 To artist Bettine Flesseman, it all sounded like a grand adventure. “Grab your toothbrush,” said Rich. “We’re getting out of town.” Reeling from weeks of harrowing headlines, Rich and I realized we needed some serious attitude adjustment to pull together the tattered shreds of our mental equilibrium. It didn’t take us long to choose the geographic solution favored by so many great minds from Marco Polo to the fraternity brothers in Animal House: road trip! Rich and I each threw a scant handful of toiletries and a change of undergarments into a single, shared backpack and left our Seville apartment on foot early the next morning. Rich had made some mysterious arrangements — he loves the element of surprise — so I had no idea where we were headed until we arrived at the train station and I heard him ask for tickets to Jerez de la Frontera. Just an hour south of Seville, Jerez — or as the Moors called it, Sharīsh — gave the world the fortified wine we know as sherry. (Thanks, Jerez; nice work!) Bodegas are dotted about the landscape, and the streets are redolent of rich, damp fermentation, the scent wafting out of open windows and tasting room doors.  Sipping sherry at the Taberna Jerez The food was extraordinary. At Bar Juanito Rich and I sampled sherry, artichokes poached in fino (dry sherry), and bluefin tuna fresh from the nearby Atlantic. During the day we explored ancient monuments and little backstreets. In the evening we joined what seemed to be all 212,879 of the city's residents crowding the downtown plazas, celebrating the simple pleasure of being together on a warm Friday evening with the holidays just ahead. I returned home to Seville the next day feeling a renewed lightness of being thanks to thirty hours free from news headlines and from the burden of extraneous possessions. “Less is more,” architect Mies Van Der Rohe famously said in 1886. But how much less stuff can we have and still live full, rich, reasonably comfortable lives? My Dutch friend Bettine Flesseman tested those limits to the max when she and her husband, Eric, impulsively moved to rural Portugal in 1969. “Our friends in Holland said we were crazy,” she told me. Those friends might have had a point.  In the mid-twentieth century, Portugal still did things the old-fashioned way. Photo: Clarence W. Sorensen Collection, University of Wisconsin Bettine and Eric were in their mid-twenties with babies one and two years old. Fed up with their native Holland’s predictability, the couple had decided to emigrate to Canada. But first, they took a two-week vacation in a country they’d never visited: Portugal. They fell in love with the people, climate, and countryside. Before the two weeks were up, they’d bought five acres of land with a roofless cottage for the equivalent of $18,000. They had absolutely no idea what they were going to do with it.  Bettine and Eric's cottage, known as Caliço, was missing a roof and only accessible by donkey track. Painting: Bettine Flesseman I’ve watched people make similar moves in Spain, and I can tell you, it nearly always ends in tears. Amazingly it didn’t this time. The intrepid couple returned in May with their babies and a rented caravan holding basic bedding, kitchenware, and tools. Before they could drive up to Caliço, as the cottage was called, they had to widen the only access: a kilometer-long donkey track. Cars were an exotic rarity there at the time; everyone was illiterate, so they couldn’t pass the test to get a driver’s license. The only three cars in the district belonged to Bettine’s family, the taxi driver, and the doctor. The only others who could read and write were the couple running the tiny village shop. They handled correspondence for the villagers, kept accounts on an abacus, and didn’t bother to stock toilet paper, sanitary napkins, disposable diapers, or toothpaste — because who needed that fancy, costly stuff? “Nobody brushed their teeth,” said Bettine. “When children got married, a standard wedding present from their parents was a denture.” As for more basic functions, she added, “The Portuguese had no bathrooms but did whatever they had to do behind a certain tree or bush and cleaned up with grass or leaves. The hot sun took care of drying the stuff and the wind took care of the rest.” Yikes! Kind of puts things in perspective doesn’t it? But 200 years ago, that’s how 85% of human beings lived; by 1980 it was 40% and today it’s just 9%. Whenever I feel gloomy about the state of the world, I look up these statistics on the website Gapminder. Right now, 85% of the world population has access to food, water, basic toilets, electricity, schooling (for girls too), and health care. It may not always feel like it, but humanity is making progress. Yes, we are!  Not all girls and women (shown here in blue) get equal opportunity, but overall we're making progress toward closing the gender gap. Source: Statistic 2024 Bettine and Eric didn’t adopt the local lifestyle completely. They traveled to nearby cities for toothpaste and other modern essentials, painting supplies for Bettine's fledgling career as an artist, and conveniences such as a chemical toilet and a bucket-style shower. The children made their own games and toys and played with the family menagerie: cats, a dog known as Mosca (“fly”) because he couldn’t resist chasing flies, chickens, rabbits, and a donkey that appeared docile until the bellyful of wine the seller had given him wore off and his surly nature emerged. “Kloris the Rooster always sat on my shoulder,” recalled Bettine, “and helped me to stop smoking. He hated the smoke and snatched the cigarette out of my mouth. He won the battle...”  Evidently Kloris had taken up the challenge of this 1970 poster from the US Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. Portugal's progress took a giant leap forward in 1974 when the Carnation Revolution brought the socialists into power. “Before that,” Bettine told me, “it was really a very right-wing dictatorship. And as you know, with dictators, they are not very interested in schooling." In 1964, the dictatorship had opened schools providing education through fourth grade, but the sketchy literacy acquired there was soon forgotten. "The girls all became seamstresses and the boys bricklayers or fishermen." After the revolution, kids stayed in school until the age of 18; years later university educations became available. Portugal’s literacy rate is now 96.78%. (By comparison, America’s literacy is 79%; worldwide it’s 86%). Overall, the lifestyle has improved so much that Portugal ranked in the top ten on InterNation’s Quality of Life Index 2024.  From left, Bettine, her daughters Meinke (an artist with a gallery in Portimão), Pauline (who runs the Earth Shop and Café in Praia do Carvoeiro), and Meinke's daughter Sancha (a carpenter and welder) in 2024. “After the revolution,” Bettine added, “the people got the right to have a holiday. What sort of holiday does one plan when one has no money? A camping holiday of course!” This was a stroke of good luck for Bettine and Eric, who had decided to turn their property into a holiday campsite, which they ran successfully for nine years before moving on to other adventures. I asked Bettine if she had advice for readers who might be considering a move to Portugal today. “Well, I wouldn't wait too long to come here, because it's become very popular. And especially with the situation in the United States, lots of Americans are looking around. It's still one of the cheapest countries in Europe, but when there's so much demand, prices are going up. So if people are interested to come, they should not wait too long.” WANT TO KNOW MORE? Bettine is kindly offering my readers a free download of her memoir The Path to Caliço (in pdf format) about moving to Portugal in 1969. It's a delight and a real eye-opener! CLICK HERE FOR YOUR FREE DOWNLOAD OF BETTINE'S MEMOIR  This shrine in downtown Jerez invites you to leave tokens of appreciation for miracles received or to ask for divine intervention. Got any concerns you'd like to take up with the Almighty right now? 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? 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 Alan Campbell (left), US Consular Agent of Seville, and his husband, Juan. “You’re the first Americans I’ve ever met,” a Spanish friend confided one night at my dinner table. I was so gobsmacked almost dropped the bowl of cranberry sauce I was handing her. The occasion was a Thanksgiving meal Rich and I had prepared for the members of my Seville art class. I’d learned my new amigos were fascinated with the exotic ritual feast so frequently featured in American movies and thrilled to experience it for themselves. The Spanish don’t tend to be adventuresome eaters, and this was years ago, before the foodie craze brought international cuisine to their attention, if not their dinner plates. But I knew everyone at my table had eaten turkey (although never in whole bird form), a stuffing-like cubed-bread dish called migas, and pureed potatoes. I figured they’d be fine.  In Seville's butcher shops, whole turkeys are less common than game birds and rabbits fresh from the country. My amigos could barely swallow a bite; it was just too strange. In vain I pointed out the familiar ingredients; they nibbled, nodded, smiled politely, and pushed the food around on their plates. But they loved the cranberry sauce. So I just kept refilling their wine glasses and passing around the cranberry sauce and baskets of local bread, and everyone had an uproarious time. No doubt they have been telling the story for years, just as I still describe eating pig brains at a party in საქართველო (the Republic of Georgia) back in the nineties. Many Georgians at that long-ago party had never met an American, and I shouldn’t have been surprised that in the days before Seville was overrun by tourists some of my Spanish amigos hadn’t either. Most of their knowledge about America was gleaned from TV shows like Dallas and Dynasty, and they seemed a trifle disconcerted to find Rich and I were not ruthless, gun-toting, adulterous billionaires tortured by dark secrets and family scandals. (I know, right? Suddenly I feel so boring.) Whenever we’re the first Americans someone encounters, Rich and I feel honor-bound to provide a more positive image of our national character and to serve as ambassadors of goodwill.  We do our best to serve as ambassadors of goodwill. Or at least project a more wholesome image than the families on Dynasty and Dallas. We are strictly amateurs, of course, and I’ve developed deep respect for those who represent our nation on a professional basis — like our friend Alan Campbell, America’s official consular agent here in Seville. This week, Rich and I met up with Alan in the café La Gata en Bicicleta (Cat on a Bicycle), and as he sipped what’s arguably the best hot chocolate in Seville, I asked him how he came to live abroad. “I was born in Atlanta, Georgia,” Alan said, “and grew up in Brentwood, Tennessee. In high school, you had to take a foreign language, so I took Spanish. I was working at a restaurant at the time, and it was the first time in my young life that I realized you could use something from school outside of school. I was able to talk to the folks that I was working with.”  Brentwood, Tennessee is a quiet suburb of Nashville. Photo: City of Brentwood Alan joined the US Army in 2002 and served as logistics officer on a NATO mission embedded with the Afghan National Army from 2008 to 2009. Afterwards he went to college on an ROTC scholarship and eventually earned a BA, two MA degrees, and later, in Spain, a PhD — all in subjects such as Spanish, linguistics, and international communication. Nothing prepared him for the quirky dialect spoken here in Andalucía. Moving to Seville in 2010 for a job as a language assistant in a public school, Alan struggled to understand speech riddled with missing syllables. To locals, for instance, the Andalucían dialect is Andalú. It’s as if everyone’s in such a rush to reach the punchline they can’t be bothered to enunciate every syllable along the way. The attitude is, “Hey, do I really have to spell it out for you?”  Standard Spanish classes are essential for the basics, but many find online courses in Andalú to be really helpful as well. This is Rich's favorite. “The language was hard,” Alan recalled, laughing. “I remember having this moment where I'm like, Okay, I have a bachelor's degree and a master's degree in this language, and I don't think I can communicate with these people. This is a lot of wasted years of education. And then it was a challenge, it was fun... You have these wins where you finally figure something out, you can communicate something, and that feels like the success of the week. It is thrilling. And I think it's healthy, good for my mental agility.” By now he's so fluent friends have nicknamed him Alandalú. Alan's next job was in a language academy, where he met his husband. Juan grew up in a suburb of Seville then studied in the US and UK; both men are fully bilingual and are raising their adopted son to be equally comfortable in both languages. Until 2019, Alan was still in the Army reserves, serving in Madrid a few days a month. There he got to know people in the US Embassy and heard about a job opening for Seville’s consular agent. “So I applied for it and got hired.” If you’re a little hazy on the ranking, it goes ambassador (one per country, living in the capital, interacting at highest diplomatic level), consul-general, consuls, vice-consuls, and consular agents; this last is usually a part-time job.  “So what do you actually do?” I asked. “Routine services include passports, reports of birth, reports of death, anything related to citizenship. Everything else is special services: prison visits, anything that might involve a victim of crime or someone in distress abroad; we get international parental child abduction cases.” He explained US law requires him to visit Americans in the Spanish penitentiary system at regular intervals. The jails here don’t provide uniforms, so Alan brings US prisoners clothes, and also books in English, eyeglasses, toothbrushes, and the luxuries of seeing a friendly face and speaking their own language.  Prison would be bad enough. Prison without books and reading glasses? Nightmare! “A lot of stuff too, comes from the States,” Alan said. “People reach out to our emergency line in Washington and eventually it gets to us: ‘Hey, my son's studying abroad. I haven't heard from him in two weeks.’ Or, ‘Hey, my sister's traveling there, and she lost all her stuff.’” That’s when it truly hit me how tremendously lucky we are, as Americans living in Seville, that Alan is here to help us. So much of his job isn’t particularly glamorous or newsworthy, but it’s done with kindness and meticulous care. Because it all matters. Bringing mystery novels and reading glasses to a prisoner. Reassuring a mother that her son is alive and well, if a bit hungover. Making sure a child’s birth is registered properly, so she has the chance to become an American citizen, even an American president if she chooses. This is what it means to be an ambassador of goodwill. “Human kindness has never weakened the stamina or softened the fiber of a free people,” said President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who steered the US through WWII. “A nation does not have to be cruel to be tough.” Performing small acts of service and compassion, even in the darkest times — especially in the darkest times — has a ripple effect, touching others, reminding us that we are not alone and that we all matter.  My spiritual teacher Thich Nhat Hanh viewed dish washing as a Zen exercise and an act of love. Just look at all the love in my kitchen last Thanksgiving! 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.  Jimmy and Cristina lived and worked all over the world before retiring in Seville. Do you ever have days when your tech devices gang up on you, taking fiendish delight in frustrating your efforts to perform the simplest task? I’ll take that as a yes. When that happened to me Friday, along with the teeth-grinding exasperation came the nagging feeling of familiarity. What did this convoluted, time-devouring, mind-numbing quagmire remind me of? And then I had it. Spanish bureaucracy.  Here in Seville, Rich and I once had to close a couple of moribund bank accounts, one with a balance of 10€, the other with 20€. To terminate, the clerk explained, required a zero balance. “Fine,” I said. “We’ll take the cash now.” She looked at me as if I’d requested a dodgy sexual favor. “No. We do not keep money here.” But … this was a bank! Where the hell did they keep the money? In a shoebox under the bed? Rich asked soothingly, “What would you suggest?” After furious tapping and screen-scowling, she said, “I could transfer the 10€ to a charity. Perhaps …” more furious tapping. “UNICEF?” “Fine.” The transfer took twenty minutes. First account: closed.  Fool that I was, I said, “Now we send the 20€ to UNICEF?” She gave me her trademark dodgy-sexual-favor look. “Impossible.” Naturally I asked why, but the answer was so long-winded my eyes soon glazed over; it’s possible my ears may have been bleeding slightly. All I can tell you is that there are two types of accounts, and this was the other kind. Forty minutes later, we agreed the bank would keep the money, the account would never be closed, and Rich and I would never darken their door again. Opening a Spanish bank account isn’t any easier. “I didn’t realize it at the beginning,” my Romanian friend Cristina told me Friday, “but here someone has to introduce you to your banker."  In Seville, you rely on amigos to clue you in about how things work. Here we are with Cristina, Jimmy, and Sevillanos Isabel and Julio, who have kindly explained countless times just where we have gone ridiculously wrong. “At first, we couldn’t get anything done,"Cristina recalled. "We had found a place to buy, and needed to put down a deposit. To do that we needed a bank account. But to open a bank account we needed a fixed address. And an NIE.” That’s the Número de Identificación de Extranjero (Foreigner Identification Number) the Spanish authorities give you. “And to get an NIE,” she continued, “we needed a bank account. And a fixed address. We went around and around. Finally our lawyer intervened. He knew someone who worked at the bank, introduced us to them, and somehow it all got arranged.” “Patience and persistence,” said Cristina’s husband, Jimmy. “That’s what you need.” And Jimmy should know; he’s an American who has lived all over the US and Eastern Europe, including Romania, where he met Cristina in 1999.  Bucharest is an impressive city. Rich and I stayed in this wonderfully atmospheric apartment building there in 2014. “I was born in Bucharest and lived there all my life,” Cristina said. “In 2004 Jim had a job in Jordan and I went with him. I left everything behind: my job, which was great; my cats which I loved with all my heart; my dad; my friends; my language.” “In Jordan we learned a few words of Arabic, to get around,” said Jimmy. “But it was complicated. There were lunar aspects and sun aspects of the language. Egyptian Arabic was different from Jordanian Arabic. Of course, it’s not Roman characters, and it reads from right to left.” After that job and a stint in the US, they retired to Seville in 2016, where learning Spanish proved less daunting than Arabic but was still no cakewalk. “Take language classes,” Jimmy advised, “but be careful. We went to one school, and they assured us that there was a wide age range of students. There was not a person there older than 24. I felt like everybody’s grandfather.” (Jimmy is 75, Cristina 62.)  Daily life in a foreign language requires creativity. A few years back, I added drawings to my hotel laundry list in Katowice, Poland to avoid misunderstandings. Everyone asks them about Spain’s medical care. “Don’t be afraid of it,” Jimmy said. “The health system is wonderful.” Cristina nodded. “Last year I had a small foot fracture. The doctor said I needed an MRI. I talked to the clerk and she said, ‘Yes, you can have one in half an hour, just wait here.’” You’ve gotta love the service. Taxes are always a delicate subject, but I felt I owed it to my readers to inquire. In years that they spend more than 180 days in Seville, Cristina and Jimmy qualify as tax residents of Spain. “There’s a huge difference,” Jimmy said. “Our non-resident tax is about 100€ to 200€. As tax residents, we pay 6,000€ to 7,000€. My advice: Get a tax lawyer.” Professional advice is also essential, he said, for getting your Spanish drivers’ license, which is required after six months of residency. (Unless, like me, you never drive here.) Jimmy passed the written test — now available in English — on his own but wisely worked with an instructor to get insider tips for the driving test. “Everything you think you know, it’s totally the opposite,” Cristina said.  Spanish driving conditions often require a special set of skills. Jimmy summed it up: “If you are thinking of relocating, remember it’s not the same as a vacation. And it’s not the same as the US. You’ve got to be open.” Being open to new ways of doing things isn’t always easy, and some newcomers crash and burn. CNN recently published an interview with Joanna McIsaac-Kierklo who retired to France with her husband in October 2023. Now they’re back in San Francisco, saying their dream life had become a nightmare. “I honestly don’t think we could have put in any more effort to acclimatize to the French way of life,” said Joanna. Really? She avoided her fellow expats — “that’s not exactly why we came on this adventure” — but never learned any French. “I have been so busy packing, unpacking, assembling furniture etc. that I haven’t really found time to hunker down and start.” Small wonder that she eventually told her husband, “I haven’t talked to one person here in three months.” Was she waiting for les Français to learn English and show up at her apartment?  Joanna in her San Francisco apartment. Photo courtesy of Joanna McIsaac-Kierklo/CNN Joanna complained that procedures for setting up a bank account and finding a doctor were annoyingly different from those she knew in America. “You talk to the French, and they just shrug their shoulders. And they go, ‘Well, this is France. That’s how it is.’” Yes, and isn’t that the whole point of moving abroad? To try new ways of doing things ? Even the food disappointed her. “People go, ‘Oh my God, the French food is so fabulous. Yeah, if you want to eat brie, pâté, pastries, and French bread all day long. But who eats like that?” Well, yes, that does sound like a nightmare.  “You go to the supermarket, and the produce is terrible,” she says. Photo courtesy of Joanna McIsaac-Kierklo/CNN. As the Buddhists remind us, wherever you go, there you are. So much of how we experience the world depends on our attitude and the narrative we wrap around our experiences. The French like to say, En tout pays, il y a une lieue de mauvais chemin (In every country there is a stretch of bad road). The question is whether we’re going to spend every minute searching for bumps and potholes or roll down the windows, step on the gas, and lean forward to see what adventure awaits us around the next bend. The Five Things Cristina & Jimmy Learned Cultivate patience and persistence. Take language classes but choose wisely. Trust the health care system. Work with a tax lawyer. Hire a driving instructor. Bonus tip: Be open to everything.  Jimmy and Cristina, dressed for Seville's Feria de Abril (April Fair) 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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Karen McCann
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