Category: Getting Settled

Adapting / Getting Settled

Catharsis (a tribute to Buddy)

[This is a post dealing with some things I’ve been needing to get off my chest for a while. There are lots of mentions of cruelty to animals AND WHERE MEAT COMES FROM, so you might not want to read it if you’re squeamish or a bleeding-heart animal lover like my wife. You have been warned.] Moving your entire life overseas isn’t easy. Sure, we may portray it as a dream, and we are certainly trying to enjoy ourselves now, but there was just so much work to get to this point. Even now, I think Dreamer and I are

Continue reading
Adapting / Burriana / Getting Settled

Adapting

Doer and I have been expats for just over three weeks now, and we’ve spent a week and a half settling into our new piso in Burriana (or Borriana, if you prefer to speak Valenciano instead of Spanish), and as he already has shared, it is a relief finally to have a home. Although we love traveling, at heart we are homebodies, and hotel life is not for us. And while we like one another quite a bit, one cannot underestimate the importance of two introverts coexisting at home together, but in different rooms.  Before we arrived in Burriana, we

Continue reading
Burriana / Getting Settled

I was saying, “boo-ooz”

“Are you going to go to a bull fight?” This is the first question I would inevitably be asked anytime I told someone I was moving to Spain. My response to this was always along the lines of, “No, we aren’t going to be anywhere near Pamplona, and that’s where they do that stuff. But maybe if we travel up north, I’ll have to check one out by myself, since I know Dreamer won’t abide that cruelty.” I guess I should have become suspicious when, one day in Castellón, Dreamer was asked to sign a petition to stop the “bous”

Continue reading
Bureaucracy / Getting Settled

Nesting

After months spent moving out of our house in Lincoln and weeks spent traveling, it feels like our lives are finally getting back to normal. We found a great apartment in Burriana, just down the street from where Dreamer will be working. So, my apologies for the lack of posts, but the past week has been spent in full-on nesting mode, building up our new domicile. The best part for me is that I have a kitchen again! A very close second is high speed Internet. And of course we have both been house drunk on all the projects this

Continue reading
Bureaucracy / Getting Settled

Soothing

Our dog, “Latte,” is a compulsive paw-licker. When Dreamer and Latte first moved in with “Buddy” and me, I’d get annoyed at Latte when he was going at the same paw for ten minutes while we were trying to sleep or watch a movie. The fur was already dripping wet and it was clearly clean – couldn’t he at least move on to another paw? But Dreamer always told me it was soothing to him, so we should let him continue. I think we have found Dreamer’s version of paw-licking… Suffice to say, we ran into some more bureaucratic snafus

Continue reading