Category: Getting Acquainted

Adapting / Getting Acquainted / Incidents and Accidents / Travel Stories

Finding the car(t)oris and driving stick

I have always been fascinated with mechanical things. As a child, I loved playing with LEGO building blocks and looking at the detail in the blown-up pictures of David Macaulay’s The Way Things Work. All of this is to say nothing about my lifelong fascination with every aspect of pinball machines, which as far as I can tell began with Sesame Street. When it came time to pick a major in college, I only wasted one year under the guise of Computer Science before switching to the obvious choice of Computer Engineering, first making sure every class I’d taken thus far

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Burriana / Castellón / Getting Acquainted

Diary of a Bus Ride

Though there are many cultural differences between Spain and the U.S., for me the one of the biggest changes may be living without a car. Plenty of Spaniards have cars, of course, but for us it doesn’t seem worthwhile to buy a car for one year. The paperwork alone – ay. Thus, Doer and I have been walking a lot more, I bought a bicycle, and we’ve been using public transportation. The trains between our town and other cities are fantastic, but up until recently we had not mastered the other big source of public transportation here – the autobús.

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Adapting / Burriana / Getting Acquainted / Holidays / Strolling

Open

Even the most reserved travelers have to be somewhat open to new experiences. When you leave your comfort zone, you will have encounters that may make you uncomfortable. Obviously, Doer and I have been trying to approach our time living abroad with as much openness as possible. However, a couple of unexpectedly related recent events have caused me to consider my own openness. The first incident happened our second day in the city of Castellón de la Plana. After spending a week in Madrid, Doer and I were eager to find a home in the province of Castellón, where we

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Getting Acquainted

Spanish Bank Account, YEAH!

Our new amiga Maite at the bank hooked us up real nice on Friday. OK, so maybe we’re not amigos per se, but she did make the necessary (but dreaded) experience of opening up a bank account here relatively painless. Frankly, I’m surprised it was so easy, given that we don’t have our student cards yet. I figured it couldn’t hurt to go into a friendly-looking branch and ask, but was expecting we’d be turned away for lack of some sort of documentation. And yet, 45 minutes and an initial deposit of €100 later, we walked out with all the paperwork

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Favorites / Food / Getting Acquainted / Madrid / Restaurants

Madrid in Our Rearview Mirror

We drove to our home region of Castellón, a province in Valencian Community, on Wednesday. But I tend to process my experiences chronologically, so before I write about our adventures here, I want to wrap up our Madrid chapter. While Madrid is a fast-paced world capital, our best moments in the big city were those in which we were able to slow down. My favorite experience in Madrid was our Sunday night dinner with Doer’s exchange family, with whom he stayed 16 years ago. They invited us to their home in a Madrid suburb and prepared traditional Spanish food, including various

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Bureaucracy / Getting Acquainted

Hay que tener THita

I rented a car on Wednesday to take us and all of our bags from Madrid to our home provincia of Castellón. As expected, the rental experience – from leaving the hotel to arriving back with car in hand – felt like it took several hours. Dreamer informs me she was not waiting back at the hotel with bags for quite that long. I swear it was at least two hours, maybe three. After forgetting that the subway line to Atocha train station was closed for repairs, I had to take a taxi from a stop more distant than our hotel. Finding the rental car

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