There’s a splendid, dizzying moment, known to every expat and many travelers, when you arrive back in your home country and see it with fresh eyes. You become a bedazzled stranger in your own neighborhood, an intrepid explorer in your own backyard. Stepping across your familiar threshold, you feel like Neil Armstrong setting the first human footprint on a dusty spacescape. And sometimes, as my expat amiga Jackie discovered, you find your old life has been waiting around the corner to throw a metaphorical custard pie in your face. In September, Jackie and her husband Joel left their charming stone cottage in a small Greek fishing village to make their annual month-long visit to Washington State. A few glasses of wine with old friends, some quality time with family, a couple of simple home repairs, and they’d be back on a plane to their beloved Ελλάδα. But as I always say, America is something you have to stay in practice for, and you don’t want to lose your touch. Every time I return, I find there are jokes I don’t get, cultural references that go right over my head, and fresh hazards to navigate. In Jackie’s case, the hazard was the self-appointed “Concerned Neighbor” who roamed their gated development with camera and notebook, ready to report any infraction of the ever-changing Homeowners Association (HOA) regulations. Jackie knew exactly how long her garage door could stay open, what shrubs she was allowed to plant, and when outdoor Christmas lights had to be turned off at night. But she had no idea solid-coverage stain — the finish that had always been on her 200-foot cedar fence — had become taboo, or that transparent stain had been decreed mandatory. As the solid stain went on, the Concerned Neighbor rushed to notify the HOA that Something Had To Be Done. There was a tremendous fuss, which Jackie dubbed “the HOA Hell-abaloo.” In the end, the solid stain had to be stripped off and transparent stain applied, taking the job from a three-day project to a three-week nightmare at double the cost. “As we watched the painters starting the second week of our three-day fence-painting project,” Jackie wrote on her entertaining blog, TravelnWrite, “one of my favorite neighbors asked, 'Will you ever live here full time?'” I picture Jackie rolling her eyes and gritting her teeth before replying, “This probably isn't the best time to ask that question.” Checking in with expat amigos, I’ve learned everyone has a different timetable for visiting their home country. Friends from Europe can hop back for a weekend, and often do. For long-haul Americans, a month is typical, two visits a year is not uncommon (especially for those with grown kids and/or aging parents), and some, like me, spend six months in each location. A few, after a bit of finger counting, calculated their last visit home was in 2016, or possibly 2015. Mad Men and Game of Thrones were both on TV, if that helped… Technology lets us stay in touch in ways that were unimaginable when Rich and I moved to Seville 20 years ago. Back then we had computers but not Wifi; email was sent and retrieved from (how quaint this seems now) internet cafés. Today, of course, we stream all the latest entertainment, absorb as much news as we can stomach, and keep in regular contact with our bankers, creditors, family, and friends (not necessarily in that order). Despite the constant flow of data across my screen, I’m still gobsmacked every time I step off the plane and find myself on US soil. “Live abroad, if you can,” advised Tom Freston, who started MTV. “Understand cultures other than your own. As your understanding of other cultures increases, your understanding of yourself and your own culture will increase exponentially.” He’s right. My home state has changed a lot over the years, and so has the way I look at it. Last spring, as I prepared to return to California after six months in Spain, I was taken aback by the gloomy public perception of San Francisco; everyone seemed to think it was in a horrifying “doom loop” of non-stop crime and hopelessness. Was it really? Or was this just media hype and political hot air? As my regular readers know, I decided to find out. I took 20 day trips into the city, and what I discovered during those long rambles made it clear San Francisco is alive and kicking and still — if you know where to go — remarkably cheap and cheerful. It hasn't lost its quirky charm, freewheeling spirit, or ability to surprise the socks off of you. Far from being on life support, it's rocketing toward the future. Apparently these facts are not generally known. I decided to gather my findings in a book, including all the flourishes and anecdotal material I couldn’t fit into my blog posts, and start spreading the word. My San Francisco will be out next month. Watch this blog for details. This book is my small way of pushing back against the rising tide of misinformation that’s flooding our lives. “The older I get,” said beloved TV host Fred Rogers, “the more convinced I am that the space between people who are trying their best to understand each other is hallowed ground.” To me, that’s what this blog and my books are all about. Travel teaches us that at heart, we are more alike than we are different. Sometimes it’s harder to remember that at home than abroad, but it’s no less true. I'm trying to let go of any impulses to do Concerned Neighbor-style finger-pointing and instead do my best to find the common, hallowed ground of understanding. San Francisco poet Maya Angelou once said, "I long, as does every human being, to be at home wherever I find myself." And sometimes that starts with wiping life's custard pie out of our eyes so we can take a clearer look at the places we call home. THE AMIGOS PROJECT This post is part of my ongoing exploration of how living and traveling abroad — with occasional trips back to the Old Country — can enrich our lives and help us avoid the isolation that's become a global epidemic. See all my Amigos Project posts here. DON'T MISS OUT! If you haven't already, take a moment to subscribe so I can let you know when I publish my weekly posts. Just send me an email and I'll take it from there. [email protected] SUBSCRIBED BUT NOT GETTING POSTS? Check your spam folder. Internet security is in a frenzy these days. If you still can't find it, please let me know. TRYING TO POST A COMMENT BUT NOT SEEING IT? For a short while, my efforts to reduce the flood of spam on this blog resulted in making it harder to post comments. I think it's fixed now, but if you have any difficulties, please let me know. [email protected] WANT MORE? My best selling travel memoirs & guides Best of Cheap & Cheerful San Francisco Cozy Places to Eat in Seville GOING SOMEWHERE? Enter any destination or topic, such as packing light or road food, in the search box below. If I've written about it, you'll find it.
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A few days ago Rich bellowed “Karen!” with an urgency I haven’t heard since that time the pine tree in our front yard caught on fire. I raced down the hall to find him holding up a small, irregular piece of cardboard. It was the missing piece from a 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle, which we’d recently assembled, with colossal mental effort, only to realize we were one short. Yes, we tore the house apart and on Friday, admitting defeat, we’d disassembled the 999 pieces and put them away. And now … ! As the Spanish would say, ¡Estaba feliz como una perdiz! (I was as happy as a partridge.) To be honest, I am not convinced partridges are happier than any other creatures. But the phrase always makes me think of joyfully settling into a cozy nest, comfortably shaking out my feathers, and basking in the moment. So I’m sticking with it. One of the great things about learning a second language is that sometimes it provides a word or phrase so perfect (a bon mot, as the French put it) that you wonder how you ever lived without it. For instance, to emphasize they’re delivering the unvarnished truth, the Spanish say, “No tengo pelos en la lengua” (I don’t have hairs on my tongue). Another favorite is “quedarse en blanco” (literally to stay in the white, meaning to lose your conversational way as if you were enveloped in dense fog), which for me is so … wait, what was I saying? Learning goofy sayings is just one of the appealing reasons to embrace Spanish. Just look at the numbers: with 600 million people speaking it, you’ll have lots more amigos to chat with as you wander through life. Even more usefully, studying a foreign language enhances neuroplasticity, the ability of your brain to change and adapt. It boosts memory, focus, cognitive skills, creativity, mood, and perhaps even your ability to keep dementia at bay. “Speaking more than one language appears to help the brain resist the effects of Alzheimer’s disease,” reported Alzheimer News Today. Experts tell us the ideal age to learn a new language is when we’re ten to eighteen, and as soon as they invent a time machine, I’ll hop back and get started on that. Luckily for all of us, life isn’t about ideals, it’s about possibilities and what we do with them. Take my amigo Julius — he goes by Julie — a lifelong New Yorker who spends a couple of months in Seville every winter. When I zoomed with him Saturday, on his 82nd birthday, I asked him how long he’d been studying Spanish. “Five years, mas o menos” (more or less). “Okay, I did have Spanish in high school, but I also had physics and chemistry; I don't remember a lot of that stuff. So say five years.” That means he got started at age 77, six decades later than the recommended timeframe. How has it gone? Julie talked about reaching the first milestone, known here in Seville as “bar Spanish,” which means he can order food and drink with a reasonable degree of certainty that he’ll be understood. “It's one thing to speak to another person,” he told me. “It's another thing to understand what they're saying when they respond. But, you know, it's not like I'm speaking on such a high level that the responses are too difficult. And also, there are a lot of workarounds; if you don't exactly remember how to say something, you find an alternative way to say it. And a lot of the vocabulary is almost the same as English.” In fact there are hundreds of words, such as taxi, radio, and mosquito, common to both languages. So Julie has achieved what I consider the second milestone: accumulating your own little collection of workarounds and soundalikes that let you make your way to solid ground even in slippery conversations. Over the past five years, Julie has thrown himself into his studies with enthusiasm. Every week, he Skypes for an hour and a half with Sonia, his language teacher in Seville. They talk about his 40-year career running New Audiences, a concert production company for jazz, blues, and folk music, and about the jazz concerts Julie and his wife, Deborah, have enjoyed in Seville. Every week, Julie also Skypes with a Valenciano named Dani who wants to learn English. They converse in one language, then the other, an arrangement commonly known as an intercambio (interchange). “He’s a young man, half my age, and very, very funny,” said Julie. “We have a good time together.” Valencia isn’t all that far from Seville, and visits have also been exchanged, giving the men and their wives a chance to become friends. “Two years ago,’” Julie recalled, “when Dani and Elena, his wife, were in Seville, we were out to dinner together, with some other friends. And I actually attempted a joke in Spanish, and everybody laughed. Deborah said the waiter was standing behind me, and he was laughing. So I said, ‘Are they laughing at the joke, or are they laughing at my Spanish?’” I’m guessing they were laughing at your joke, Julie. Humor is one of the most difficult things to pull off in a foreign language, marking that moment as milestone number three. “You are officially a bi-lingual person,” I told him. “What advice do you have for people just starting on this journey?” “You should not be afraid to use whatever little bit of Spanish you've learned,” he said. “People are very kind and accepting… They will respect you more and thank you for making the attempt.” Your brain will thank you, too. Thinking in a second language always gives your cerebrum an invigorating workout, bestowing the same health benefits, such as neuroplasticity and boosted memory, no matter how polished the results may (or may not) be. Of course, no matter how long you study Spanish, you may occasionally quedarse en blanco, feel your mind blanking out in the middle of a sentence. (Yes, it still happens to me, even after 20 years, although far, far less often.) That’s when speaking Spanish starts seeming like working a jigsaw puzzle that’s missing half the pieces. And you find yourself bewildered by the suddenness of the disaster, like a homeowner discovering one of their pine trees is on fire. (Which, if you’re wondering, was caused by an electric cable rubbing against a branch until the insulation wore off.) But then, there are the good days. You reach for a word and it’s there. Somebody gives you directions and you understand them. You crack a joke that leaves a tableful of friends and nearby strangers helpless with laughter. “I’m proud of myself when I’m understood,” said Julie. “And I’m getting better at it.” And that is something to be celebrated, at any age. THE AMIGOS PROJECT This post is part of my ongoing exploration of how living and traveling abroad can enrich our lives and help us find fellowship, avoiding the isolation that's become a global epidemic. See all my Amigos Project posts here. DON'T MISS OUT! If you haven't already, take a moment to subscribe so I can let you know when I publish my weekly posts. Just send me an email and I'll take it from there. [email protected] SUBSCRIBED BUT NOT GETTING POSTS? Check your spam folder. Internet security is in a frenzy these days. If you still can't find it, please let me know. WANT MORE? My best selling travel memoirs & guides Best of Cheap & Cheerful San Francisco Cozy Places to Eat in Seville GOING SOMEWHERE? Enter any destination or topic, such as packing light or road food, in the search box below. If I've written about it, you'll find it. How is 2025 treating you so far? I ask because my year’s off to an extremely dubious start. Minutes before midnight on New Year's Eve, I opened a can of the traditional 12 lucky grapes that MUST be eaten as the clock chimes ... and found 11 grapes. Hard not to read that as an ominous message from the Universe! Days later I finished the toughest 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle I've ever attempted ... and discovered it was missing the final piece. Oh the horror! And did I mention Rich and I both got Covid? (We’re fine now, thanks for asking.) Obviously there’s no point in lulling myself with false hope that this year’s going to be a cakewalk. The gloves are off, and 2025 and I are going toe to toe. So I’m in survival mode, taking stock of my resources. As I roll with the punches, I'm comforted to know that if the going gets tough, Seville’s first class medical system is standing by to patch me up for the next round. The fact Spain has an extremely modern, efficient healthcare system seems to stun my American visitors. That's because we’re raised on the myth that any medical services outside US borders must be hideously, dangerously substandard. Well, hold onto your hats, folks. In the most recent rankings, Spain’s health index score was 43 places higher than that of the USA (#26 vs. #69). Moreover, Spain is becoming a world leader in medical research; it just surpassed Germany for the top spot in clinical trials. “From face transplants to robot surgeons,” reported Olive Press, “Spain has achieved many medical discoveries and innovations in the last year.” I fervently hope I won’t need a face transplant or robotic surgery in 2025. But still, it’s great to know Spanish doctors are on the cutting edge of modern science. “OK, fine,” I can hear certain friends muttering to themselves about now. “The care may be great but how do I access it? Where do I go? How do I manage when I don’t speak a word of Spanish?” I’m so glad you asked. To dig deep into this question, I sat down this week with María Moreno Verd of the International Department at Seville’s premier private facility, the Hospital Quirónsalud Sagrado Corazón, now part of the German company Fresenius-Helios, Europe’s largest healthcare system. The facility was honored for emergency care and surgery in the 2024 Best Spanish Hospital Awards. María is a professional medical translator who is thoroughly familiar with every aspect of the health system. Her first job, she says, is to calm the fears of patients. “You get anxious when the situation is new, when you are outside your comfort zone. People feel better when I approach them in their language, and I tell them that I am going to be with them all the time. I am there to listen, translate, and explain everything.” The first thing she explained to me was the best way to access the hospital system, which is via G24, their 24/7 call center in Madrid. The number is 901123456; I’ll wait a moment while you jot that down for future reference. G24 translators, fluent in 11 languages, will send your information to María, who makes the appointment or organizes the ER visit and arranges to be present when you arrive. G24 works with you on a Guarantee of Payment letter, based on your insurance; without it, you have to pay up front, and by European standards, care at Sagrado Corazón is not inexpensive. Last February one of my visitors required medical assistance to remove half a hearing aid that got stuck in his ear. (And yes, the poor guy will never hear the end of that little misadventure!) He was so flustered that he walked out of his rental apartment without grabbing his wallet, arriving at Sagrado Corazón with no ID, no cash, no credit card, no insurance card, nothing. Luckily he did think to bring me along. I didn’t know about G24 back then, so we were ER walk-ins. While I paid the 400€ ($413) deposit, a relative back at the rental apartment found my friend’s ID and texted us a photo of it. Paperwork done, we waited nearly an hour. The actual procedure took ten seconds, and the doctor, nurse, my friend, and I all cheered mightily when the deed was done. The staff refunded 70€ ($72); they’d rounded up, just in case. My friend was reimbursed by his insurer when he got home. You can never prepare for every medical emergency, but when traveling abroad — or staying home, for that matter — it’s a savvy move to keep everything on this checklist easily accessible on your phone. Prescriptions, which in Spain may be available over the counter. Medical records of major health issues, such as recent surgeries and chronic conditions. Pictures help, in case of a language barrier. If your records are on a health portal, make sure you know the password. Verification of your travel and regular health insurance. Travel insurance is a very good idea, and remember, Medicare doesn’t cover you outside the US. The local emergency phone number. In Europe it’s 112 for everything, like our 911. For more far-flung trips, we have the Emergency Call app. The name/location of top hospital(s). A public ambulance will take you to the closest facility; G24 can dispatch a private ambulance that will take you to Sagrado Corazón. The name/location of a reliable clinic. I have insurance with Sanitas and often take visitors to their clinic for minor stuff. Even without membership, it’s much less expensive, around 60€ ($62) for a walk-in exam or prescription renewal. If something’s beyond them, they’ll send you to Sagrado Corazón. Bonus tip: Get receipts! Usually these will be in Spanish, but that doesn’t matter. You’ll need them for reimbursement later. “Be sure to tell your readers how nice everyone is at the hospitals in Seville,” my sister-in-law said, when I mentioned I was writing this post. Deb should know; in 2020 my brother tumbled headlong off his bicycle and wound up in the public Hospital Universitario Virgen Macarena. Mike had a CT scan, X-rays, and extensive first aid. Total cost: 199€ ($205). Although Virgen Macarena doesn’t normally provide translators, they found someone to assist. “I cannot express how ginormous this place was,” Deb said. “And yet everyone was incredibly helpful. They seemed to really care about us. We were real to them.” When the last test results confirmed Mike was OK, everyone around them burst into applause. Being surrrounded by people who care makes all the difference. I suspect it boosted Mike’s ability to bounce back from his scrapes and bumps — no small consideration for a man of 70. A meta-analysis conducted by the National Institutes of Health showed that “Higher levels of psychological stress experienced by hospital inpatients are associated with poorer patient outcomes.” To feel good is to heal better. It pays to be prepared — especially in 2025, which is bound to include plenty of shocks and wallops. But we don’t have to take them lying down. When my New Year’s grapes numbered 11, Rich sprinted to the kitchen, found another can, tore off the top, and returned with the extra grape just in time for midnight. Whatever good luck I have this year, I owe to him. Now, if he could just find that missing puzzle piece… Long-time readers will recall we had another missing puzzle piece case back in 2021, one with a happier ending. Click here for details. THE AMIGOS PROJECT This post is part of my ongoing exploration of how living and traveling abroad can enrich our lives and help us find fellowship, avoiding the isolation that's become a global epidemic. See all my Amigos Project posts here. DON'T MISS OUT! If you haven't already, take a moment to subscribe so I can let you know when I publish my weekly posts. Just send me an email and I'll take it from there. [email protected] SUBSCRIBED BUT NOT GETTING POSTS? Check your spam folder. Internet security is in a frenzy these days. If you still can't find it, please let me know. WANT MORE? My best selling travel memoirs & guide books Best of Cheap & Cheerful San Francisco Cozy Places to Eat in Seville GOING SOMEWHERE? Enter any destination or topic, such as packing light or road food, in the search box below. If I've written about it, you'll find it. |
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