Update on Spain
Bureaucracy; Stand-up Comedy; Irrational Heat
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Well we have now officially lived abroad (in Spain) for four months, Since April 3rd. It’s fairly bizarre to say this because, for me, it feels like we’ve been here for much, much longer, perhaps a year, even two. I think part of the reason for this feeling is that since we left Portland, Oregon on April 2nd, it’s been such a radical and even “violent” shift from what we’re used to and have been used to all our lives that it feels like a shifting phantasmagoria of time. Sort of like COVID circa 2020 and 2021 in NYC.
So, at a third of a year in Spain, abroad, how do I feel?
Well, mixed, to be honest. Mostly good. Not working a conventional job is of course brilliant. The English-language AA meetings here are lovely and the 12-step community is solid and tight-knit. Eating out is fantastic when we do it because the international array of food here is incredible and delicious. It’s definitely a “foodie” town.
The art and architecture is profound; all we have to do is walk out of our apartment and through Plaza Espana across the street (Gran Via) and we’re trudging past The Royal Palace, the Almudena Cathedral, the Sabatina Gardens, Plaza de Oriente, Parque de Montana where people hang out around the Temple of Debod, not to mention trails everywhere from Parque de la Bombilla, Parque de la Casa de Campo, and so much more. The people in general are absurdly friendly. (It feels very un-American in this regard.) There are plenty of bookstores which makes me happy, even if there aren’t enough with a respectable English-language selection. (But there are some, including Desperate Literature, which I have frequented often.)
On the downside, however, are a few things. The heat, for one. Since somewhere around mid or late May it’s been more or less intolerably hot during the day. If you get out before say 10am, you’ll be ok, or after around 9, 9:30 pm (it stays light until close to 11pm), but anytime between that is brutal. Consistently it’s in the high nineties, sometimes cracking triple digits. The following week (the first opening week of August) is supposed to hit 103. (It did.) But at least it’s not humid. Some people like humidity because, in theory, it calms the heat by adding moisture.
But I’ve spent enough time on the East Coast and in the South (not to mention Portland) to know that, at least for me, I’d take a dry Las-Vegas-style 110 with low or no humidity over 80 and high humidity any day. Part of this could very well be the fact that I was born and raised in coastal and nearby mountain Southern California, Ventura and Ojai, where the humidity is low and the heat is dry. Ojai can sometimes get up to 108, 112 degrees (rare but it has happened, and certainly low triple digits in summer are normal) but it’s a desert-like dry heat. So I grew up with that.
The worst heat experience I ever had was while camping in my car in Northern Florida a few summers ago while driving back to California from the east coast. It might have been in the upper eighties, temperature wise, but the humidity was so brutally, syrupy thick that I felt like I could literally chop through it with a machete. It felt like swimming through earthy, nasty sludge while walking around. Horrible.
Britney goes on a little 25-minute jog/walk around 8, 8:30am, but I can’t do exercise in the mornings. I need a slow experience filled with silence, reading, and caffeine. Ergo, I go out sometimes during the day to walk around aimlessly or else hit a bookstore or else read at a coffee shop…when it’s not too crazy hot, but mostly, as of late, I simply stay indoors all day—reading, writing, working on my podcast—Sincere American Podcast—taking a “Siesta” (nap), coming up with new Substack essay ideas, etc. And then I go out generally around 9:30 pm, which is right when the temperature finally starts to abate. I enjoy walking, and lately running again (why did I ever stop) slowly into the dusk and finally darkness. I feel very safe walking around our area at night. Young people are out and about still en masse, walking, running, making out, eating outside at restaurants, etc. It’s a vibrant nightlife.
One thing we’ve done now either three or four times (I think four) is go to English-speaking local stand-up comedy. One of the guys I met in my AA meetings is a comic and we exchanged numbers and he’s invited me to several. They’re fun: Small, usually in the backs of or basements of bars. Ironically, a lot of AA folks go because we know this sober dude and he has connections with the bars and clubs and brings in money. (We buy soda and food instead of booze.) A young woman from Georgia (the country, not the US state) has been to I think every single event we’ve attended. She is one of the comics. She goes by the name “Echo.” She’s very funny. She jokes a lot about her complicated sex life, her differences between she and her parents, her dark, controlling nature, guys she breaks up with because they’re “too nice,” etc.
One night Britney and I walked into the bar for a show and, stupidly (on my end) we sat literally right up at the front. Like, two feet, maybe three, from the comics. Echo went first. She roasted the shit out of me. I laughed, and I genuinely enjoyed the jokes, but I also had not prepared for that much attention focused “on” me. (Aka, the whole bar of 35 people laughing at me.) One of her lines was this. She said (she’s 25) that one of her toxic traits is believing that older men are more mature. Then she looked at me and, totally serious, said, “How old are you?” I said my age (42), and she said, “See what I mean?”
Huge laughs.
We saw Echo again at The Comedy Lab, this time going without my connection, just going on our own. It was fun. Surprising us, Echo was one of the comics. It was a much bigger, more authentic, legitimate venue, with perhaps 100 people in actual seats and with a three or four-foot-high stage.
Echo was clearly drunk. Her eyes were half rolling back into her head. She told us she was on a date with a guy from Hinge. She pointed to the guy, sitting not far from us. The guy laughed. Most of her jokes fell flat. She seemed a little disoriented, a little hostile, and trying too hard. It was a new Echo. When one guy up front heckled her she got angry and told him, more or less, that he was full of shit. She did, we noticed, almost the exact same list of jokes as we’d heard her do before. That was interesting. Still, it was a good show.
The biggest “news” as of late is that we finally, FINALLY picked up our TIE card. (Tarjeta de Indentidad de Extranjero, a card foreigners with a visa are required to get to stay in the country for a year or more.) We’d “gotten” the TIE card before our three months of living in Spain had passed, but we had to wait longer to actually pick it up. We were anxious because of the disaster that occurred the first time we went to the police immigration place which you can read about here.
In the end picking up the TIE was, for Spain standards, a piece of cake. Two trains 30 minutes to the place. A 45-minute wait, a relatively short line, and a very fast card retrieval. An hour or a little over and we were walking back to the train. Thank god! I will say that the Spaniards, when it comes to their governmental bureaucracy, are pretty disorganized and borderline dysfunctional. First off, they almost never explain anything to you about the process or what’s going on once you’re actually there. The times don’t make much sense, because it gets so backed up; an 11:45am appointment might end up being at 12:30 or 1pm. The lines are often confusing and random and in the end people get called by time. If you do ask an officer for help, they’re liable to look at you with bored and irritated eyes and gesture to hand them your papers, and speak very briefly and very quickly, usually in Spanish. They obviously hate the Kafkian boredom and lazy absurdity of The System. And who could blame them? We feel like cattle being herded into the abattoir.
But, overall, Britney and I are both glad we left the States for a while, and we’re grateful to be here. As I mentioned before, we have now 100% officially decided to not renew our visa after our one year comes up in April, 2026. We’d already decided on leaving Madrid specifically because it’s primarily a young person’s city, a lot like Manhattan. (The culture and vibes are much, much more relaxed. But still.)
We’d already decided on getting out of the city either way. And then with the continually restrictive rules around the renewal process, it has made it easier to just leave Spain altogether. They now require that you have enough savings to last two years, in order to renew. That’s close to a hundred grand, just in savings. Yeah. We don’t have that. Not even close. Not to mention they now want to dig much further back in your bank account, check for work activity, etc. As Britney often says: It just feels like the Spanish government doesn’t want foreigners here as much as before. They seem to be pushing us out.
But, we also don’t yet feel (at least right now, at 1/3rd of a year in) like we want to leave Europe altogether and return to the States. That may end up happening sooner than we imagined before…but not yet. (And maybe we’ll end up staying longer-term; anything can happen and things can change, as they often do.) As I said previously, our current goal is Albania. Why Albania (which is 1300 to1600 miles east of Spain, bordering Macedonia, Greece, and near Italy along the Mediterranean)?
A few reasons. First, Americans can live there for a whole year without a visa at all. Yeah. That’s the biggest reason. But also, according to our research, much of Albania is: Incredibly low cost of living (dirt cheap); low crime; by the ocean; mellow. There are of course some downsides: Less to choose from as far as food; harder with language and communication (fewer people there speak English); some bureaucratic and governmental issues; not a wealthy first-world nation; etc.
But think of the travel: It borders Greece. It’s by Macedonia and Kosovo. Italy is right there. Serbia and Bulgaria are close. Montenegro borders the northern part of Albania. It would be a whole different experience. We’d be much deeper into Europe, closer to the eastern side. We could actually save money because of the profoundly low cost of living (a few hundred Euros per month can get you a big, spacious two, three-bedroom apartment). Most of the western side of Albania is on the Mediterranean, along the Adriatic Sea. And we wouldn’t even have to deal, at least that first year, with the governmental immigration bureaucracy.
I also plan to digitally apply for a visa for us for Thailand. You have to apply no more than three months ahead of the planned move. I’ll do this, with our expected plan to be Albania. But Thailand has become much easier over the past year. They now let in freelancers with a pretty middling amount of passive-income. So we’ll try.
*[Re the following commentary on my wife Britney’s drinking: I checked with her first and she read the material before I posted this. She gave me the thumbs-up.]
There’s also a slight tension between me and Britney around all of this. She’s been off alcohol (for the thousandth time) for close to six weeks. This time does seem different. She waffles sometimes: Is she an “alcoholic” or not. Her drinking is very, very different from how mine was before I got sober 15 years ago (15 years September 24th, next month). I was blacking-out, doing crazy shit, getting arrested and waking up in strange places with strange people. Britney has always been highly functional. She had the same job for 17, 18 years in Lompoc. She stayed in the same town. She raised a son. And her issue revolves not so much around drinking heavily as the psychological aspect of it.
*(Nota bene here, however: She has historically had some blackouts, including 2-3 since we’ve been together. She has had some wild/crazy experiences in the past which were alcohol-fueled. She has a history, before our relationship began in the summer of 2022, of partying and hard-drinking on and off. Still, overall and despite all those caveats, she has more or less been very functional…at least since we started dating.)
Britney will most often—when she was drinking—consume two glasses of wine when she drinks, and often only a few times per week. Sometimes that increases but that never lasts. She doesn’t get crazy, rarely does anything approximating “blacking out,” and gets everything she needs to get done…done. But. When she’s not drinking she obsesses about alcohol. And she almost always wants to drink more…she just stops herself most of the time. It’s that psychological obsession that gives her (and me) pause.
This time does feel different. She’s been not just “off” alcohol but taking action: Working out a lot more, focusing more on health and fitness, and reading books such as Jack Canfield’s The30 Day Sobriety Solution, Martha Beck’s The Way of Integrity, and Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way.
And I can see the changes in her, psychologically as well as physically.
All this to say: A part of her wants to return to the States, work again, be back in her own environment (not Lompoc but Portland or any number of other places we’ve considered) and establish “roots,” get some homelife stability, save up some money, travel when we can, maybe even buy another small house somewhere to rent out, if we can afford that at some point.
And I get this feeling. On the 24th of this month we’ll celebrate being together for three years. Three!!! It feels like a decade at least! Not in a bad way but in a realistic way. All the change. My father dying. Getting married. Traveling to Africa and Asia. Our dog dying. Britney leaving Lompoc after living there all her life. Her son moving out of her house. Us moving first to Portland and then abroad to Spain. Etc. The theme of our relationship has been change. Change.
And the thing is: Britney, like me, loves loves loves travel. (Part of our problem is that we both want to travel everywhere all the time.) But she is also a homebody when we’re not traveling. And she misses the States, as I sometimes do too. Before moving to Spain we went back and forth about how long we’d go for: First it was “forever,” then just one year, then 3-5 years, then forever again, and now a few years.
One thing I’ve learned about Britney, myself and the complex dynamic between us, is that the heat generated between us inevitably means sudden change, sometimes seemingly out of the blue. Sometimes we both want the same change; sometimes it’s only one or the other. It’s a push and pull between us; a give and take; a compromise; a continual dialectic. The best tool we have between us is frequent and clear communication. What do you want? When? How? Why? Etc.
So, the only thing I can say for sure right now is that we’re almost certainly going to be in Madrid until April of 2026. And quite likely we’ll move to Albania after that. Beyond that: Who knows. Maybe we’ll be back in the States in a couple years total. Maybe we’ll end up staying five or seven years in Europe/Asia. Who knows. We have passive income. No other major responsibilities (although Britney has her 19-year-old son in California who she may help out in various ways over time), a strong desire to travel, a willingness to live unconventionally, and the drive for adventure.
What else, really, in life is there?