Our Excitement Around Moving To Spain Has Evolved

From 2024: A post that visioned the life we're living coming up on one year in Spain

As the year winds down, I’m resurfacing a few pieces that mattered—some popular, some overlooked, some that quietly predicted what life abroad would actually feel like.

Today’s post is from 2024. And it’s one of quite a few from the years leading up to the move where I visioned the life we’d lead in Spain. Turns out I had my head on straight.

Why I’m resurfacing this piece:

I don’t write about life abroad as a fantasy, a checklist, or a crisis to monetize.

I write about what it feels like to stay sharp, curious, and capable when nothing is optimized for you—and no one is trying to sell you a solution. And you can’t maintain any of this without a clear vision of where you want to go, why, and that the destination has what you’re expecting.

If you’re interested in that kind of thinking, paid subscriptions are 50% off through the end of the year. Pay in euros and get 30 days free.

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From December 22, 2024

On January 2, we fly to Barcelona. We will spend most of the long weekend there. On January 6, we take the train to Valencia. On January 7, we apply for our residence permit. Then, we wait. Upon approval, we will open bank accounts and find an apartment. Then, we will conduct several other bureaucratic and administrative tasks.

Of course, I’ll detail them all as they happen. At the same time as doing my creative damnedest to bring to life my experience of living life—on the ground—in Spain.

The day to day. The seemingly mundane. The euphoria. The excitement. The struggles. The challenges. Assessments of what we thought it was going to be like compared to what it’s really like.

All while keeping it real, raw and personal.

It has been more than two years since we decided to move to Spain. We have spent most of that time in the planning process.

As I wrote in yesterday’s installment—

I also feel like we have already lived the so-called honeymoon period and will hit the ground running (and living) right away in Spain. This is something I will cover in tomorrow’s installment.

So, let’s do it.

Call me a shitty writer, but there are some things I like to bullet point out.

• Before I went to Europe for the first time, I had super high expectations for their cities. As places to live. Largely because I became a big fan of cities around the time I moved to San Francisco in 1999. While pursuing a degree in urban studies, there was always this sense of European envy among scholars and planners. The idea that no matter how hard we try, even America’s great cities can never come close to Europe’s urbanity.

• The second I set foot in Italy, then Spain, then Malta, then France, every single city I visited blew my expectations away. Prior to visiting, I worried I might have been over-hyping European cities. Turns out I wasn’t. And turns out that I was correct to assume that I wanted to live the city life that many European places offer. A city life that simply doesn’t exist in the United States. I got close to a taste of it in San Francisco and even Santa Monica and Los Angeles, but, relative to great European cities, you really only half ass urban life in great American cities.

• Over the last 20-plus years, I have developed a solid sense of a place after spending just a little bit of time in it. As in, to what degree would I like—or not like—living in a place.

• Part of the reason for this is the focus I place on day-to-day life. Melisse and I walk by the Arc de Triomf in Barcelona, but end up a few blocks away at a place where you’re unlikely to find a tourist.

When we spend the first weekend of January in Barcelona, we’ll spend it in a local neighborhood where you don’t see a ton of tourists. Especially tourists you could classify as sheep.

• We walk the types of paths we would walk if we were living in a city. We don’t follow the cattle from landmark to landmark. It’s the only way to see a city. And definitely the only way to get anything resembling a sense of what it might be like to live in a place.

• From there, we assessed the life we live in Los Angeles against our ideal. Against our preferred lifestyle. And we clearly concluded that we’ll do many of the same things in the day to day in Spain as we do in Los Angeles. Except we’ll do them in a distinct built and social environment that’s focused on public space, pedestrians and efficiency. Efficiency achieved by relegating the private motor vehicle to second class citizen. The exact opposite of how we structure life across most of America.

It’s not a case of we hate our lives in California so we have to get the hell out of here as much as it’s the reality of we have pretty fulfilling daily routines in California that can be objectively better in settings designed to facilitate and foster these daily routines.

When you drill it down to what this is really about—using a car versus not using one and functioning daily in a built/social environment constructed for people versus one constructed for cars—you strip away the imprecise vision that somehow, something you can’t put your finger on will make your life better in a different part of the world. You can absolutely put your finger on car culture and its nefariously deleterious effects.

That’s the stuff wherever you go, there you are is made of. That’s where euphoria can cloud objectivity. Of considering the reality of what it’s like to live in a place versus visit it.

I drink coffee in a cafe most days of the week in Los Angeles. We buy street food here regularly. We go to modest bars. We go to cocktail bars. We buy groceries and produce. We spend time at the beach. We go for hikes. We head to the yoga studio multiple times a week. All elements of quality of life.

The rubber meets the road when you consider the how and where elements that also comprise quality of life. How do you do these things? Where are you doing them? As in, what’s the setting and how do you traverse that setting?

When we soberly assess these questions, Spain checks the boxes and LA/the United States shoots blanks every single time.

So this doesn’t mean we’re not (still) excited to move to Spain. Of course we are.

However, the type of excitement we’re experiencing has moved from a mix of euphoria and practical excitement to mostly practical excitement alongside an eagerness to see what our new setting has in store for us personally and professionally beyond the aforementioned what elements of quality of life.

The best cities have great amenities. Cultural and otherwise. Residents and tourists should have access to them. However, at the end of the day, cities are places to live. Which is part of the reason why overtourism is such an important issue. But, not far from the throngs all flocking to the same places, city life marches on.

If you’re moving to—as just one example—Spain simply to eat tapas and drink cheap beer, you’ll likely be in for a rude awakening. That activity makes up a small fraction of day-to-day life.

We live in LA where lots of people who visit say I could see myself living there. But that’s after walking along the beach in Santa Monica or strolling the canals in Venice. That’s not going to be your daily life in Los Angeles. It’s going to be much more mundane than that.

Time has a way of creating certainty or leading you to realize that you really don’t want to do something as bad as you thought you did after all. Giving yourself time and space between making a decision you can still change and the point where you can’t or would have a harder time turning back is probably a good idea.

For me—and I think I can speak for Melisse (because I just asked her)—having a good two years to chew on our motivations for moving to Spain has reaffirmed the decision repeatedly.

From every angle.

Time has mellowed out the excitement from post-vacation euphoria—which feels great so there’s no reason to suppress it—to something decidedly practical. To the notion that as much as we’re changing our lives, we’re really just enhancing—upgrading—our existing lifestyle and—subsequently—our quality of life.