We have been in Spain for a bit more than a month now, and we’ve been in our long-term rental house for about three weeks.  Things are starting to feel a bit more settled, although we still have some nagging to-do items, which include buying a car so we can stop changing rental vehicles, and assembling or returning the dining room table we purchased (we’ve been using an outdoor patio table for a dining table).  We have been fully unpacked for about two weeks, and we finally got reliable internet service about a week ago (hooray!).

What is Our Life Like in Spain?

The pace of life here is SLOW.  We anticipated this, and so we have been patient with things we would not be accustomed to waiting for (like a company that will actually install the internet service speeds they promised).  We have also been intentionally chilling out – not signing the kids up for extracurricular activities, not visiting local attractions or taking any road trips yet, and instead, just enjoying leisurely afternoons and evenings at home or within walking distance.  The kids stay up quite a bit later here than they did in the states, so they occasionally nap, but mostly they have been enjoying swimming.

The average day starts when one of the kids awakes around 7 or 7:30am.  I drag myself downstairs and make coffee with my newly discovered squeezable bottle of sweetened condensed milk (yum!), nurse the baby, and help make breakfast.  We all eat and get ready for school, and one of us will walk the kids down the mountain around 8:30 (a relaxed walk) or 8:40 (a somewhat rushed walk), to arrive by 9:00am.  If we are running late, we can drive down in about 10 minutes.  After we drop the kids off for school, we sometimes have coffee with some of the other English speakers that live here (they have coffee together every day!), depending on what errands need to be run.  Ryan and I have been taking turns bringing the kids, but usually he gets started on work and I take them down.  It has been great to have him home all the time, and no commute!  Cora has been taking a morning nap around 10:30 or 11:00, which gives me a little bit of time while the bigger kids are at school to do something else.  Usually, that involves food prep, cleaning, going grocery shopping, other errands in town, doing work on the computer, or my favorite, which has only happened a couple of times – taking a nap! I  really want to use some of this time to do some painting, but I haven’t been able to do that yet, because as I said, it seems everything is slower here, so errands and such take longer, too!  (Maybe it’s just me in slow motion…)

Too Much Cooking!

The kids get out of school at 2pm, and we have lunch, which is basically like dinner.  The Spanish tend to make that their big meal of the day, so we have been trying to do that, too.  The only problem is that now I’m basically cooking two dinners a day, and it’s more time in the kitchen than I care for!  Back in America, I would cook in the evening and we would eat leftovers for lunch the next day.  Since Ryan is working from home and he isn’t a big fan of leftovers in general, my old cooking schedule doesn’t work for us.  I decided today that I’m going to have to come up with a new plan to simplify the amount of cooking I’m doing, maybe by prepping both meals at once, or by making enough at lunch to eat the same thing for leftovers at dinner the next day.

Our afternoons now involve helping the twins translate their homework (Ella and Peter haven’t really had any), doing chores, swimming at home, sometimes going to the beach, or napping.  Ryan basically works normal business day hours on Spain time, so he is most often working in the afternoons, but he does have some flexibility and can help with homework sometimes, too.  One afternoon, I took the three oldest kids to meet a new friend at the beach, Cora was napping, and Peter stayed home and played by himself while Ryan worked.  I got to sit under a palm tree reading a novel while watching the kids play in the Mediterranean!  It was like a dream!

We have tried to go out to dinner a few times, but none of the restaurants open back up until 7:30pm, which is a bit of late start for us to be out (for the baby in particular).  When I cook, we try to have dinner around 7:00, but since it stays sunny and bright so late, and because we’re really doing the “laid back” thing, I often don’t realize it’s time to start cooking until 6:30 or 7:00, and then we get a late start even at home.  A 7:30 dinner is still pretty early for many Spaniards, but most families with young kids eating around then, I think, so they can get the kids in bed at a reasonable hour.

Taking Advantage of the Amazing Weather

We love eating our meals on the patio by the pool!  It is perfect weather for it, and it’s just so easy to relax out there.  It seems like at least one of the kids is in the water near dinnertime anyway.  They have been swimming literally every single day since we arrived, even though the average temperature is usually in the low 70’s!  After dinner, we usually put Cora to bed and do something fun with the kids for a bit, like watch a TV show, play a game, or  do the less fun work of finishing up the chores.

Sunset is almost an activity of it’s own, because we have a particularly beautiful view from our upper terrace, and I just love to sit up there (sometimes with a glass of wine) and enjoy the splendor of God’s creation in action!  Tonight we played board games with the kids up there and enjoyed watching several paragliders take off and land down on the beach.

It doesn’t really get dark here until almost 10pm, so it’s a little too easy to stay up late.  The kids make their own meriendas to eat at school (effectively, packing their elevensies lunch), and we all pretty much go to bed at the same time (although I am often the last one awake doing things like writing this blog post, talking to someone in the States, or checking Facebook, hence having to drag myself down for coffee in the mornings).

In many ways, we feel like we’re on vacation (well, a working vacation for Ryan), and it is fantastic!  I highly recommend the less busy lifestyle.

It was a successful first day of school!  The kids were all very “nervoucited” (nervous/excited) about it.  When we arrived in the area outside the gate, there were several little girls Ella’s age that came to meet us.  They were very excited, too, because apparently, word had already gotten around that the new americans were starting class today.  We met a couple of girls who speak English, and a Spanish family with a girl in Ella’s class.  Then the music came over the loudspeakers, and the kids all ran into the courtyard and lined up with their teachers.  I was able to go in and meet the teachers briefly, but generally, parents aren’t supposed to go into the school yard.  Ella and the twins both have male teachers, and Ella’s speaks a little English.  Peter has a young lady, but we met several of his classmates that speak English and can help him translate.

After the kids went into their classes, we met the other English-speaking parents outside the gate.  There are several Americans, some British and I think Irish.  They said they go get coffee almost every day after they drop the kids off, and they invited us to come, but we had plans to drive to Malaga and pick up a few things at Ikea.  They warned us that we might not have time to get there and back before 2pm, but we were optimistic – it’s only an hour away, and we had five hours!  Certainly it would work!  Right?

Well, we should have listened.  As it turned out, it took us a while to walk back up the mountain to home, finish a phone call with mom about Jon’s accident (more on that later), and then get in the car.  Then I forgot my Ikea list and we had to go back home, and then I took the wrong road to get out of town, and ended up driving through some frighteningly narrow one way streets in Las Maravillas (the high, hilly part of town), before finally making it back to the highway, so we didn’t arrive at Ikea until noon!  Well, we figured it wouldn’t take us more than an hour to shop, and we’d have an hour to get back, and all would be well.  Did you know that Ikea is a maze intended to keep you there forever?  We did, but we thought we could get through it fast enough. We were wrong!  In retrospect, we should have abandoned our cart and just hoofed it through every shortcut we could find once we realized time was getting tight.  But we thought we could buy the few things we had and still make it.  Of course, there were long lines and checkout was SLOW!  So it was 1:15 when we left, and we knew we were in trouble.

As we sped back towards La Herradura, I called the school and told the secretary we would be 10  minutes late.  She was not pleased! She told me “This is a school, not a day care!” and warned me that if somebody was not there to pick up our kids, the local police would have to come, because the teachers all leave.  I was mortified!  What a terrible first day impression to make.  (Can you see me wringing my hands and hanging my head?) I had not put anybody’s name on the matriculation forms as others who are allowed to retrieve the kids, because they only people we know here are the Wagoners, and I didn’t want to burden them with that responsibility.  But what could I do?  It was physically impossible for us to get there on time (due to our own newbie foolishness), and we had no other options, so I called Heidi.  Thankfully, she was home and was able to go pick up our kids!  I called the secretary back and explained that another American lady would be coming to get my kids and stay with them until we arrived.  She seemed glad (though I am sure was still not at all happy with me).  When Heidi arrived, another parent we had just met that morning who also knew her had to assure the teachers that it really was okay for her to take the kids, so we had yet another person come to our rescue.  Thank you Heidi and Joaquim!!

When we arrived at 2:10, the kids were all sitting on a bench in front of the school doing their homework.  There were no tears, and no shouts of joy when they saw us, either – they were all engaged in their work!  All of the Americans were hanging out talking and waiting for us, so our shame was fully public in the expat community.  But the kids seemed like it was a good first day!

On the way home, they told us they really didn’t understand much of what was going on. There were several English speakers who helped them, and the twins came home with photocopies of pages from their math book for homework.  Their favorite part of the day was recess, of course!  I will interview them after their first week and post a video so you can see what they think right from their own mouths.

 

 

Here is a list of little things that are different and interesting:

There is a very confused rooster somewhere on this hill that crows all day long.

Most days we have slept until 9 or 9:30am instead of the usual 7am!

You can’t open any of the doors to the house from the outside because there are no handles.  Even the front door can only be opened with a key.

We park on the roof of our house.

All the bathrooms have bidets, but their location in the upstairs and downstairs bathrooms is swapped, making choosing the correct receptacle in the middle of the night a bit of a challenge.

I saw a grasshopper as big as the ones I dissected in high school!  At first I thought it was a defective hummingbird.

Guardrails, even on the most steep of mountain switchbacks, are apparently optional here.  (Yikes!)

The first thing we smelled when we walked out on the patio was jasmine.  Glorious!

Trash is collected daily after 8 pm.

We measured the grade of the hill you go up to get to our house.  It is 25 degrees in many places!!

Just getting to Spain with five children is an adventure of it’s own!  We packed large duffel bags for each person in our family, plus 3 boxes, 3 suitcases, and 1 trunk of miscellaneous stuff we wanted to bring, plus 5 carry on suitcases, backpacks for each person, a diaper bag, a guitar, car seats, a baby crib, and a gate checked stroller.  Whew!  Look at our pile of luggage on the cart at Washington Dulles!

    The flight was routed through Dublin, Ireland, so our first leg was about 6 hours.  The baby slept part of the time in my lap, part of the time on the floor (while I tried desperately to find a way to get comfortable without stepping on her), and a decent part of the time talking, fussing, or just generally making it impossible for me to sleep on the the overnight flight!  When we got to Ireland, it was like a maze of twisting, turning hallways with somewhat unclear markings about where we were supposed to go, but thankfully it was 5am so it was not crowded.  The second leg of the flight was better – only 3 hours from Dublin to Malaga – and Cora slept most of it in my lap and I managed a little bit of a snooze, too.

When we arrived in Spain, there was a fairly long line to get through customs but it went fast.  There were no forms to fill out, they just looked at our passports and stamped us through. I thought it was funny – the man looked at each passport and read the name, then looked for the child.  When he got to Peter, he asked for Pedro!  (I don’t remember him asking for Mateo, but he did pause and look a little confused about Ella, which means “she” in Spanish.)  Then there was the confusion about retrieving our baggage.

We looked on the monitors and went to the indicated luggage carousel, and waited, and waited, and waited… and saw no sign of our stuff.  We did wonder if maybe this was going to be the solution to our “how do we get all this luggage to our house?” problem – if they lost it, they’d have to ship it to us, right?  So we walked towards the lost luggage office, and as we passed the monitors again, Ryan noticed that it said that bags arriving from non-EU locations would be on a different set of carousels!  We went through the doors into the specially enclosed area, and there, all lonely on the carousel, we found our bags.

At the Malaga airport, they didn’t have the huge luggage cart like they had at Dulles, only the smaller “carritos”, so we grabbed a bunch and started loading them up.  It took seven carts!  And of course, now we had a new challenge, because though we had seven people, only 5 of them could effectively push a cart (and Ella was iffy, too).  Can you say “inchworm”?

I went to retrieve our rental van (a 9-seater I was hoping would fit all our stuff), and after circling the airport road and talking to various policemen and other official looking people about 5 times, finally determined that I could not get back to the area where Ryan and the kids were waiting for me.  They all kept telling me that the family (and all of our luggage) had to go UP to the departures area if I was going to pick them up.  I knew that was virtually impossible, with only Ryan and the twins to push seven carts!  I was about to give up, go park somewhere, and walk to find them when I spotted Ryan down on the lower level as I was driving by on the upper level.  I yelled out the window, and he heard me!  (miracle of miracles!)  We decided to risk parking in the taxi area long enough to load the luggage.  After some prayer, a little tetris, and a slightly illegal seatbelt situation (4 kids squeezed into the second bench seat meant for 3), we managed to get everything in the car!   It took putting some luggage on laps, filling the entire back seat and every nook and cranny under the seats, plus the whole boot of the van all the way to the roof, but we made it happen.  Hooray!  No need to hire a second car just for our luggage!

It was about 3 hours after we landed by this time, and I was running on only a cat nap for sleep. As we drove to Almunecar, I had a hard time keeping my eyes open, but we made it alive.  We had not gotten any SIM cards for our phones at the airport, so we had no way to call our real estate agent that was going to let us into the house, so we went to McDonalds, and were very thankful that they had free Wi-Fi!  (Pronounced wee-fee in Spain.)  By about 5pm we had met our agent and made it to the house. I was very proud of myself for navigating the steep roads and successfully backing the huge van through the gate into the parking space of the house, which is on the roof!  You have to go down a set of stairs to a terrace where you enter the house at the bedroom level, and then go down another level to the kitchen and living area.

  I thought we would all crash when we finally arrived, but the kids were so excited about the pool they had to jump in.  Also, our house has an elevator!  You know what that means.  We had to put the kabosh on the whole “an elevator is a toy” idea.  The view is gorgeous, the house is beautifully decorated and very modern, which is apparently somewhat rare in Almunecar.  It has king sized beds in each of the 4 bedrooms, and they even had a baby crib set up for Cora, a high chair, and a little walker we can use to contain her a bit (but haven’t used yet).  Two of the bedrooms have a balcony, so we chose one of those to be the “master” even though it’s not the biggest room.  Ironically, the baby has the biggest room, because it’s at the back of the house where there is no view!  I think we finally got to bed pretty late that night, trying to stay up long enough to beat the jet lag and get on the new schedule here.  We are so glad to have arrived safely with minimal difficulties along the way!

 

We took a month after returning from our scouting trip to pray and seek counsel about whether or not moving to Spain is the right thing for our family right now.  We struggled through many considerations, including how the move will effect our nuclear and extended families, our church, and our faith.  I am excited to report that we decided today that we are going to give it a go!  Lord willing, we will be moving to Spain sometime in the Spring of 2016!

On Tuesday, we explored the town of Orcoyen, just 15 minutes outside Pamplona, where our church here in VA has a sister church.  The pastor and his family were wonderfully gracious hosts to us! Their kids are about the same ages as ours, and we FaceTimed with our kids both nights, and the kids had a blast being silly together.

We visited the small evangelical Christian school there where the Marrone kids go, and really liked it.  It was about as close to homeschooling as you can get while still officially being in school.  The only problem is that they are new, and the highest grade they have this year is 4th grade, so the twins would have to fall back a grade.  However, several of the schools there recommended that anyway, so they can learn the language while learning easier academic content.  The other drawback is that it is a private school, and while it’s cheap compared to private schools here, 200 euros per month per kid when you have 4 kids in school adds up fast!  Interestingly, the director did mention that they’re looking for an English teacher, and that if I taught English, they could offer a discount.  I wonder what I would do with Cora in that case?

We took a walk up to the old church in Orcoyen and got to see the old part of town.  We stopped at the grocery store to buy bread for lunch and some treats to bring home.  I was so glad that the sun came out!  It was very pretty (and chilly compared to the southern towns we visited!)

We enjoyed lunch with Dom and Damaris’s friends from Argentina, and they even drove us to their small town in the suburbs so we could see what an even smaller town is like (they said less than 200 families live there!).  It was very pretty and quiet.

The biggest hesitation for me about Pamplona is the climate:  gray skies more than half the year.  They say it’s like living in Seattle.  I’m not sure I could remain emotionally stable in those conditions…

   
 Thankfully, the next morning as we are leaving Ronda, the sun did peek out a little bit.  The countryside around Ronda is very pretty, and if we had had more time to explore there, it is possible that the town might have been a good fit for our family, if we found a place along the outskirts.  For now, though, we decided to cross it off the list, because our visit was very little value because it was so rainy and we had so little time.  It is hard to decide whether we like mountains and countryside better, or the beach better!

  We drove a different route back to Malaga that was a little less treacherous in terms of winding roads. We saw lots of cute little towns along the way, some that looked rather run down, and others that look like they might be good places to live if you want to be out in the country that fairly close to a major city.  We know nothing about what the schools or churches are like there, however, so Laura wrote down a few town names and we will research later to see if they be worth going back to next time we are in Spain.

  
 We left about an hour more than we needed to get back to Malaga, and we were glad for it, because it took us a little while to find a gas station and make our way back to the rental car return area at the train station. In the end, we were right on time with no extra time to spare. 

We boarded the Ave to Madrid without a hitch.  Cora slept some on the train, and we were very glad to be with us long trip where we could move around, rather than being stuck in the car. However, I should note that the changing tables in train bathrooms are tiny!
We were thankful that when we arrived in Madrid, they had a guide to take us directly to the next train platform for Pamplona, because it was a very short connection. About 6 1/2 hours later we arrived in Pamplona, and Dominic Maronne, the pastor of the GCE church there, picked us up and showed us around the city before bringing us back to his house to stay the night. 

 We saw the famous historic town hall building, and the place where the bulls run during San Fermin.  We also were able to stop in to the Orange office to get our phone Sim card problem fixed, finally!

  When we got back to the house, Damarais had fixed a wonderful Spanish dinner for us, and we enjoyed it about then usual Spanish time – 9 PM!  We did a FaceTime call with her kids and laughed at how hyper they were! They enjoyed being silly with the Marrone kids as well.

On Sunday we attended church at La Iglesia Cristiana Evangélica Victoria in Rincón de la Victoria.  It is a small church that meets in a rented building with 3 small classrooms and one larger room that serves as the sanctuary and multi-purpose room.  There were about 50-60 people there, including a team of about 12 visiting from Calvary Chapel in California and another 3-4 visitors from Bilbao.  We didn’t know any of the worship songs, but thoroughly enjoyed singing in Spanish with our brothers and sisters in Christ.  In particular, I enjoyed the Spanish classical guitar that accompanied the music!  This Sunday, the visiting pastor from CA preached in English, with Pastor Ivan translating to Spanish.  Everyone was very welcoming, and we had a good conversation with Ivan about the doctrine of the church, their needs, and the Spanish culture.  He and his wife Eunice both speak English extremely well, so we spoke a little of both languages.

When the service was over, they converted the room into a place to eat, and invited us to share their potluck lunch with them!  We got to talk with some of the visitors and also some members of the local church.  It was a very helpful and encouraging time.

After we left, we decided to check out and inland town, Ronda.  On the way there, we drove through Torre de Benagalbón (on the recommendation of a really interesting man Ryan met at church who had worked for the United Nations and traveled all over), and then headed a little further west to check out other areas of Mijas Costal.  While Ryan was driving, Laura was able to talk to an American missionary in Spain on the phone and get a lot of information about schools for the kids, other potential towns to check out, and life in Spain in general.  We did think La Cala de Mijas was a very cute little area near the beach, but were still a little deterred by the highly touristy feeling of it. We turned north, and headed up the mountains towards Ronda. On the way, we drove through another pueblo blanco called Ojen, which is amazingly beautiful to see from afar, even despite the clouds and rain, and has some amazing views of the mountains as well as a for a few of the Mediterranean Sea. 

 As we drove up the curvy mountain roads (and Ryan sang the James Bond theme song) it started to rain. By the time we arrived at Ronda, it was pretty much pouring. We drove over the famous bridge there, but could not really see what it looks like from outside the car because it was so wet and dark. 

 We found a cheap place to stay, the Hotel Andalucia, which was a one star hotel and the least attractive one we stayed in our entire trip, borrowed an umbrella, and went out to brave the rain to find some food.  We tried to go to a tapas place that was highly rated on yelp, but it was closed and we arrived so we ate at the restaurant next door.  The food was pretty good, but the highlight of that meal was talking to the waitress, who told us that she has always lived in round and loves the town.  Unfortunately, I was pretty exhausted, so my Spanish wasn’t working very well to have a more in-depth conversation!  After dinner, we walked about a kilometer back to the hotel in the rain, and went to bed. It was a rough night with the baby, because she was right next to us in the tiny room, and she woke up many, many times. Most of the trip, she woke up every 2 to 3 hours each night, but this night was the worst.  I can’t wait for her to get back on her regular sleeping schedule the twelve hours per night without interruptions!