We leave in a week! Sorry for all the pre-departure writing, but honestly so much of this trip is about preparing for the trip that we wanted to write about this part too.
There’s a scene from the movie Babel of a couple at a restaurant in Morocco that has stuck with me since the one time I saw it. I just rewatched it. The couple is played by Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett, and they’re angry with each other over something recent but unsaid. As they sit in low chairs under a ragged tent ordering food they don’t want, Cate says, “Richard, why do we come here?”
She’s talking about what they put themselves through to feel something—implying that the intent of adventurous travel doesn’t match the reality. The scene emphasizes their disinterest in the local people—ordering cokes in English without making eye contact with the serving boy—and their distrust of everything around them—throwing out the ice in their glasses because Cate’s character fears it was made with bad water.
I saw Babel only once, in 2006 in a theater, with Kelly, my new girlfriend who lived in the mountains near Vail. Kelly seemed like a great person to travel with, but would we end up like those characters—planning trips to the other side of the world and ending up hot, irritated, and homesick for two weeks?
We didn’t.
One thing that Kelly and I see the same way is that traveling must be about more than observing culture and places but actually participating in them. And to be more specific, I’m not talking about putting on a traditional garment and joining in a folk dance on your Thursday night trip itinerary.
Two things I’ve learned that help immerse you in another culture are to build something with the locals, and to obtain something from the local government. Both require learning rules and norms and spending time without wearing a mask of tourism.
As of this writing, I still have not set foot in Spain, but even before we leave, we have started connecting with the place in a way that feels more permanent and subtle than what would happen if we booked a two week tour.
The first is that we applied for a work visa, and the second is that we got a long term lease on a house. I’ll share the stories of how we did these two things, and maybe by doing so, I’ll be able to reveal the door I’m trying to open in myself to let in Spanish culture.
Getting a visa
Since I often handle the business, bureaucracy, and legal stuff that our family does, it fell to me to try to get visas to be able to stay legally in Spain for a year.
Fortunately, we have a Spanish citizen friend that was able to help us get a work visa. The specific details of the type of visa and how we got it are unimportant. For this story, let’s just say it’s a high-effort, high reward visa. With it, we’ll be able to stay in Spain indefinitely, and would even have the option to become citizens if we love it that much.
One of the things we needed for our visa is a notarized, apostilled, officially translated copy of my college diploma. No I didn’t know what that meant when I first read the requirement. And it took me six tries to get it right.
First try: I got an electronic copy of my diploma and sent it to a translator. “This isn’t notarized or apostilled,” they said.
Second try: I sent a copy of my diploma to the apostille, which is a Massachusetts state government office that puts official looking seals and ribbons on documents to signify their authenticity. “This hasn’t been notarized,” they said
Third try: I asked my college to notarize the diploma and send it directly to the apostille. Score! I got a notarized, apostilled diploma in return. BUT! Our lawyer noticed that the diploma wasn’t the fancy one with the seals and the embossed paper. Spain needs the fancy one.
Fourth try: My fancy diploma is buried in a box in the basement somewhere, and I didn’t want to look for it. I asked my college if they could make a new fancy one, notarize it, and send it to the apostille. They did! It took 5 weeks, and I finally got the notarized, fancy diploma back from Massachusetts. BUT! Our lawyer in Spain noticed that nowhere on the diploma did it say I studied computer science—a requirement of the type of visa I was getting.
Fifth try: I asked my college to write a letter saying I studied computer science and listing the requirements of the major, notarize it, and send it to the apostille. Two weeks later, the apostille returned the letter to me along with a letter of their own saying it could not be apostilled because the letter had been notarized with a BLUE STAMP!!!! AAAAAAHHHHHH!!!! WHAT!!!!!????
Sixth try: I got on a red eye to Massachusetts, drove to Amherst where I grabbed a copy of that letter that had been notarized with a BLACK stamp, drove it to Springfield, and walked it into the apostille. Smiled ruefully when they marveled that I had come all the way from Colorado, and walked out with the completed document.
From the first try to the sixth try was eight months—September 2021 to April 2022. I had never faced such bureaucratic resistance. In March, I wrote to my friend Fede in Spain, “I have been working on this since September. I almost want to give up.”
He said, “Noo Jon! The most challenging thing was the College certificate. We are almost done. Don’t give up.” I needed to hear that.
The thing about bureaucracy is that perseverance eventually pays off. And sure enough, After trying six times to get my college diploma, three times getting our marriage license (because they are only valid for three months), and two times getting our criminal background check (again because they expired the first time), we finally got all the documents in order, submitted them via our lawyer in Spain, and 2 weeks later received a letter from the Spanish government that our request for a work visa had been approved.
Done, right? Nope! There was still one more hurdle. We had to take some additional documents, along with our letters of approval from Spain, and our passports in person to the Spanish Consulate in Los Angeles. To do this requires an appointment. One appointment for the family? No. One appointment for each member of the family. Easy right? No. They are always booked. There’s a window of time at noon pacific each day where eight appointments are released 30 days in the future. At that moment, it is possible to book appointments for about 30 seconds. So how do you get 4 appointments on the same day within 30 seconds? You need four screens, and two people, and to have pre-registered four accounts in the appointment booking system.
We learned this trick by reading some other blogs and expat Facebook group posts, and by trial and error. It took a week of attempts to get four appointments close enough together to book flights for the family to LA.
The actual appointment at the LA Consulate to submit our visa applications was fairly uneventful other than giving us a glimpse of the type of stern, middle aged bureaucrat who appreciates brevity and organization we will likely meet in Spain. Kelly faced her appointment alone and I didn’t brief her on the organization of her folder with more than 10 documents in it, and she was sent back to her chair by the consulate matron with a clear and not entirely unkind, “You are not organized, my friend!”
As I write this, I’m still a bit tired from a 20 hour trip to LA to pick up our completed visas two days ago. Given that we leave next week, our timing couldn’t have been better.
Getting a house
One of the most fun parts of planning to go abroad is imagining where you’ll live. Spain has a website similar to Zillow called Idealista where we were able to browse furnished houses for rent. It became Kelly’s pastime. Looking through our text message history, there are fun rental options going all the way back to October, 2021.
When I would sometimes come up to our bedroom to sleep after staying up a bit longer than Kelly, I would walk into the dark room, but there would still be a faint glow from her phone as she was scrolling Idealista.
Before our visa was assured, Kelly scrolled Idealista mostly to get a sense of where apartments and houses were available, and how much they cost. From her scrolling, it seemed like the inventory was good and the prices were good.
Then, when our visa looked certain, it was time to get serious. This was just before summer, and it coincided with a sharp drop in inventory and rise in prices. We suddenly learned that the area we wanted to live is a summer rental zone. All the furnished places on Idealista switched from annual rentals to very expensive two-week-at-at-time rentals.
We feverishly wrote to the real estate agents of the few that were available. Each interaction took a whole day because of the time difference. We would wake up to messages about places not being available until September.
There was one, one in particular that looked so good. It was in an old world vacation-y section of the coast called Baiona. It had a pool, it had a friggin barbeque building, ocean views, and it was in our price range at $2300 euros per month. The real estate agent sent us a video tour, and we got deeply emotionally attached.
We told the real estate agent we wanted it. Kelly showed the kids, we both showed our friends, and out of nowhere the real estate agent said that it had been rented. Snapped up from under us.
And yet, it’s still listed as of June 29th. We think maybe we scared them off by telling them we were American and starting to ask questions about the lease length.
Without that house, the pickings were looking meager. I told Kelly that there would be more houses, and that we just needed to be patient for the summer rental phase to pass. We could get a temporary Airbnb when we arrived and switch to our fulltime home in September.
Not so fast, Jon. Our visa has a rule that you have to be registered with the government as a resident within 30 days of arriving. Guess what? Appointments are hard to get. Guess what else? Before you can make your appointment you have to register with your local community, and in order to do that, you need evidence of a long term lease. Hahaha! Now what?
This is where I had a stroke of beginner’s luck. Kelly, who had used Idealista for so many hours that she has permanent muscle memory, immediately nixed one of the houses I found. “Super far from where we are looking,” she said in reply to my text.
She followed with, “Actually, maybe not if you read the description.”
In my naïve, Idealista beginner’s approach, I found a misaddressed house. It was sitting there not getting attention from house hunters because it looked like it was in an undesirable neighborhood.
Skip forward a couple emails, video tours, and contract signing, and the house was ours! Kelly was so mad, and glad.
I’m not going to poke any kind of fun at the elaborate rules of Spanish bureaucracy. I will just say that I’m a changed person. If all this had been easy, the victory of walking out of the consulate with 4 visa adorned passports and securing an impossible to find long term rental would not taste so sweet.
So instead of me poking fun, I’ll share this video where the Spanish poke fun at themselves. So so so much funnier having lived it.
We might do one more post before we go! Alana has, maybe, something fun she wants to share.
—Jon