 Lee Kramm has lived abroad and worked remotely for 11 years. Commuting to an office five days a week; I still shudder when I remember how many hours of my youth were spent crammed into subway trains and buses, navigating crowded transit hubs, and hurtling along freeways, pedal to the metal in the 8:40 Grand Prix, trying to comb my hair and put on lipstick using the rear-view mirror. Looking back, I'm amazed that I — and the drivers around me — survived long enough to reach the office every morning.  Just wondering how many commuters have crashed trying to read this sign. Like most Americans, I usually spent nearly an hour a day in transit. That's 232 hours a year — the equivalent of nearly six 40-hour work weeks. Do I miss it? Are you kidding? I’ve worked from home for decades now, and I still feel the thrill of playing hooky. Cooking breakfast, I listen gleefully to traffic reports so I can revel in the fact that snarled off-ramps and blocked bridges won’t slow down my morning commute from kitchen table to home office. Thanks to the pandemic (a phrase you don’t often hear from me!) millions discovered the convenience of working at home, and today around 32.6 million Americans (22% of the workforce) are still doing their jobs remotely at least part of the time. Not all of them are working from the USA.  We all have different reasons for moving abroad. According to Reddit, “There are 17.3 million American digital nomads or people that travel freely while working remotely.” My math isn’t great, but doesn’t that add up to around 11% of the US workforce? No wonder I've had so many enquiries about this lately — like the visitor who recently asked, “How do people manage their jobs remotely? Think I could do it?” To answer him properly, I sat down this week with Lee Kramm, an American amigo who has spent the last eleven years working remotely in Seville and, more recently, in the Algarve region of Portugal. I asked him to share his family's story.  Lee with his wife, Emily “I'm trained in engineering and medicine,” Lee explained, “I worked in the FDA for five years, serving as a medical officer for the regulation of ophthalmic medical devices and drugs.” His job was to determine what scientific evidence needed to be gathered to ensure that a clinical trial provided definitive proof. He liked the work, but neither he nor his wife, Emily, felt at home in Washington, DC. “You go on long walks through the neighborhood and you talk about moving. It's more like a fantasy at that point,” he recalled. “We were fed up with living in DC. Emily had lived in Barcelona, studying. She told me if we could ever find a way to move to Spain with the children to learn the language, it’d be a great opportunity. But how to make it happen? What are the logistics of it all?”  First, Lee left his government job and spent a year in the US setting up a private consulting practice. Instead of evaluating clinical trials presented to the FDA, he now advises companies how to design clinical trials for new products they want approved. He joined a consulting group with an international reputation and soon had plenty of clients. “Then Sandy Hook happened,” he said. As you probably remember, that was the deadliest elementary school shooting in American history; 26 people were killed including 20 first graders — little kids about the same age as Lee’s two children. That’s when Lee and Emily, then in their mid-thirties, got more serious about living in Europe. The following summer they moved to Seville and enrolled their kids, aged seven and eight, in a local public elementary school. “A lot of expat families we know send their kids to bilingual schools as a soft landing,” said Emily. “And we just threw our kids in, as hard as you can do it. But they learned Spanish down in their souls, and they'll always have it.”  The Kramm kids walking to school in downtown Seville, 2013 Family life is very different in Spain. “One of the things people enjoy here,” Lee said, “is not to have a whole life that’s centered around driving among different activities, like sports. That change is like a breath of fresh air. And kids don’t have to think about things like wearing clear backpacks for weapons checks or training to hide under their desks [from a shooter]. You transition to a more sane way of living.” I asked Lee about his work-life balance. “I'm disciplined about getting my work done. What I'm not disciplined about is taking personal time. My clients are all over the world, in different time zones. So my work bleeds into Sundays, into night, into early mornings. I enjoy what I do, but I need to segregate my work life better. But that's one of the beauties of working for yourself, right? It's all within my control.”  As for Emily, she started a nonprofit called Diálogos para Construir (Constructive Dialogues or “DPC”). “I founded it with some Spanish aid workers, heroes with capes. We provide legal aid, housing, educational, and basic needs support for refugees and migrants who are already here.” She mostly works with African and Middle Eastern youths who reach 18 and are no longer eligible for state services. To help fund the nonprofit, she and some friends launched Uprooted Theater, Seville’s first English language live theater. It’s been a huge hit in the community and a personal delight for me.  Cabaret night at Uprooted Theater This nonprofit and the people they support will benefit enormously from last month’s Spanish legislation reforms that will provide them with work visas and encourage them to assimilate into society. “Spain needs young workers,” Lee explained. “And these young men want to work. Spain said, ‘We’re going to look at this as a practical matter. We are going to fulfill the labor needs of Spain and the production demands from Northern Europe; we cannot segregate refugees and migrants away from the work.’ This is big news. And it’s good news.”  As a future expat, how might you find work? Lee has used Upwork to hire freelancers for various tasks and projects; some consultants say it is useful for finding jobs online. Other sites Lee hasn’t tried offer similar services. What about navigating the transition? Lee recommends Jackie “the Fixer” Baxa’s Family Move Abroad. Got teens approaching college age? More and more Americans are opting to get quality, affordable degrees in the UK and the EU; the consulting group Beyond the States can help you research options. Spain began offering Digital Nomad Visas in 2023 — just one of the reason it’s often ranked among the top countries for remote workers. Beyond that, Lee pointed out, “You pay less for housing, health insurance, basic needs, and you don't need two cars…” In fact, you may not need a car at all. Rich and I have lived in Seville for nearly 20 years without a vehicle, walking everywhere, enjoying the city’s exuberant nuttiness every single day. Where I come from, you don’t find entertainment like that on a city bus or crowded freeway!  SPAM ALERT! Lately I've been flooded with spam comments, sometimes 200 or more per blog post. Each has to be removed individually. I'm experimenting with ways to block them, which may result in some delays in posting legitimate comments. Don't worry — your words will appear! In the unlikely event they don't, write me at [email protected]. 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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 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? 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.  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.  At Seville's Feria de Abril with my friend Lynnette, who caused quite an uproar one memorable night. It’s not easy for anyone, let alone a foreigner, to cause a sensation at Seville’s Feria de Abril (April Fair). The whole event is already wildly over the top, with half a million women dressed in gaudy, ruffled gowns, beribboned horses and carriages weaving through the crowd, and everyone dancing day and night all week. They say the average Sevillano gets two hours of sleep a night, and I’m surprised it’s that much.  Seville's Feria de Abril is held two weeks after Easter and requires a flouncy dress, a rose in your hair, and incredible stamina. Feria perfectly embodies a favorite expression of some bad-influence friends of my youth: “If you’re going to do something, you might as well go too far.” And then one year my American friend Lynnette showed up at Feria in an outfit that had Sevillanos pouring out of their tents, roaring with laughter, and begging to have their picture taken with her. A howling sartorial success. I felt lucky to be there when it happened. As is so often the case in Europe, it all came down to fútbol — or as we Americans like to call it, soccer.  Here Real Betis celebrates a victory. Their checkerd history inspired their slogan "¡Viva el Betis manque pierda!" (Long live Betis even if they lose!). This city has two teams. Sevilla Fúbol Club was launched in 1890 by aristocrats who made it clear that lesser mortals need not apply. In 1907 the city’s scrappy underdogs formed their own team called Betis, from the old Roman name for the Guadalquivir River that runs through town. The word Real (Royal) was added to the Betis name seven years later when they won the patronage of King Alfonso XIII. Take that, Sevilla FC snobs! Both play in the top-level La Liga, and the years have done nothing to dim the intensity of the rivalry. One of the first things you learn here is that Sevilla FC wears red stripes, Real Betis wears green ones, and there are plenty of bars in town that you’d be extremely unwise to set foot in wearing the wrong colors. Trust me on this. So when Lynnette strolled through the Feria de Abril in 2007, eight-and-three-quarters months pregnant, wearing a traditional Feria dress in bold green Real Betis stripes, wrapped in a shawl with the team’s logo, Betis supporters cheered and raced over to take selfies with her. For me, it was like walking into a party as Marylin Monroe’s wingwoman. Heady stuff. Lynnette had come a long, long way from the life that was expected of her in the conservative small Missouri town she once called home. Like so many expats, she didn’t move here as part of carefully constructed strategy. “It was all a whim, with zero plan,” she recalled, laughing, when we were reminiscing recently about our early days in Seville. She’d lived in various parts of the US — Oklahoma, Texas, New York, and finally Las Vegas — but she felt her life wasn’t moving in the right direction. Or really any direction. Then she went to Spain on a ten-day vacation, not expecting much beyond a little good weather and affordable wine. “I’ve got to be honest, I was clueless. When I came to Spain, I just fell in love with the country. It knocked my socks off. The Mediterranean, the mountains … it was just so beautiful to me.”  Playa del Postiguet in Alicante, Andalucía Lynnette moved to Seville in 2002 and survived by teaching English and sewing Feria dresses (or trajes de flamenco, as they’re properly called). Eventually she met and married a Spaniard named Fran, and they had a son, Andrew. And that’s when things started unraveling for Lynnette. “I had considered myself bi when I moved here,” she said. “I felt it was equally possible that I might have fallen for a man or a woman. I loved Fran dearly. But after I had Andrew, there was something like a biological shift in my body; in the course of the next few years, it just became more and more clear to me that I was just not interested in [marriage to a man] anymore. I was raised in a very traditional home; even though I consider myself a liberal feminist woman, there was expectation in my head that I needed to be a good wife and a good mother. Your kid needs two parents.” She stuck it out until Fran finally said to her, “This isn’t working.” And they agreed to call it quits. “I was devastated,” she told me. “It took me about a year to say, ‘I am a lesbian.’”  Lynnette in August, 2024 “How did your friends and neighbors react? Was there any pushback?” “Oh, God, no. Never.” She considered a moment. “Here there’s a close family bond, and I feel like it's reflected in the acceptance of people who are different. You've got so many different kinds of people in your family and you accept them. People who are queer or have disabilities are really welcomed into every part of society. People are more empathetic.” I’ve often observed this during Sunday lunch, when many generations of a Sevillano family will gather at long tables in neighborhood bistros. Everyone is expected to converse with everyone else. Yep, even the doddering ancianos, the kids with Down Syndrome, the awkward teens, the grumpy dads, the distracted moms, the shy cousins, and the tiniest babies.  Rich and I don't have relatives here, but we hold big, noisy Spanish-style meals to celebrate the holidays. This is Thanksgiving 2021. And this, I believe, is one of the truly remarkable things about Spain. The word nosotros (us) means everybody, the whole mad mix of humanity that makes up the nation. That’s the basis of a socialist society — and theoretically of our democracy as well. “We the people…” is supposed to include all of us. Not just the ones we agree with about sex, religion, and politics. Not only those who look like us and live in a “nice” house. Not exclusively folks who are free from illness, strife, or bad luck. Everybody. Of course, human nature is human nature; get a few Sevilla FC and Real Betis supporters in a room and you’ll see sparks fly. But you’ll also see Sevilla FC fans grinning along with everyone else at Lynnette’s famous Betis dress, which she wore to Feria again when the team won the 2022 Copa del Rey. Only this time with the waist taken in and her hair in an asymmetrical bob, shaved on one side. And people still cheered and rushed to take selfies with her. An influencer shot this TikTok video of her, and it went viral. Open-heartedness begins at home and spreads out into the world. “Knowing that your parents, your grandparents, your family supports and loves you no matter what — I think that that really does make a difference in how people behave in general,” says Lynnette. Mother Teresa agreed. "What can you do to promote world peace?” she asked. “Go home and love your family." Amen to that.  Our family and amigos at a party in 2024. Ya gotta love them. 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.  A Seville coachman takes his siesta during a lull on a warm afternoon. “Nothing is permanent in this wicked world — not even our troubles.” — Charlie Chaplin “I always feel younger here in Seville,” Rich said at breakfast Friday morning. My husband looked remarkably chipper for a man who had been out till all hours watching live cabaret in an old warehouse on one of the city’s more obscure back streets. And why wouldn’t he? According to recent research, novel experiences abroad fend off the effects of aging. If so, I’m all in. The researcher, Edith Cowan University’s Fangli Hu, says it all comes down to entropy. Digging deep into my hazy memories of high school science classes, I recalled that entropy refers to the tendency of the universe to unravel into chaos then hurtle inevitably towards death. How does that help us exactly? According to Hu, positive new experiences build physical, emotional, and psychological resilience. More resilience means we’re less jittery. And when we’re calmer, she explains, “Organs and tissues can then remain in a low-entropy state." Meaning we aren’t plunging quite so rapidly into the whole chaos-hurtling-toward-death scenario. And if I say so myself, Rich has a gift for throwing himself into novel experiences ... and carrying me along with him. The health benefit of novelty is excellent news for those of us who live abroad. Because every day our brains are stretched like Silly Putty. Rich often illustrates this point with the Screwdriver Story. During our very earliest days in Seville, he needed this simple tool for a minor repair and looked up the Spanish word in his dictionary (this was in the dark days before smartphones). He then walked to the hardware store muttering to himself, “destornillador, destornillador, destornillador,” ignoring all the odd looks he was getting from fellow pedestrians. Stepping confidently through the door, he strode like a lion to the counter. And that’s when his mind went completely blank. Groping desperately, he found something that sounded almost right and blurted out, “Ordenador!” The Spanish word for computer. Confusion reigned. His attempts to elucidate and pantomime only made things worse. Eventually he fled, returning home to consult the dictionary before trying a different hardware store. He never showed his face in the first one again.  Now, a pessimist might consider this a high-stress, entropy-boosting situation. To an optimist like my husband, it was exhilarating. “In these situations,” he explains, “you’re not on automatic pilot. Everything is a challenge. Every day is full of accomplishments.” Eventually, he did manage to return home with a screwdriver. And by now this small purchase had taken on mythic significance: it wasn’t just something to check off on his to-do list, it was a triumph. Filling your life with such modest but thrilling victories helps you feel more confident, less stressed, and — according to Hu — better able to fend off that old devil entropy a bit longer. So if stress is bad for our longevity, where in the world can we go to find a relaxing, life-prolonging haven?  I decided to look up the Global Peace Index for 2024. (Find the entire list here.) Even in these troubled times, some nations still manage to achieve stability and tranquility, starting with these standouts.
This is Iceland’s 17th year in the top spot, thanks to a small, close-knit population, a robust economy, and so little crime cops don’t carry guns.  Icelandic police officer Heiðrún Huld, shown here with Buster, never carries firearms. "We’re such a tiny country, we have an excellent support system and zero tolerance for violence within the community." Out of 163 countries on the list, Spain came in at a respectable 23rd, while the US showed up at 132nd — just above Iran and Lebanon. I suspect if the poll was taken this week, we might score even lower on the tranquility scale. Don’t get me wrong — America is doing lots of things right these days. We have the lowest unemployment in half a century, slower inflation, a manufacturing boom, record-breaking gains in the stock market, and crime plummeting to historic lows. “The American economy has left other rich countries in the dust,” says Zanny Minton Beddoes, editor-in-chief of The Economist. “A relentless dynamism is the essential characteristic of the American economy and the ultimate force propelling it forward.” But while relentless dynamism is great for our economy, it does nothing to soothe our collective nerves, frayed by constant upheaval at home and abroad. American’s organs and tissues are clearly in a high-entropy state right now.  Is it any wonder that the latest polls show 50 million Americans (15% of the population) are currently planning to move overseas? Not everyone will follow through, of course. But it’s easy to see the attraction of a less stressful environment. I don’t know how life arranges itself in Iceland, but I can tell you that in Seville, the pace is slower and far more civilized. Here, very sensibly, the day revolves around the twin pleasures of food and conversation.  Second breakfast at El Castillo, a café in Rota, Spain, last January First breakfast is at home with family and typically includes café con leche (a small, strong coffee with milk) and toasted baguette with a drizzle of good olive oil and slivers of jamon (cured ham; prosciutto's toothier, more flavorful cousin) and possibly a slice of tomato. Second breakfast takes place mid-morning. If you’re working, you put in a solid hour or two at the office then repair to the nearest café for another round of toast and coffee accompanied by lively conversation with colleagues. Lunch is a leisurely and substantial repast at 2:00, if possible taken at home with the family and followed by a siesta. Merienda (afternoon snack) may be enjoyed with family or friends and often involves coffee and a sweet roll — yes, essentially a third breakfast — around 5:00 pm. After that you head back to the office for another three hours. Dinner is served at 9:00 or 10:00 and may be just beer and tapas or a full meal. If you have friends around, it can last until 2:00 am or later.  Rich in our Seville kitchen, making paella with amigos Julie and Lonnie Spanish healthcare experts insist five meals a day are essential to keeping your weight down, as it prevents overeating at meals or — horrors! — snacking. “To lose this traditional schedule,” warned a MujerHoy article darkly, “is to throw open the doors to indiscriminate nibbling.” Egads, not that! In ways too numerous to mention in one post, I find life in Seville encourages me to pause frequently to smell the orange blossom, sip espresso, ponder the meaning of life, and enjoy the companionship of amigos from around the world. You may discover that you resonate best with the daily rhythms of Iceland or Portugal or Singapore. Or some less frenetic corner of America, for that matter. Finding or creating a peaceful sanctuary, with an unhurried pace and congenial company, can sustain us through even the most turbulent times. “We need, above all things,” said philosopher Alan Watts, “to slow down and get ourselves to amble through life instead of to rush through it.” Or as Mae West put it, “Anything worth doing is worth doing slowly.”  Einstein was right; time is relative, as this Seville clock shop demonstrates. So why hurry? 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. 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? If you ever miss a post announcement, please check your spam folder. Internet security is in a frenzy these days. 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.  Expat friendships often start in the long, long lines inside the Plaza de España office that handles residency cards. Here Rich arrives early with a backpack full of documents. “What surprises people most when they first move here?” I asked my friend Gabrielle — Gaye, for short — as we lingered over late-morning coffee in one of Seville’s back street cafés this week. Having moved from the US to Spain in 1963, marrying a Sevillano, and raising a family here, Gaye has been my go-to expert in cultural matters ever since we met in book club two decades ago. “That people take children everywhere, even late at night to bars,” she answered promptly. I had to laugh, thinking how often I’d fielded the horrified questions “What is that little kid doing in a bar? At this hour?” You’d think we were frequenting an opium den or particularly sordid brothel instead of a café-bar where somebody’s grandmother was cooking a late supper in the back. “My visitors freak out,” I told her, “when they see little kids running around playgrounds at midnight. They keep insisting children should be in bed at that hour, no matter how often I point out that in these sizzling temperatures they need to exercise when it won’t give them heatstroke.” Seville is the hottest city in continental Europe, with heat waves so severe meteorologists now name them, like hurricanes. For much of the year, it’s only sensible to siesta in the afternoon and venture out after dark. But it’s not easy to convince American guests that taking children to a playground at night is a practical necessity, not parental neglect.  Sevillano children also stay up very late at night to march in religious processions. In vain do I point out that Spain is the most family friendly country in Europe, according to US News and World Report; worldwide it’s second only to New Zealand. The US was ranked an underwhelming 26th, just below Turkey and Thailand. Who are we to judge other people’s childrearing techniques? Letting go of our pre-conceived notions of How Things Are Supposed to Work is one of the first and most essential challenges expats and travelers must grapple with. We have to mentally unpack our bags and throw out great gobs of assumptions we’ve been carrying around for years. This makes room for fresh introspection and, with luck, greater clarity about who we are and what we’re doing in the world. And that, according to a recent report in the Harvard Business Review, is a very good thing.  Being an expat means plenty of fresh new experiences, such as sampling caracoles (snails) with a toothpick in a backstreet tapas bar. The Harvard report analyzed six studies involving 1,874 participants to see how living abroad affects people. Not surprisingly, the authors found it generally makes you more creative, tolerant, and competent. They zeroed in on something they called “self-concept clarity,” which means having a deeper, keener, and more consistent understanding of yourself. Apparently this quality blossoms during the expat experience and offers all sorts of benefits, such as boosting psychological well-being, job performance, and the ability to cope with stress.  Rich's ability to cope with stress — and his legendary ability to sleep anywhere — helped him survive during the pandemic lockdown, during which we often picnicked on the roof of our Seville apartment building. At the end of their report, the authors rather surprisingly included this lovely quote from Michael Crichton, “who captures the spirit of our research in his autobiographical book, Travels: ‘Often I feel I go to some distant region of the world to be reminded of who I really am … Stripped of your ordinary surroundings, your friends, your daily routines … you are forced into direct experience [which] inevitably makes you aware of who it is that is having the experience.’” You don’t need to move abroad to have more direct experiences, of course, but it helps. Everything around us is so new and interesting it’s easy to put away our cellphones and simply be here now (something the Buddhists have been advising for centuries). While Spaniards love digital devices as much as anyone, they use them considerably less. Spanish 18-to-24-year-olds are on their smartphones 3 hours and 40 minutes a day — which seemed a whopping number until I learned American youngsters are on them half their waking hours.  At our holiday dinners in Seville, the kids agree not to use their cellphones, and we introduce them to low-tech fun like this memory test (Kim's Game). One reason for the difference in cellphone use: Spanish families don’t assume kids will disappear into their rooms and their devices when relatives gather. Youngsters are expected to spend time with various generations of adults, holding up their end of the conversation, and giving grandparents proper attention and respect. (I know; what a concept!) But times, and Spanish families, are a-changing. For a start, the birthrate has dropped to 1.19 per woman, the lowest since record-keeping began in 1941. It was nearly triple that back in the 1960s and early 1970s, when birth control, abortion, and divorce were illegal, and the government and the Catholic Church promoted childbirth as a civic and spiritual duty. “During the Franco era,” Gaye recalled, “they used to give prizes for large families. Fourteen or fifteen kids, that wasn’t uncommon.”  In 1968 this Barcelona family won an award for having 16 living children. The caption in the newspaper El Pais mentions only the name of the father, Oriol de Riba, as if he alone deserved all the credit. Spanish homes may be less crowded now, but they remain the cornerstone of the culture, and the matriarchs who run them often command serious respect. Today nearly half of Spanish women (47%) work outside the home, and more than half the parliamentary posts are held by women, giving the government “a marked feminist accent,” said Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez. Comparing modern Spain to the Franco era she first knew, Gaye said, “There’s more equality now. You can see it, for example, in the clothing. Clothes were much more expensive in the past, so there was a big difference in what was worn by the very well-to-do and by the working class. Now everyone dresses the same.” She gestured toward the window, where we could see people strolling past in the international uniform of jeans, t-shirts, and sneakers — a look equally at home anywhere from Seville to Singapore to San Francisco. “When I first came here,” she added, “women wore dresses or skirts — never pants except for sports or the beach. Blue jeans?” She glanced down at her denim-clad legs. “Never.”  Everyday fashion has changed, but during the big festivals, such as the Feria de Abril and the Rocio pilgrimage, Sevillanos still wear traditional outfits like these. Nobody blends seamlessly into a new culture. I wore all the wrong stuff to all the most important occasions for years. I remember sitting next to the only other non-Spanish member of my painting class at a Christmas party, both of us hopelessly overdressed. She said with a sigh, “I will never get this right.” Maybe, but it does get better. And let’s face it, we provide our new Spanish friends with a lot of innocent amusement at our expense. Of course, the real guffaws come at the way we butcher the language. I’m reliably informed that nowadays my vocabulary is decent, my grammar occasionally shaky, and my accent appalling. Having made all the classic bloopers — using embarazada to indicate embarrassed when in fact it means pregnant, for instance — I have become nimble at delivering graceful apologies and quickly changing the subject. Learning a new language and culture creates countless opportunities for error, but also for reaching out to those around you for advice and assistance. You rely on the kindness of strangers every day and receive lifesaving support from neighbors, colleagues, and your fellow befuddled foreigners. Perhaps the biggest surprise of expat life comes the day that you realize you are no longer alone; the former strangers around you are fast becoming true amigos.  ¡Salud, amigos! (To your health, friends!) THE AMIGOS PROJECT This post is part of my ongoing exploration of how living and traveling abroad can not only enrich our lives but help us learn how to avoid the isolation that's become a global epidemic. 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? If you ever miss a post announcement, please check your spam folder. Internet security is in a frenzy these days. 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.  This is my "Rich, I've just had an Absolutely Brilliant Idea" face. The first thing that struck me when I arrived back in Spain this week was how much less invisible I feel here. People pay attention to each other. It’s one of the things that makes Seville — a city of 700,000 souls — seem like a village. For instance, there was the time I discovered a pickpocket had slipped his hand into my purse. OK, I know that’s not the kind of attention anybody wants. But as I wrenched my bag out of his grasp, a nearby stranger instantly began berating the thief in a furious barrage of Spanish that had him fleeing at top speed. I got the impression she would have liked to chase him down and clobber him with her own purse, and I appreciated the sentiment. Of course, sometimes you can be too visible. Like the time I tripped over a crack in the sidewalk and grabbed Rich’s arm for support. Which would have been fine except that as I lurched forward my foot came down directly on top of one of his, and we both pitched forward onto the ground in a tangle of arms, legs, and embarrassment. Everyone in the vicinity shouted and rushed about until it was clear the only thing injured was our dignity.  A New Yorker cartoon shows how Americans might handle the situation. Madeline L’Engle once asked, “Have you ever tried to get to your feet with a sprained dignity?” To which I reply: Often. I’ve spent two decades floundering through the pratfalls and misunderstandings that come with living in another culture for six months every year. “How long are you going to keep this up?” everyone used to ask me. “When are you coming home for good?” But nowadays they are peppering me with practical questions about residency visas, Spanish medical insurance, and the difficulty of learning a second language. Everyone I know seems to be considering — or at least fantasizing about — a move abroad.  Planning — and dreaming — can be half the fun. I’m always happy to share what I’ve learned. The lessons are valuable, even if you’re one of the (apparently rare) Americans not contemplating a move to Europe. For a start, living overseas teaches you why and how to make new social connections. And that’s an area where most of us seriously need to up our game. In 2023 US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy wrote, “I embarked on a cross-country listening tour, where I heard stories from my fellow Americans that surprised me. People began to tell me they felt isolated, invisible, and insignificant.” Even pre-Covid, he says, half of all Americans reported feeling lonely. And that’s worrying. “Loneliness is far more than just a bad feeling — it harms both individual and societal health. It is associated with a greater risk of cardiovascular disease, dementia, stroke, depression, anxiety, and premature death.” Yikes!  Dr. Murthy, surrounded by family during his swearing-in as US Surgeon General, is determined to help fight the loneliness epidemic. Most of us no longer live in our original home towns, hanging out with chums we met in kindergarten and generations of extended family. In our increasingly isolated society, how do we reach out to new friends — or amigos, as they are known here? Can we find ways to come together, boosting our daily fun while pushing back against the loneliness epidemic? I was mulling this over during lunch today, and inspiration struck as I was spearing my first forkful of carilladas (pig cheeks). "Rich, I've just had an Absolutely Brilliant Idea. This can be the focus of my blog this fall and winter. I can explore how members of the expat community find creative ways to jump-start their social lives. I'll call it 'The Amigos Project.' I can start by sharing the tips I always give newcomers." What tips? Find a book club (mine’s part of the American Women’s Club of Seville). Join an international social club such as InterNations. Dine with a local chef in their home via EatWith. Sign up for a language class, even if you have absolutely no aptitude for it.  Mladen and Lidija, our EatWith hosts in Zagreb, Croatia, are now long-standing friends. What have you got to lose but your loneliness? For those moving abroad, choose a destination known for its congeniality. Below are the results of InterNations' 2024 Expat Insider Survey which evaluates quality of life by studying leisure, mobility, health care, safety, and climate. Spain has held the number one spot for two years in a row. Not bragging, just saying.  Four years ago I wrote: The decision to move abroad often comes as a sudden, blinding, rapturous epiphany, when you realize you actually can — you should! — you will! — boldly change the course of your life forever. I’ll never forget Rich sitting me down at a sidewalk café in Seville and earnestly trying to persuade me that we should live here “for a year” while I kept attempting to break into his monolog long enough to gasp “Hell, yes!” But, as the Buddhists are fond of saying, “After the ecstasy, the laundry.” When the first giddy thrill wears off, the mundane details need to be addressed. And when I say “mundane details,” I actually mean the staggering mountain of large and small tasks required for any major move, plus the added legal complications of foreign residency.  Future expats all have a folder like this, bursting at the seams with legal, medical, and financial documents. To get you started, here are stories I’ve written about the three biggest “mundane details” you’ll need to tackle early on. How To Get a Residency Visa Without Losing Your Mind. A residency visa will let you live year-round in the country of your choice. Getting one can take 200 hours of paperwork; you may want to hire help. What I've Learned About Finding Medical Care Abroad. The US ranks 23rd in quality of health care, so you may be pleasantly surprised by the options (and prices) you find overseas. I'm a Foreigner Here Myself. Learning a new language doesn’t get any easier with age, but it’s a great way to make friends and learn about local customs and attitudes. At the very least you’ll do better ordering beer at the bar.  Soon you, too, could be saying, "Dos cervezas, por favor." “Travel,” wrote author Andrew Solomon, “is a set of corrective lenses that helps focus the planet’s blurred reality.” We get even greater clarity when we settle down abroad for an extended period of time. Just as going away to college gives us fresh perspective on our family dynamics, leaving the US to immerse ourselves in a foreign culture illuminates our understanding of our nation and our world. We make friends with a whole new range of people. And while we're getting to know them, we discover exciting, totally unexpected aspects of ourselves and how we fit into the global family. Stay tuned! In the coming months I'll be visiting different parts of Spain, talking to expats and locals to learn about ways they have managed to engage more fully with the culture around them. Got questions? Let me know in the comments below.  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? If you ever miss a post announcement, please check your spam folder. Internet security is in a frenzy these days. 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.  True friends come in all shapes and sizes, as I learned from Charlotte's Web. “The horrible thing,” Rich said, after finishing Charlotte’s Web, “is that I’m never going to be able to kill a spider again.” When I'd learned Rich had somehow managed to get through childhood without meeting the talking spider who saved an innocent pig, I gave him my copy, pulling it out of the huge pile of banned books in our living room. Now, I know what you’re thinking: Charlotte’s Web was banned? Why? Seriously, why? It seems some Kansas folks were offended by the book’s talking animals, insisting they’re “unnatural and blasphemous, as humans are the highest level of God’s creation.” Really? Have the seen the human folly in the headlines lately? Give me pigs and spiders any day.  To me, restricting kids’ access to books is like depriving them of oxygen or the right to eat chocolate on Halloween. How is anyone supposed to navigate childhood without lessons from Harry Potter or Goosebumps? Who can make sense of the adult world without To Kill a Mockingbird, the Diary of Anne Frank, and The Great Gatsby (all removed from many high schools; see the banned lists here)? “I am a parent myself,” wrote Khaled Hosseini, author of the much-banned novel The Kite Runner. “I understand the parental impulse to safeguard our children from harm. But banning books like The Kite Runner doesn’t ‘protect’ students at all. It betrays them. It robs them of the chance that we as parents and instructors owe them, the chance to broaden their human community, to let them walk the world in another’s shoes for a while, to foster empathy for others, to be challenged by the experience and perhaps take a small step toward becoming fuller, richer versions of themselves.”  I was horrified to discover that in the past three years, 6528 books have been targeted for censorship in the US, according to National Library Association records. Challenges started in public schools and spread to public libraries. Statewide bans have begun. There’s talk of national book bans in 2025. What can we do to protect our freedom to read? That's the subject of discussions taking place this week all over America in libraries, bookstores, and coffee houses, because this is national Banned Books Week. Ask your local librarians and booksellers what they've got planned. I’ve organized events in all the bookstores in San Rafael, the city nearest me, and I'll be participating in the three shown below. If you’re in the SF Bay Area, drop in and say hello; I love meeting readers and catching up with old friends! Find me at these San Rafael events: Thursday 9/26 Rebound Bookstore | Banned Book Reading 6:00 – 7:30 PM | 1611 Fourth Street Saturday 9/28 Friends Books | Banned Book Lottery 11:00 AM – 2:00 PM | 1016 C Street Saturday 9/28 Copperfield's Books | Banned Books Community Read-Aloud 2:00 - 3:00 PM | 1200 Fourth Street  Part of my outrage over book banning comes from hanging around City Lights and other activist bookstores I visited as part of my Cheap and Cheerful San Francisco project this summer. Rich and I made 20 trips into the city to investigate reports that it's become a dystopian hellscape mired in a “doom loop” of poverty, drugs, and hopelessness. Don’t believe a word of it. I’ve been talking to San Franciscans, checking out the mood, eating in modest cafes, bistros, and diners, and asking everyone about the doom loop — a subject that always inspires hearty guffaws. “Doom loop? Hell no. This is a great place to live,” I was told over and over. Then they’d point me toward another fabulous eatery, more great bookstores, parks I shouldn't pass up... News flash! The media has been telling a lot of whoppers about San Francisco. “A lie will gallop halfway round the world before the truth has time to pull its breeches on.” Versions of this saying are attributed to everyone from Churchill to Mark Twain to Chinese philosophers, and proof of its accuracy can be found in the doom loop narrative. Much of the sneering is politically motivated; the Left Coast is a popular target. And after decades of writing about how cool San Francisco is, many jaded journalists cannot resist the chance to jump on the bandwagon and get snarky at the city’s expense. But the truth is out there, my friends, and fact-checking with reliable sources reveals a very different picture. Crime rates in San Francisco are dropping, reports the SFPD. Year-to-date, larceny theft — including car and retail robbery — is down 40%. Homicides are 39% lower. There are 17% fewer burglaries. People and property are safer.  Welcome Ambassadors like Kevin are standing by to help visitors find their way — and feel safer in the city. Money is pouring into San Francisco. “In 2023, AI-related startups in the San Francisco Bay Area received an estimated $27.4 billion in investments — 52.6% of the global total — from seed, venture and private equity investors,” Forbes reports. San Francisco has the highest number of AI job postings in the nation, gearing up for what Price Waterhouse Cooper predicts will soon be a $15.7 trillion industry. Of course, we have major problems; what metropolis doesn’t? But struggling to get a disaster-prone city under some semblance of control has always been our default status.  OK, to be fair, this hasn't actually happened yet in real life. But if it's going to happen anywhere, it's likely to be here in SF. Coping with challenges hones our strength and creativity. As Orson Welles said in The Third Man: “In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace — and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.” San Francisco isn’t a cuckoo clock kind of town. During its turbulent history, it’s given the world Levi’s, TV, 911 dispatch, no-fault divorce, Beatniks, The Summer of Love, gay marriage, fortune cookies, Airbnb, Uber, Twitter, Instagram, Yelp, Eggo waffles, martinis, iPhones, and driverless taxis, to name but a few.  Where would the world's coolest people be without the martini? Above all, San Francisco is tremendous fun. Whether you’re as outrageous as Janis Joplin, just want a quiet place to read the books you love, or have a hankering for dive bars and dim sum, this city has it all. Where to start? Here are our suggestions. Best Food Foghorn Taproom The Grove Marcella’s Lasagneria Delicious Dim Sum Best Bars Tempest Bar & Box Kitchen Vesuvio Café Twin Peaks Tavern Best Bookstores City Lights Fabulosa Best Tour Tenderloin Tour Best Museum Beat Museum Best Transportation Waymo driverless taxis I was touched by the kindness we received wherever we went (except the Tonga Room, of course, and the area patrolled by the Waymo Vigilante). And I am deeply impressed with the way the city continues to champion personal freedom. You can be yourself here. And that is a gift beyond price. “San Francisco is a mad city, inhabited for the most part by perfectly insane people,” remarked author Rudyard Kipling. “San Francisco has only one drawback – ’tis hard to leave.” But leave it I must. Next week Rich and I head back to Seville and our Spanish life. It’s not easy saying goodbye (cue Tony Bennett’s I Left My Heart in San Francisco), but we are moving on to fresh loony adventures in Europe. Stay tuned for updates!  Rich and Tony Bennett thank San Francisco for the memories. ON THE ROAD AGAIN NEXT WEEK I will have to skip next week's post to accommodate my travel schedule, but after that I'll have all new stuff to write about. This is the last post in my series OUT TO LUNCH IN CHEAP & CHEERFUL SAN FRANCISCO Thanks for joining us on the journey! BROWSE PREVIOUS 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? If you ever miss a post announcement, please check your spam folder. Internet security is in a frenzy these days. WANT MORE? You can find my best selling travel memoirs & guide books here. 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.  Cara gave us a cheerful welcome at Tempest Bar and Box Kitchen. You have to love a city that commemorates the removal of a hated eyesore with poetic words celebrating our collective joy. Walking out of the San Francisco Ferry Building this week, I discovered a sidewalk plaque commemorating the destruction — begun by the 1989 earthquake, finished by the mayor — of the hideous 1958 Embarcadero “freeway to nowhere.” “The freeway that brooded over the Embarcadero with all the grace of a double decked prison wall is finally gone,” SF Chronicle columnist Carl Nolte wrote gleefully. “In its place is a sweep of air, fog, October sunlight, piers, ships, and the silver Bay Bridge, which is 55 years old and still looks modern.” I was snapping a photo of the plaque when I noticed a man nearby grabbing a yellow traffic cone and making off with it. Wait a moment, I knew this guy — it was the bike-riding Waymo Vigilante who had attacked our Waymo driverless taxi in June, calling me “a disgrace to the human race” for riding in it. What was he up to now? He strode across the plaza to a Waymo standing at the curb and placed the cone on its nose, angled like a unicorn’s horn. Unsure how to cope with this surprising development, the vehicle radioed headquarters and hunkered down to await further instructions. The Waymo Vigilante took a few victory laps around the plaza, admiring his handiwork, clearly thrilled that he’d won a battle in the war between humans and robots.  The Waymo Vigilante admires his handiwork. It was a short-lived victory. In minutes, a worker arrived and removed the cone. The Waymo drove on, the Vigilante pedaled away glowing with self-righteousness, and the streetcar Rich and I had been waiting for came and whisked us off to the day’s activities: an afternoon in the city’s dive bars. If you’re not familiar with the term, a “dive bar” is a well-worn, unpretentious local place that can be anything from a comfy, no-frills neighborhood pub to a seriously squalid gin joint. The name was born in the Prohibition era, when you had to dive down steps to cellars selling bootleg hooch. Today’s dive bars offer cheap drinks, funky décor, colorful characters, and often an easygoing camaraderie that creates a pleasant sense of community among random strangers. I get a kick out of dive bars and have spent years dilligently researching them all over the world on behalf of my readers. (You're welcome.) Very, very few have edible food, but I’d heard of one notable exception in San Francisco: Tempest Bar and Box Kitchen.  The Tempest Bar on a Friday afternoon In the 1960s it was the writers’ hangout Page One “just a short stumble away” from the city’s main newsrooms. Through the years and various owners, the bar has quenched the thirst of reporters, printers, delivery drivers, bike messengers, and “general weirdos.” After the current owners took over Tempest in 2010, a regular customer who was also a notable chef proposed adding modestly priced gourmet eats. Box Kitchen was soon dishing out such unlikely fare as mac and cheese egg rolls ($10) and potato skins with pork belly and quail eggs ($15). Along with our short Modelo draft beers ($4), Rich and I ordered corn and clam chowder ($8) and elote riblets ($8), which turned out to be Mexican street corn slathered with miso butter, chives, and a Japanese spice-and-seaweed blend called togarashi. Not your average bar snacks!  Rich, creamy chowder and slightly spicy Mexican street corn at Tempest A woman at a nearby table jumped up to hug a burly guy with his hair in turquoise cornrows, and they did a little impromptu dance. I called out something encouraging, and we exchanged grins. Soon I was over admiring her friend’s baby, which led to the kind of meandering, friendly chat that’s a hallmark of dive bar culture. The food was spectacular and almost surreal, being served in the kind of place where ordinarily you’d be lucky to get a bag of peanuts. Sipping my chowder and studying the specials, I vowed never to try The Mind Eraser (vodka, Kahlua, and soda water, $11)(unless I already have and don't remember it). I wondered idly if the Italian digestif, Fernet ($8), was anything like its Spanish counterpart, orujo. “Let’s find out,” said Rich. The first sip seared the inside of my mouth like liquid fire. If I’d been capable of vocalizing, I’d have howled. “It grows on you,” gasped Rich. Incredibly, it did, and we finished every drop.  Fernet, a digestif that packs a punch Our next destination was the legendary Vesuvio Café, where the Beat Generation gathered before City Lights opened across the alley. Eccentric artist Henri Lenoir launched it in 1948, filling it with art and drenching it with atmosphere. “Stepping inside feels like walking into the bowels of a pirate ship adorned with decades of history and loving kitsch,” wrote SFGate editor Andrew Chamings. “The bohemians filled this place with surrealism, a sense of humor, whimsy and lightness, and I love them for it.” He declared it “the best bar in America.” Young Jack Kerouac found it so seductive he blew off a once-in-a-lifetime chance to meet world-famous author Henry Miller, who’d written to say he liked the younger writer’s work and could they meet up? En route to their rendezvous in Big Sur 150 miles south along the coast, Jack dropped into Vesuvio Café … and never made it out of San Francisco. When I got to Vesuvio I found the atmosphere convivial and noisy. My nearest neighbor at the bar was a man with a paperback book and a shot of scotch at his elbow. “Get much reading done in here?” I asked. “Sometimes,” he said. “If I really want to concentrate, I go upstairs to my favorite table on the balcony.” Ice broken and his cred as a local established, we were soon exchanging names (his was Josh) and tidbits about our personal and professional lives. When I mentioned the dive bar pub crawl, he insisted I walk across the street to check out Specs’. “Specs’ is the best dive bar in the city,” Josh said. “Specs’ is not a dive bar,” said Shafagh. And he should know; he’s the bartender there. Properly known as Specs’ Twelve Adler Museum Café, and eccentric even by San Francisco standards, this former speakeasy and historic lesbian bar was transformed into a left-wing, blue-collar union bar by Vesuvio-waiter-turned-construction-worker Richard “Specs” Simmons. The inside isn’t as downscale as your typical dive bar, but the dim lighting, quirky décor, and atmosphere of casual chumminess fit the profile. Rich and I were soon chatting away with everyone. Shafagh showed me postcards sent by customers journeying in distant lands and gave me a copy of the card the bar uses to support women fending off unwanted advances.  Could have used this when I was younger! I don’t know what time Rich and I stumbled outside into the afternoon sunlight and began weaving our way toward the Ferry Terminal. Along the way we continued the debate about whether Specs’ was a dive bar. “It all comes down to price,” I said. “How much did we pay for those drinks?” I’d seen Rich hand over a credit card and wave away a receipt. There was a long pause. “I have absolutely no idea.” “I rest my case,” I said. And then we were boarding the ferry, where we slept all the way home.  Words to live by... WHERE ARE THESE CLASSIC SF DIVE BARS? South of Market Tempest Bar and Box Kitchen, 431 Natoma Street North Beach Vesuvio Café, 255 Columbus Avenue Specs’ Twelve Adler Museum Café, 12 William Saroyan Place And There Are Countless More Google "dive bars in SF" and have fun exploring the city's oddball drinking establishments. I'M ON THE ROAD - NO POSTS FOR TWO WEEKS We're going to a wedding plus lots of side trips to visit family and friends. I'll post again as soon as I'm back. This post is part of my ongoing series OUT TO LUNCH IN CHEAP & CHEERFUL SAN FRANCISCO My goal is to discover some of San Francisco's most colorful neighborhoods so I can check out what's really going on in this zany town. Are we in a doom loop? Already on the rebound? Still fabulous? And where should we eat afterwards? These and other questions will be explored in upcoming posts. BROWSE PREVIOUS 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? If you ever miss a post announcement, please check your spam folder. Internet security is in a frenzy these days. WANT MORE? You can find my best selling travel memoirs & guide books here. 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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