Never Retire: What Life Is Actually Like In Valencia, Spain
All I can do is relay our experience. To give you a true sense of what life is like—on the ground—as a foreigner in Valencia, Spain.
If I take inspiration from anyone on the internet, it’s Shawn and Lainey and their Days We Spend YouTube channel. My wife and I have been watching them for longer than I can recall now.
There is an industry online that romanticizes Spain then turns around and tears it apart, creating problems and stoking fears (not to mention false narratives and stereotypes) so that the people looking to grab their chunk of market share in this industry can take the reins and solve the problem for you. It’s opportunistic and exploitative. And doesn’t do much, if anything to help you prepare to move here—or elsewhere—let alone give you a real, raw and personal sense of what it’s like to live in parts of this vast country.
Days We Spend strikes the balance between Spain is freaking amazing and sometimes things aren’t easy, tilting the scale toward the reality that—as a place to do your day to day and explore everything from your seemingly mundane to bucket list passions—you’ll have a hard time beating this country. As long as you can adjust to the universal challenges and rigors of moving abroad. They don’t talk so much about Spain problems as they do human problems—and triumphs—that you’ll find and can have almost anywhere.
They do it from their perch in Ourense, a city of 100,000 in Galicia, a part of Spain that—as I understand it—resembles the Pacific Northwest of the United States.
My wife and I try to do it from our viewpoint in Valencia, a city of around 850,000, that, if you use the weather and proximity to the beach as your gauge, resembles Southern California.
But Ourense isn’t the Pacific Northwest. And Valencia sure isn’t LA.
So your job as a content creator—which has become equally as awful a name for writers and YouTubers as mixologist is for bartender—is to relay your lived, day-to-day experience. To make some small, but educated leaps and hope that you counter the noise by delivering a real and raw, personal and true sense of how it feels to live where you live. To do whatever you do with the hope that others can adapt your experiences to answer their questions, suit their needs and calm their anxiety.
Sometimes I write stuff and I am like, this is boring. Then, I watch Shawn and Lainey talk about the type of sock liners they use when they do a Camino (their passion) and it reinforces the utility and meaning in the (seemingly) mundane.
So—fresh of yesterday’s story of being invited to lunch and welcomed into an apartment by Spanish families and friends all in the span of 36 hours—
This is how my wife found her bicycle.