My Journey to Driving Legally in Spain

If you read my other blog, Being Here and There, then you know I signed up for driving school last week. (Take a look over there for the reasons why I signed up and how this makes my life suck.) I've decided to chart my progress here and save the other blog for the big steps and interesting cultural moments that are sure to interest those who read the blog for the insight of my life in Spain. :o)


So, let's get to the charting.


Time
My goal is to be a legal driver in Spain before the start of Semana Santa (Easter holidays), which start for me on Saturday, April 11. That gives me 70 days.

I hope to pass the theory test in February, then take about two weeks to pass the driving test. Following the plan, that puts me in the middle of March, three weeks before Semana Santa.

Money
The average cost of getting a driver's license is €1,000. I hope to not pass the average (although doing it in less would be great, too).


So Far...
I signed up on Tuesday and paid €180 (sign up fee and books). It took me about 20 minutes.
Since then I've spent about 5.5 hours studying this week.

You never know what you've got til it's gone! :o(

About a month and a half ago our French neighbor slipped out of our lives in the dead of night. Now we miss him dreadfully.

Actually, we don't know when he moved out...he didn't say goodbye...but we do miss him dreadfully. We never really knew how paper thin our walls were (he must have never watched TV or listened to music), although Jose swore he heard him fart a couple of times when we were all going to bed.

Now we've got the loudest neighbors born in Spain! (Foreign neighbors tend to be hard of hearing, playing loud music ALL the time.) These are true Spaniards, they talk loudly, they scream through the house, they laugh loudly, they all talk at the same time and they are very social. In the week and a half they have lived next to us, they have had 3 different visiting couples over to stay. Yesterday evening was particularly nice as they were all singing karaoke (we assumed), left to go out after we went to bed and came back at 7 am, still singing.

The silver lining in this earplug inducing cloud is that Jose is more and more happy to look for a house (and not an apartment). Let's see how long we hold out before we're banging on the walls and writing obscene messages on their door.

Keeping Up with Los Garcia

I'm not sure what the Spanish equivalent is to the expression "Keeping up with the Joneses", but there has to be one. Even without knowing the people on the street, common sense tells you that there is no way so many people are as rich as they live.

You see it everywhere. BMWs, Audis, Mercedes cars everywhere you look (from what I gather, they are a little cheaper here than in the US, but still!). The latest styles on every woman. Lots and lots of skiing vacations for the school children. Wildly expensive houses. Weekly proof! One of Jose and my favorite TV programs (we only watch 3) is Ajuste de Cuentas. Every week the presenter goes to a different family's house and helps them sort out their financial mess. The only bad thing about the show is that it's more or less the same every week. Families that lived like kings and queens for years and now find themselves with loads of debts, maybe multiple houses (because of buying one before the other sold), and crazy spending habits.

It's a familiar tale, I know. Millions of Americans spend beyond their means and have a scary amount of credit card debt. But in Spain I see it a little different. In the US it's a problem easy to ignore, since you never know someone's salary or earning potential. Because everyone has debt it's become acceptable. Everyone is believed to have the ability to work a little harder to earn more money to buy anything what they want. I know it doesn't work this way in real life, but that's what we're led to believe.
In Spain, however, I know that the average monthly salary is less than 1,000 euros. And I know that it's almost impossible to buy a house for less than 150,000 euros (and that's not a bad price!). So where are these people getting the money to eat out all the time, buy lots of clothes, afford a mortgage on that house, buy new cars and go out to drink with their friends once or twice a week? That's what I don't understand.

You get the feeling like people know something you don't (like the exact location of a money tree). And at times it's hard: to stay at home,to buy the car we can afford, to spend what we've budgeted to spend, to save like crazy people. But sometimes it's great, especially when we can afford fun trips. We're about to make one of the most important financial decisions of our life, buying a house. It's a decision we've already spent lots of time thinking about, and Jose has already made multiple spreadsheets to show all our options. Knowing that this one decision will affect the rest of our lives (in this case, financially speaking), it's not something that we're taking lightly, yet it's strange and a little hard to look at it so differently than so many people, Spanish and otherwise.

Get ready for lots of posts!

We started the Cheese!

January 10: We cut the cheese.

By "the cheese", I'm referring to my 3 kilo, bigger than my niece when she was born, cheese I received for Christmas in my basket. It's a lovely Machego sheep's milk cheese. Last year I received a similar one and we were munching until the beginning of April (3 kilos is a lot for only 2 people! and we're not particularly cheese fanatics.

Let's see how long this one lasts!

It happened on the first day!

Today Jose and I had an appointment to look at a house!! It was our first and we had mixed emotions as we drove out to Almonacid (a village near Toledo). We had found the advertisement on a website and were pretty sure that it wasn't exactly what we were looking for, although it fit in our budget. We went out and saw it (and we were right, we didn't like it) in order to start somewhere.

As we were driving home, we decided to go through another village. Right when we pulled in we saw a new subdivision with a show house (they build 50 exact copies of the same house and call it a subdivision in Spain) that was open. We decided to stop, just for the heck of it.

(A few months ago I read _The Courage to be Rich_ by Suze Orman. One of my favorite chapters was about everything house related: buying, mortgages, etc. I read it especially well because I knew Jose and I would be in that situation soon. One of the first points in the chapter was a warning. It started in a story format, something like this.

You go to the real estate agent's office and tell them about what you have in mind, bedrooms and cost and all that. Right away the real estate agent takes you to a fantastic house that costs (a little or a lot, doesn't matter) more than you wanted to pay. You say no way, but that fantastic house has now infiltrated your brain...and suddenly you're imagining yourself living in that fantastic house...and now you're thinking about how you can possibly afford that fantastic house, stretch to meet the mortgage payments, how it will be worth it in the long run...........)

And it's happened!! On the first day! The second house we saw was really nice (and they had cleverly decorated it with fantastic, modern furniture to make it oh so inhabitable)! Lots lots better than the first...and only 20,000 euros more than our budget. And now I'm thinking about the house, imagining myself lounging on the upstairs balcony off the master bedroom, watching the sunset from the back porch, etc. Darn uplanned stops!!!

Am trying to remain strong and discourage any of this behavior in Jose!

Online writing update

It's the beginning of January, and I thought about writing a small update on how the online writing is going.

I fell short of my December goal of 25 articles, and only got to the 15 mark. I'm still happy to report that I made almost $4 with those articles. Since January began, however, I have made over $1 - that puts me with a total of over $5!!!

With less to do and less travel this month, my January goal is to reach 30 articles and hopefully the $10, and first payout, mark.

I'm also seriously thinking about starting a today.com blog, if I can work out how to avoid the system thinking I live in Spain. Is there time for that? We'll see.

Funny Portugal Story

My husband loves coffee. And he's Spanish. Which means that he can only drink coffee with lots of milk, in the manner of a proper cafe con leche. If we happen to be in a different country, or on an airplane, he always orders coffee, not even with a moment's hesitation with the fact that the coffee might not taste the same, or have the same amount of coffee grounds, water, milk combination. And it's surprising...every time.

So we're in Lisbon, where we noticed very quickly that the coffee was quite strong, and very badly proportioned with the amount of milk. That doesn't stop us from ordering the coffee that was included with our lunch "menu". The nice lady brings us tiny cups of only coffee to the table. Jose pours in his two packets of sugar (hardly dissolving in so little liquid) and dutifully tries to drink it. He doesn't get down more than the tiniest of sips before sputtering. I don't even try.

He calls over the waitress. Can you bring us some milk please? Milk? she asks. Yes. A bit of milk. So over she comes with a tiny cup full of milk (confused, I'm sure). So, here we are at the table with two full cups (albeit, tiny ones) of coffee and one more, full of milk. No help.

He calls over the waitress, again. Can you bring us another cup? An empty cup? she asks. Yes. She brings another tiny cup over (now very confused, I'm certain). He manages to mix a bit of milk with a bit of coffee in one tiny cup and in another a little more for me. We manage to drink half a tiny cup of coffee, among the 4 cups and stained table cloth before discreetly asking for the check and high tailing it out of there in embarrassment.