We’re back in Colorado now and slowly reconnecting with old friends. Before we got home, at a restaurant in Stockholm, Kelly and I took on a serious tone with the kids and told them they needed to be prepared for something.
Kelly said, “People are going to ask you how your year was, Jonah. What are you going to say?”
I laughed and said, “People in the valley are so into their daily routines, they won’t have any clue what we’ve been through. They’ll be like, ‘Didn’t you go somewhere? Where were you again? Italy?’”
As I pulled my truck into dusty, hot, driveway with 8 suitcases, three boxes, 3 duffle bags, and a giant surfboard bag, our neighbor looked over from her porch. She tapped out her cigarette, stood up, and said, “Welcome back! Remind me where you guys were at? Italy?"
The thing is that for the people that were here while we were away, they didn’t go through a transformative experience, and there’s no way to answer the question “how was it?” and actually communicate what it was like in just a few words.
I’m not even going to try do that in this post.
Instead I’ll give myself a grade on a few of my goals for living abroad. Let’s see how I did.
Surf: B-
I wanted to surf every day. I surfed a lot, and I had some unforgettable sessions, but I didn’t surf nearly every day (either because of poor conditions or being a busy parent). I also wanted to finally get properly barreled, but that didn’t happen either.
The closest I got to barreled was at the appropriately named Supertubos in Portugal. It is about 3.5 hours south of Vigo, so I couldn’t go there often. One rainy day in January, I agreed to meet an American friend for lunch in Lisbon, so I decided to hit Supertubos on the way south. The conditions were perfect—not too crowded, small barrels, and no wind to cause them to close up.
Early in the session, a wave came my way, I stood up on it, turned down the line, saw the lip forming, got excited that it was going to go right over my head, and then it landed directly on my head.
It landed with so much force that my stance was driven deeper than my ankles would allow. After that wave, I was a bit scared, and I didn’t get anymore good chances. My ankle was moderately sprained, so I limped back to my car, through, Lisbon, and around Vigo for the next few days.
Nonetheless, I got some great days in, I surfed in storms and large waves, and acquainted myself with a whole section of European coast from Southern Portugal to northern Spain. I already miss surfing in Spain.
Spanish: B+
I secretly wanted my Spanish skills to catch up with Kelly’s. That was too much to hope for. She still speaks more fluently and makes significantly fewer grammar mistakes than I do, but I think my ability to understand and hear Spanish is fairly close to hers. I also think I finished my year in Spain knowing a few more Spanish specific idioms and slang than her because I put in a bunch of time watching Spanish soccer and TV shows.
A few Spanish speaking highlights for me:
Sitting in a room full of young adults sitting for the Spanish drivers test. Not understanding the proctor when he asked everyone if we needed a “justificacion,” but feeling a little better when my test taking neighbor also didn’t know what that was, but ultimately passing the driver's test in Spanish. (Turns out the justificacion is like a doctor’s note. You bring it to work and they have to excuse your lateness by law.)
Feeling the combination of dentist nerves and second language nerves in the dentist chair, but learning the word for swishing: enjuagar.
Being in charge of 10 preteens at Alana’s birthday party and regulating their ice cream purchases—in Spanish (difficult even in English.)
Listening to an audiobook in Spanish that doesn’t have an English translation.
Making friends with and really getting to know the parents of my kids’ school friends (in Spanish)
Having relevant things to add about the local soccer team while getting my haircut at the barber shop. Possibly my proudest moment.
Portuguese: D
As for my endeavor to learn Portuguese, the experience was quite different. One of the reasons we were going to live near Portugal is to spend a lot of time there and start learning Portuguese. We did spend a lot of time there, but we didn’t learn the language.
Several times I talked to Kelly about getting in contact with a tutor, but each time we felt too busy to commit. Studying for the stupid driving test ate up like 2 months of our free time.
I guess I’ll give myself just a tiny bit of credit that these days I can understand and read Portuguese slightly better than I could last year.
But I can barely order food in Portuguese without sliding into speaking Spanish.
Business: B+
In my wildest dreams, Kelsus, my software consulting business, would have tapped into the Europe market and started building a team in Spain and working with clients in Northern Europe.
Both of these things kind of happened. While we haven’t hired any software developers in Spain, we have helped several Argentinians relocate there, and now have a growing team in Mallorca.
Near the end of our year, just before we had to madly start packing our stuff, I flew to Mallorca to visit with the team. My flight landed at midnight, so I didn’t get to my teammate’s apartment where I’d be staying until one in the morning. I expected I’d just quietly enter and go right to bed. Nope! I walked into a room with more than a dozen Argentinians having a lively conversation, shouting welcomes to me, and getting ready to cut the cake for a birthday party.
Without a doubt, I have my dream job.
I also started seeking new clients in northern Europe by attending conferences in Copenhagen and Stockholm. Fede from Mallorca, one of my best friends and colleagues at Kelsus, joined me for both conferences. We did our jobs and had 20 meetings at each conference, but we also got to eat at incredible Scandinavian restaurants. Dream job.
At these conferences, I met people that lead to me becoming a business mentor for startups at Stockholm Techstars and for Copenhagen Fintech. It’s been intimidating to join mentorship meetings full of European corporate veterans, but they seem to enjoy my enthusiasm for startup life and building software at least to the extent that they invite me back. These relationships are still relevant to Kelsus, and will likely bring my back to Copenhagen in September for more networking and business building.
Friends: A-
I went in thinking I’d get to know people because of my interests—surfers, technologists, etc. But the surfing community is close knit and slow to warm to outsiders, and Vigo doesn’t have much of a technologist meetup scene like Lisbon or Barcelona.
In the end, it was our kids that really helped us make friends. We got to know a few parents of their friends from school. We even had a birthday party for Jonah that was the biggest party we’ve ever thrown.
It’s so hard to make friends as an adult and especially in just one year, and even more especially when you can’t live on the reduced sleep schedule that the late night culture of Spain requires. But we did it, and if we stayed for 2 more years or 10 more years, the shape of a community we would spend time with was already forming.
I hope to be able to go back and visit these friends maybe even as soon as next summer.
If we could do it over again, we might have tried to figure out a way to host the kids’ classmates’ parents at our house earlier in the year, because then we probably would have had a shorter length of time in the beginning of the year without really knowing anyone.
One last thing on friends. The longer I run Kelsus (more than 10 years now), the more I realize that the people I work with are some of my closest friends, and I take them with me everywhere I go in this silver box that I’m typing into right now. In February, I went to Uruguay see them in person at our annual offsite that we call Kelsus Camp. I spent the entire week immersed in Spanish and laughed that I had to leave Spain to finally get real practice with my Spanish
Travel: A
When we arrived, I felt unhurried about travel. We had all the time we needed to get to know Spain and the rest of Europe. Turns out that Spain is big, and Europe is big.
I went in thinking I wanted to surf Mundaka, Hossegor, and Morocco. I wanted to check out Prague, spend some time in the Alps, and maybe finally make it to Scotland—a place I have wanted to go since reading and watching Trainspotting 25 years ago. None of those trips happened, and yet we traveled a ton—11 countries, 15 Airbnbs, and miles of time in planes, trains, boats, and automobiles.
Our trips to Egypt and Scandinavia were so good they occupy almost as much brain real estate for me as our entire rest of the year in Vigo.
Also, after all the travel we did, we learned that it’s what our family is great at. Our kids have yet to be music prodigies or to earn their place in the gold medal skier factory that is Vail youth sports, but they can crush overnight trains and planes. And, when Kelly and I start planning a new trip, we get in the zone, bending Airbnb, booking.com, and all the rest to our wills.
I hope not to let these skills get rusty in the coming years.
Family: A+
Wow, did we grow together. We spent every waking hour together some months. We helped each other through times where we felt foreign and alone.
At one point after about 20 days on the road through Scandinavia, I told Kelly about a TikTok video I had seen where a mom was walking the thin line between bragging about her family’s six week European vacation and complaining that she couldn’t take another minute with her family.
Kelly told me that Scandinavia has extremely high divorce rates, and that there’s always a big wave of divorces right after the monthlong summer holidays.
We didn’t say anything for a second. Then we laughed and said, “just one more week.” We both looked nervously at the kids who were plugged in for their fourth hour of screen time that day.
We celebrated milestones (sometimes for the second time as in Alana’s second graduation from elementary school). We took more pictures this year than in any prior year because we had good reasons to want to remember what we were doing.
After a year of such vivid and full on living, I don’t know how I will handle returning to a predictable routine.
While I was in Spain, everyone I talked to wanted to tell me about the time they were in America or the person they knew who moved here. Then they would give me the time and space to talk to them even when it meant being patient with my slower than average Spanish.
If I can bring that care and time into my interactions here, and not be the busy person who doesn’t fully stop walking while saying, “Oh weren’t you guys abroad or something?” then maybe my routine life will get just a little bit better.
—Jon
I love hearing about your experiences and I can obviously relate to so much. When I came back from China, even though it was SO hard to live there, I learned so much about myself and what I was capable of enduring. Those self learnings have been so critical in shaping my identity. It’s also why Josiah and I really like to spend money on experiences, especially the ones you know you’ll never forget! I selfishly hope we get many more opportunities to travel with you guys again the future! And when the kids are ready for solo travel…feel free to ship them over to us!