices is just not the same.

Dubbing has deep roots here, from back when sound first appeared in cinemas in the 1920s This massive advance in movie-making led to films being made in many languages, but at a time when nearly half the Spanish population was still illiterate, dubbing them was the only way many Spanish people could enjoy them.

After the Spanish Civil War, dictator Franco wanted to keep Spain as uni-lingual as possible, so films were only shown in Spanish. Even regional languages like Catalan, Basque or Galician were banned. Dubbing played an important role in controlling the portrayal of politics, sex, religion and the army.

By now, Spanish people are just not used to watching subtitled films. It means that English language academies like the one where I work are full of young kids whose parents have realised that English is important for their future, and they’re not going to learn it watching dubbed cartoons on the TV.

TO CONCLUDE

As a lover of international travel since I can remember, and sitting on the fence of two cultures through a Dutch mother and British father, I figured I’d be great at this cultural adaptation thing. But it gets harder as you get older and become a little less patient!

My advice to anyone moving to Spain, especially with family, is to be as prepared as you can. If you are an expat being relocated by your company, you should have people helping you anyway.

If you are like me, however, a life-long traveller and pretty adventurous, bear in mind that the life you imagine may not fall into place as quickly as you would like. The bureaucracy, which locals tell me got worse with the pandemic, and a lack of local support network, will be a hurdle to overcome.

Reading the blogs of other foreigners who moved here assures me that Spain is worth the hassle. We’ll just have to wait and see!