Living in Spain as an Expat

Living in Spain as an expat is great.  The sun shines (at some point) most days of the year.  Even when it's cold, you can usually go for a walk and find a nice sunny spot to stand in for a while.

And the sky is brighter in Spain.  Each time I come back to my home here in Spain after a trip to the UK, it never ceases to amaze me how much lighter and brighter everything is here.  I like that; it cheers me up when I am missing my family back in the UK.

The pace of life in Spain is so much more relaxed too.  Ok, sometimes the Spanish way of life can be a little too slow, especially if you want something done in a hurry, but overall it seems to me that the flow of life in Spain is much better for your health, once you get used to it.

And the people in Spain seem happier too.  The Spanish way of talking is often loud and very expressive.  Get a room full of Spaniards and they all tend to talk at once, which can get confusing for an expat!  But I feel the Spanish way is so much more open than the 'stiff upper lip' British way of communicating.

There are many other reasons why I like living in Spain as an expat.  Nevertheless, there are some things I do miss.

As I live in Spain most of the year, I miss my family and friends left behind in the UK.

I miss working with people who speak the same language as me and sharing a joke with them.  The Spanish sense of humour can be great, but by the time my head has translated the joke, the conversation has moved on to something else!

I miss listening to Radio One when it first goes out.  Yes, I know that's sad, but I used to enjoy listening to Chris Moyles while I was getting ready for work.  Here in Spain, I have yet to find a radio station I like.  Spanish radio seems to consist of the same 'pop' songs played over and over again, and stations set up with expats in mind seem to think we all prefer listening to music from the 60s and 70s.  Why?

So, basically, I find Spanish radio to be utter crud.  But if anyone has found a good Spanish radio station I can tune in to in the Granada region of Southern Spain, then please let me know.  I really would appreciate it!

And I miss watching TV, without having to translate every word.  We haven't got around to installing a big enough satelite dish here in Spain to get English TV yet, and by the time we do, I guess we will be used to watching Spanish TV anyway, even though, like Spanish radio, a lot of it is utter crud.

But really, that's all I miss about the UK.  I still much prefer to live here in Spain.  Living in Spain as an expat can be frustrating at times, but overall I think it's great.

When we planned our move to Spain, we decided to live in rural Analucia, rather than on the coast.  We knew it would be cheaper to live here and we also wanted to be a part of Spanish life, rather than live in an expat community.

We chose to live in a small village in rural Granada.  No one here speaks English other than another couple of expats.  In fact, Granada as a province doesn't appear to have that many people who speak English, and why should they?  We chose to live in Spain, so we should learn the Spanish language.

In preparation for our move we took Spanish lessons on a regular basis and read all the Spanish language books we could find. 

They say it gets harder to learn another language once you are out of your teens and I guess they are right.  Nevertheless, we thought we had learned enough Spanish to get by.  After all, once we were living in our Spanish village, we would soon pick up more of the language by chatting with the neighbours...

We were already prepared for the rapidity of Spanish speech, but we thought we could get by at first by picking out the odd word and trying to make sense of the rest.  After all, that's what the language books taught.  Of course, they hadn't allowed for the Spanish dialect.

The first few times we spoke to our neighbours, our carefully pronounced Spanish words were often met with blank stares and the replies we received, well, we could hardly understand a word.  Requests of "Por favor, puede usted hablar mas despacio?"  were met with confusion in many cases.  Our neighbours are used to talking fast.  Their language and dialect enables them to do this.  "Mas despacio" most often became the slightly slower version of a speeding train.

It wasn't until I was talking to one of the other 'non-locals', a woman who had moved to our little village from a more urban area of Spain, that I realised that it wasn't necessarily because we were expats that we hardly understood a word.  She explained that she had trouble understanding the local dialect also.

Of course, this makes perfect sense.  When you think about all the different dialects in the UK and how difficult it sometimes is for people there to understand each other, why should living in Spain with all the many different regions and cultures here be any different?

After that, our language task became more about re-learning Spanish, so that we would understand our neighbours.

Today we can just about get by speaking Spanish (as long as we are face to face with the person we are talking to - telephone Spanish still gives us nightmares!).  We have a long way to go before we understand the local dialect (or many of the jokes), but we are getting there.  However, in the unlikely event we moved to another part of Spain, some of our 'language skills' would have to be learned all over again.

But of course it's all part of the rich culture of living as an expat in rural Spain and we wouldn't wish to give that up.

We moved out here to Southern Spain two years ago.  We had researched articles, forums, websites and books all about Spain and we had spent a great deal of time looking at different parts of Spain to choose where we wanted to live.  We had all the correct paperwork, had done all we thought we needed to do to make our move as painless as possible, but of course we had not!

When you move to Spain you can never be prepared for all the little things that can happen: or the problems you may have to face and perhaps that's as well, or else you may never make your move to this lovely country, and that would be a shame.

This blog is about our life in Spain as expats and some of the 'adventures' that have happened to us, even those we would best forget.

It's also about the many good things we have discovered about Spanish life and why we would never want to stop being expats.

Well, that's the introduction over to Living in Spain as an Expat.  So it's very soon on with the next post!