Our New Old House - Originally posted April 2006

Tosca and Amatti. Our little insect hunters.

So much has changed. Have you ever watched a movie and at the end of it you think “Man, the end of that movie resembles nothing of the beginning”. You know? Because so much has happened in the last two hours. Such is our life.

Andalucia is very beautiful and is progressing everyday, but it’s almost like living in two separate worlds. One world is progressive and resembles Canada very much. The other is the old world with houses with no indoor plumbing and horse buggies. It’s not unusual to get stuck in traffic on the highway because a giant tractor pulling a cart of olives just coming in from the fields is pushing 30 km/hour in front. Or to get stopped on a road by a herd of sheep following their shepherd home. They sound so funny with all their bells around their necks chiming.

We are now living in the new place. New to us. Old to the earth because let me tell you this place is OLD. It is definitely part of that old world I just touched on. Ironically enough our address is Casa Nueva which translated means “New House”. I wonder what the old house looked like before this one. Miguel and I actually have a bit of a theory about the name of this place.

Miguel found out some gossip about our place from this guy who’s done some construction work in our neck of the woods and knows our neighbours and a little bit of the history. First off you need a little explanation as to the setup of our house. Our house is actually attached at one wall to our neighbours.

Originally our place was the barn of a much larger house until it was “fixed up” (I use that term loosely) and sold as a separate unit along with 50,000 sq m of land. The story from this guy is that the family ran into a little bit of financial trouble when one of the boys (I don’t know how far back this goes) killed someone and the legal fees trying to keep him out of jail left them in debt.

That’s all the guy really told Miguel except that the name of place was Rey Mundo (King World). Our theory is that there was a lot of bad publicity and negative energy because of this whole incident that when they separated and sold this place they changed the name of the whole place for a fresh start.

Of course this is all speculation and who knows if that guy was even talking about our place. I do have to say that the neighbours are weird. Harmless weird though (except their stupid little dog who never shuts up – I’m gonna kick him one day).

So you are all probably wondering how is the new place. Let me just say – Life is very very real now. Very real. I equate it to camping inside. For starters our bathroom is not part of the main house. You have to go outside. We consider it a glorified outhouse because even though there is a bathtub, sink and a toilet that flushes, the sink is not hooked up and our hot water heater does not work so we can’t take showers. Right now we’re making trips to the in-laws for laundry and showers. I wouldn’t use the shower anyway. Every time I go to the bathroom I play “guess the insect”. The insects are much weirder and bigger here.

Needless to say we will be moving the bathroom inside. We have enough room for a nice big one. First things first though. The water needs to be redone or more like “done”. Our kitchen tap right now resembles a garden hose through a hole in the wall. In fact all our pipes resemble garden hoses. The good thing is that everything in this place seems to be a temporary job which means it won’t cost a lot to rip it out. The kitchen needs to be redone pretty quickly too. The roof needs to be redone ASAP as parts of it falls down everyday.

The other day I could hear something crawling around in it. I thought it was going to come right through the ceiling since I could see it “bulging” around inside. It turns out it was a cat trying to meet our cats. I’ve always wanted to buy a fixer upper and make it something amazing. I just didn’t think there would be such a large draft from the doorways and windows and so many bugs. Thank goodness for Tosca and Amatti our little hunters. Let’s hope they don’t eat anything poisonous. There is a lot to the house though which is good. There is an upstairs which will eventually become our bedroom and a TV room, but for now it will have to be the bird sanctuary that it is. We can hear the birds up there every morning. God knows what else is up there.

I know it sounds dire, but it’s not. It’s different. It’s new. And it’s very real. It actually makes you feel more alive. Everyday there is something new. The air out here is fresh. Our view is ridiculously amazing. We have a well and apparently the water runs 200 meters below our land and flows at 100 meters per second so we’ll never run out of water. We have quince (sp?) trees, fig trees and an apricot tree. We have a grape vine running up the side of our house. We can’t remove any soil from our place because it is protected by law and indigenous only to this part of the world. You can see the end of El Torcal (the largest karst formation in the world) from our place http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torcal_de_Antequera .

So far we have encountered rabbits, vultures, golden eagles, foxes, wild pheasants, and a mother of a frog which is apparently poisonous to touch. Sometimes at night you can hear this god awful scream that sounds like an old witch or something. It turns out it’s a screeching owl. I almost ran over a lizard the other day and the day before we saw 7 vultures circling around a section of the mountains. Obviously something had died. I love this place and I can not wait to make it our own. Quite the change from our little condo in Toronto.

The latest thing to scratch off our list is me getting my NIE which is the number that foreigners get here instead of a DNI. It wasn’t easy to get even though it’s supposed to be. Government workers are unbelievable. I don’t know if they really don’t know their jobs or if their just trying to confuse the foreigners so that they’ll leave and not come back. The only way to really get anything done smoothly here is to go through the backdoor and for that you need to know someone who knows someone.

It turns out that we know someone who knows someone. The guy who sold us our place, knows the head of the foreigners department at the police commission. After all the miserable jerk workers we’ve dealt with I can not tell you how awesome it feels to be able to go to the head honcho’s office in the back of the police station where no civilians go and have him tell the workers who treated you like an old kleenex two days earlier to give you a NIE today (it usually takes 4-6 weeks to get one).

So now I have a NIE. I’m still not legal here in Spain, but the NIE is a big step. My residency card is the next step and Juan Antonio has said that he will get his friend to help with that as well. They have a saying here that goes like this “A person who knows someone who can get things done in the government shits gold”. Well, let me tell you, this guy is shitting bricks of it.

We are slowly but surely ticking things off the list. Still, miles to go before we sleep.

Meier Front Hatchway U100 - Originally posted February 2006

A LOT has happened since the second update so I’ve actually put everything in two separate updates. Here are the third and fourth instalments of The Great Spanish Adventure.

I’ll start where I left off. Remember the bit about our stuff finally leaving Barcelona and being shipped to us. Good! Now remember I ended with “I’ll believe it when I see it”? Well, herein lies a very interesting and funny tale. The truck driver had called on Saturday and told us that he would be here around Tuesday or Wednesday, but he was a little confused because the shipping order said our shipment was 3000 kg, but it didn’t look like it should be 3000 kg. In fact our shipment was 300 kg. No biggy so they tacked another zero onto our shipping order. We’re not getting charged extra so why do we care. We were waiting and ready to go on Tuesday. He didn’t show, but he did call us again to tell us that he would be there around 8 tomorrow morning and that again he was concerned about this shipment because it was in fact quite heavy and he wasn’t sure his truck would be able to get onto a residential street as it was an 18-wheeler. Ok, again no biggy. We’ll just get him to drop it off at the bottom of the hill and haul it up one box at a time. We can even use the car. This guy worries more than we do. So sure enough we get a call at 5 minutes after 8 on Wednesday morning and we’re off to meet him at the front of town.

Now, before I go on allow me to divert with a little piece of history first. I guarantee it will make perfect sense in a minute. During the Second World War there was a German navy soldier named Meier. Meier was kind of a burly guy and often took a while to get through the hatch from the bridge to the control room on the ship. So one day his shipmates decided to play what they probably thought was a really funny joke. As Meier was going through the hatch on this unfortunate day they jumped on his shoulders and of course poor Meier fell through the hatch and followed through with an 18-foot drop to the floor. He did survive this terrifying experience, but developed a fear that his shipmates might try this again. In order to make sure it would never happen again Meier created a very sophisticated and fast system of getting through the hatch like “Grease Lightning” as his shipmates called it. It was named “The Dive” and the hatch was renamed the Meier Hatch which lives today for every hatch of this design.

Now, I’m sure you’re all asking why are you talking about a German soldier in WW2 and how do you know such a useless fact anyway. Well, because we researched it on Wednesday night the same day that we opened the back door of the truck drivers semi and were surprised to see a crate about ¼ of the size of our 25 containers that said Meier Front Hatchway U100 on the side at which point I turned to Miguel and said “I don’t think we’ll be able to get this up the hill”. First thoughts are funny eh? The driver was right. The shipment was in fact 3 metric tonnes understandably for a ship’s hatch which was meant for Bilbao, the ship building capital of Spain. We were right too. Our stuff is 300 kg, but never made it to Málaga. Apparently we were not as pissed off as the shipyard was to receive our Rubbermaid boxes full of picture frames and my grandmother’s lamps. I can imagine some big guy full of grease pulling out my fluffy purple sweater saying “Where the hell is my HATCH!”. So we made some phone calls and received one back saying that our stuff was BACK in Barcelona and would be here the next day at around 10 in the morning and again I say “I’ll believe it when I see it”.

Sure enough the next morning, no truck, no call and no returning of our calls to find out where the hell our stuff is. We were starting to think that these guys were real professionals. I don’t know what tipped us off. By this time we were, well, livid! At this point we’re threatening to get everyone involved from the guy in Canada who shipped the stuff in the first place to the RCMP and INTERPOL. We did eventually get our stuff. Next Tuesday. I can’t be mad anymore. I can not express how great it felt to see our stuff finally. It felt like a victory of some sort.

That week was a busy week because Miguel’s DNI came in as well. That meant that we could claim the car that we had been driving for over 2 months and also insure it. What a novelty. The insurance was a little tricky though. You need to know what you’re doing because if you don’t you can end up paying an arm and a leg. The first guy we went to quoted us 1400 euros for the year. The reason being that my International Driver’s Permit is only valid since November so I would have to take the non-experience driver’s rate. I have a copy of my driving record which shows that I’ve been driving since I was 17, but it’s not valid for an International Driver’s Permit. We decided to try RACE which here in Spain is the equivalent of CAA. Our second quote was 340 euros for the year. We went with the second. They could insure me under my Canadian Driver’s Permit which meant my driving record was valid. YAY! So now we have a car to our name and we can get into all the accidents we want. Which is a definite possibility since the drivers here are all insane!

Right now our days are busy as we are getting our new place ready to move into. We have the keys, but we’re still working on getting the financing together. It is looking very good. It’s so weird how it works here. There are rules, but they are being bent or twisted all the time. We got kinda lucky because our realtor knows the director of the bank that we’ve applied to. The two of them are in cahoots and working to get us the best mortgage they can. We had the land evaluated last week and we’re just waiting for the paper work to go through and then we can find out how much of a mortgage we can get.

So one by one we check things off our list, but there are still so many things that still need to be done. We should be busy for a long time. Never a dull moment!

Banks, shipping and television - Originally posted January 2006

So what’s happened since December?

Apparently January is colder than December, the car still belongs to no one and on top of that we found out our car insurance is invalid and we can’t get any until Miguel’s NIF comes and we can claim the car as ours. On that note, Miguel’s NIF is late. It should be here any day HAHA! We did get the land that we were looking at. We almost lost it because, but in the end we bought it. All we need is a mortgage now. We have no idea what we’re doing.

Keep in mind these were the initial problems that we encountered. More have come since then to give us a lovely collage of pains in the ass.

The first problem is our money. We left Canada without it. You’re thinking “Are you dumb or something”, but think about it. Most people who sell their place where do they move to. Perhaps a bigger house or to a different city where they have a new job or closer to family. All they do is go to their new branch of TD or RBC or BMO and get their money. Who moves to another country? Only morons like us, that’s who. So we left the country with our money in our Canadian accounts thinking no problem. Why would there be a problem? We live in the age of computers? Anything can be transferred in a matter of days. No problem? Problem! It takes A MONTH to process a Canadian cheque in Spain. We know this now because we tried it with MY new bank account (Miguel can’t get one yet cuz he doesn’t have a NIF). So I came up with this brilliant idea to transfer the money to my dad’s account from Miguel’s account and then get him to wire it to our new account. The money should be here in a couple of days. No problem right? Problem! Have to call our bank in Canada first and get them to add my dad to Miguel’s internet payee list. You’d think you could add another customer of the same bank to your account online, but NOOOOOOOOO. Get that set up then transfer the money to him. No problem right? Problem! We can only transfer 8% of out total amount at once, but apparently you can do as many transfers as you want and it doesn’t cost anything. So 13 transfers later the money is with my dad who wires it to us the next day. A WEEK later it finally shows up, but not all of it. Oh, there’s a rule you need to know. Here in Spain EVERYONE takes a cut. So our bank in Canada took their cut, pretty standard. But then it went through their intermediary bank, which took a cut and THEN it finally got to our account where our bank took a cut. Nice eh? Wait until you hear about the shipping.

So the shipping. Ah, the shipping. First word of advice; NEVER USE SEALINK CANADA TO SHIP ANYTHING. Unless of course you love surprises like getting a phone call from Barcelona telling you that your stuff has arrived there and that you need go there and pay them money and fill out some forms. For your convenience you can hire a customs broker and have them take care of it for you and you pay them. Hmm, what to do? So I call the GUY from Sealink Canada and ask him, “So, like what is this all about? I paid you $1500 to ship our stuff to Malaga and now their calling from across the country telling us we can go there and pay or we can hire someone and pay?” To which he replies, “my fee is for transport and documentation in Canada so you’re pretty much on your own”. And you couldn’t tell me all this in Canada? Whatever, once again someone’s getting their cut. Sooooo, 600 euros later we still don’t have our stuff, we paid extra fees because the customs brokers office took their sweet ass time and didn’t inform us that we had to send the money first just told us to bring the invoice to the port so now we’re paying fees for the port in Barcelona holding our stuff. Have we finally gotten our stuff you ask? No, it’s apparently going to arrive next Tuesday or Wednesday. I’ll believe it when I see it. They should make one of those Mastercard commercials from this experience. Except it ain’t priceless baby. Total shipping: A cool $2500. Are we having fun yet?

One last problem to talk about and then I have to talk about happy things because all this negativity is giving me a headache. We learned something new here. I can own a car! I just need a NIE. It’s like Miguel’s NIF except it’s for foreigners. So we go to Malaga to get this NIE that will allow us to own a car and drive with insurance. Cool eh? So we go to the place we went for Miguel’s NIF. Nope, not there. You have to go to this other office all the way across the city.

So we take a cab there. Hmmm, can’t get a NIE yet you need to register your marriage certificate that shows that you’re married to a Spaniard. You have to go to this other place here across the city.

So we take a cab. Wait in line. Finally our turn. Nope, you need to be in that line. Ok, again our turn. Oh, you need to go to the Canadian embassy and get instructions from them. Where is that? Don’t know. No one knows, but the British one is over there ask them. Where? Hmmm, no. That’s the French embassy, but wait! Nice receptionist has a list of embassies in Malaga. Here is the Canadian embassy all the way over here. Ok, get another cab. Um, no. No cabs available cuz it’s getting close to lunch and everyone’s going home. Walk all the way there. Of course it has a Burger King attached to it. Only funny thing all day. Finally get there at 1:10 after running around town for 3 hours just trying to get one thing done. Hours of Operation: 9 to 1 Monday to Friday. Sit down on bench and CRY!!!

OMG someone actually opened the door. Such a nice lady. Gives us the instructions we need to send our marriage certificate back to Canada to get authenticated by the Department of Foreign Affairs so it can then be authenticated by the Spanish Embassy down the street in Ottawa and then off to Madrid to get authenticated once more. By the time it comes back Miguel will have his NIF and I can get my NIF and not my NIE. I have a headache.

Now for a little lesson in the funnier things in Spain. I guess they’re not really funny, but instead odd. Today’s topic is Spanish TV. For starters, they’re soap operas are ridiculously dramatic especially considering that nothing happens. No one steals anyone’s baby or husband. No one gets kidnapped. No one gets possessed and there are no bitch fights. No ridiculous story lines and yet twice the drama. Commercial breaks for any show last like 15 – 20 minutes, BUT they only play once every hour or so.

The news is for the whole country because there are less people killed and robbed in all of Spain than in Toronto each year. And yet Miguel’s mom is sure we will be killed in our sleep if we live in the country.

Another thing is that this country is obsessed with performing children. There’s this one show that is all performances from children from singing songs to telling jokes. They had this one girl on there singing pop music and trying to shake her hips like Britney Spears (she was 4 years old; she has no hips) and the hosts LOVED it! I couldn’t figure out what the big deal was. I mean she’s four. She hasn’t even developed a voice yet. She sounds like a chipmunk and rightly so. Two weeks later in Malaga I noticed a poster advertising this same four year old in concert. I guess she’s a big star and I didn’t even know it. I consider it the equivalent to pageanting in North America. They also have this song on one channel that comes on at 8 o’clock every night for kids so they know it’s time to go to bed. It’s very catchy.

And finally the movie names. I don’t know how it works, but sometimes they keep the English title completely, sometimes they translate it literally and sometimes they come up with something completely different. Here are two of my favorites.

Movie Names:

Spanish Title: La Jungla de Cristál
Translation: The Glass Jungle
English Title: Die Hard

Spanish Title: Los Blancos no lo Pueden Meter.
Translation: The Whites Can’t Put It In
English: White Men Can’t Jump

How's the weather? - Originally posted December 2005

This is my initial update for everyone who is wondering if it’s possible to make a big move to Spain and survive. So here is the scoop on our big vacation to Spain. HAHAHAHAHAHA! Vacation; yeah right.

I’ll start with the flight. Miguel flew over from Toronto on November 23rd and I followed him from Calgary the next day. Both flights were hell for different reasons. While I only had an hour and 20 minute delay in from London to Malaga as opposed to Miguel’s 2 hour delay, I paid close to $500 more in excess baggage while Miguel paid around $250. Luggage becomes a whole new concern when you’re taking your entire life with you.

Finally we made it to sunny Spain where the temperature outside is around a balmy 15 degrees Celsius in Malaga. Pretty warm eh? The only problem is that we are 20 minutes north of Malaga in the mountains so by the time you get up here take off around 5-7 degrees so you’re looking at an average temperature of about 8-10 degrees.

Still not bad for November? Ok, but first let me explain Spanish housing. Houses in Spain are NOT made the same way that North American houses are. I’m sure you probably already had an idea of that, but I’ll go into a little more detail. Houses in Canada are made to keep the warmth in. This is why they are made with planks of wood and drywall. So when you come in from a cold blizzard you instantly feel warmth; like a warm blanket. Houses in Spain are made to keep the heat out. They don’t have a lot of air conditioning here as it would take the GDP of a small country to cool it down for 10 months out of the year. So they make the houses out of concrete, brick and plaster. That’s GREAT! For 10 months in a year, but for 2 months it’s like living in an unheated basement. You guys get to read about it. We’re learning it the hard way or should I say the cold way. Here in Spain in November and December if you want to warm up you have to go outside and hope it’s not raining as this is also the rainy season. We are adjusting though. I’ve gotten used to my nose being cold all the time and I spend a lot more time outside now.

So that was the first night’s lesson. There have been many along the way. The next lesson was more fun. I don’t know if you know this, but the amount of time it takes a country’s government to get something done is proportionate to how long the country has been around. So if your country has been around for like EVER then getting anything processed like say a birth certificate takes approximately 8 months to a year. UNLESS, you go through your family lawyer. I have a feeling in Canada if you were to do this someone would be going to jail, but in order to get Miguel’s birth certificate so that he can get his national identity number so he can do anything here we went to the family lawyer who calls a guy in Madrid and it turns out that it only takes 25 days to really get a birth certificate if you’re willing to pay. We can’t wait 8 months so we did it.

This is apparently how Europe works. You know what they say when in Rome….. Of course if we knew that we needed the birth certificate before we got here we would have been on it like white on rice about a year ago, but you never know what’s going on until you get to where you think you need to be here in Spain and then they send you to someone else and they tell you something completely different. Make sense? I don’t get it either. Anyway, so we’re waiting for Miguel’s birth certificate now and a bill.

As I said before you can’t do anything here unless you have a NIF (national identity something or rather) UNLESS you’re not a citizen. HUH! So I, as a foreigner, can do anything I want except work and apparently own a car, but Miguel can’t do anything. Not until he gets that number. We have a car now except that we don’t really. We drive it around and fill it up with gas and we even have some pictures of it (it’s more like a golf cart cuz sometimes on the highway I can only go like 60 km in a 100 km zone), but when we went to change ownership we couldn’t because the guy insisted that we need a NIF # to do it. I’m not sure as I don’t speak Spanish that well and I also don’t understand the bureaucracy here at all.

We did the next best thing we put it in Miguel’s mom’s name. She didn’t like that too much since she already has 2 cars in her name so we went back to where we bought it from and she talked to the guy and now apparently we’re leaving it in transfer which you can do for up to 60 days until Miguel gets his NIF and then we can transfer ownership. The question is who is it in transfer with right now? The previous owner or his mom cuz I think we already went through the process before she complained. Meh! Who cares? We have a car. I never would have guessed that my first car would be a Peugot or in Spain for that matter. It’s a good thing I learned on a standard.

Anyway now that we have a car we’re spending a lot more time looking for a place to live and soon at finding work. There is a lot of land here, but every time we make an appointment to go see it turns out it’s already been sold. There is one place that we looked at that has been vacant for a while. There’s a reason it hasn’t been sold yet. Actually there are about a million reasons it hasn’t been sold yet, but we like it!

It’s a real fixer upper which is kind of what I’ve always wanted. Miguel’s cringing at all the work that will need to be done. The most appealing thing to me about this place is that there is a vulture’s den about 150 meters away from it. Now, I know what you’re thinking, but these are not the kind of vultures that you see in old cowboy movies in Canada where they’re eating the carcasses of dead people in the desert. These guys are quite well fed and keep their distance. Mind you if we do end up living there I think that we will be keeping the cats inside just in case. But these birds are amazing. Twice we saw one hover in mid air. One time it was right in level with our heads since we were up in the mountains and there are lots of hills. They just stay in one place in the air and let the wind keep them up. This is how they hunt. So we’re looking into this place a little more. Keep your fingers crossed.

I gotta say, I’ve been here before, but when you’re here as a possible future citizen it’s very different. There are so many weird things here that I thought I’d never see. Like a monkey crossing the street in Malaga. Apparently one of the problems here in the south of Spain is a lot of illegal immigrants from Africa. And I guess some of them bring monkeys and such with them. Apparently some guy once tried to import a whole litter of baby tigers or lions or something rather.

It’s different being here and I am slowly adjusting, but it will take time. Things are happening, but at a slow rate. We have no idea where life is going to take us, but I’m sure we’ll be just fine. I hope this letter has been half as entertaining to read as it has been to me to write. I’ll send some more notes along the way and let you know how our vacation in Spain is going. HAHAHAHAHAHA! Vacation. Okay, I’m going outside to warm up.