We´re not homeless anymore

We rented a flat. I feel very grown-up which is very silly indeed.
It´s partially furnished in a terrible rococo old-lady taste and is in urgent need of renovation (really old fashioned kitchen) but it´s perfect for our needs as it´s huge, 3 big bedrooms, 2 bathrooms, kitchen diner, huge living room and formal diner area, largish balcony, laundry room and the use of the communal terrace. Plus it´s also well located in the centre of the second big town in Catalunya called Sabadell but in a quite road. Half an hour by train to the sea; 2 tubes stops from "the husband"´s campus and with a few school close by for the son. I may even get lucky and find a job there although commuting to the centre of Barcelona doesn´t look bad.

We´re moving tomorrow, so I´ll be busy packing and cleaning our flat for the rest of the day.

Showing off and getting a flat

I´m proudly showing off about Barcelona to my friend. She´s really impressed and started talking about moving here because lifestyle, weather and all the usual stuff that made the Brits love Spain.

Also I´m on my way to sign the lease of a flat right now. Wish me luck!!

First visit from abroad!!

Great! A friend from Bristol is coming to town!
She's one of our oldest friends in Britain and we've been also neighbours for a few years and it's really nice to have her here with us.
I'm specially thrilled because I haven't actually talked with anyone since Monday when my dad left.
Also she's bringing us some of the stuff that we lefy behind. She asked me if I wanted books and other reading material or clothes and things like that. Doh! No contest! Books!!
Now I´m going to get some nice fruits to show off and to clean the flat properly.

Also "the husband" is getting back from Russia any minute now and I missed him a lot.

fitness workout podcast?

Do you know a fitness workout podcast?

All this nice food and specially my daily ice-cream is helping in piling up the pounds here and I´m going from a tight 12 size into a balloon size in no time! It's scary.

At the moment I´¡m living in rented accomodation until September and the we'll move to another place so it's not a good idea to find an pay membership to a fitness club. So my best bet is to excersise while I go to the beach. And a fitness podcast will be a great solution if I can find one.

Any idea?

Dubbed. DOH!

After going to the beach and having a shower, we went walking around the neighbourhood here in Poblenou; you know, our usual getting lost, and founded a sort of open air mall. Pretty good and with a big two-storey Carrefour supermarket at the basement. Nice things to look at and even some British chains such as C&A and BHS's and even a branch of The body shop. I missed C&A when they closed in Bristol a few years ago and it's good to have it here.

However, one of the things that I truly love in Barcelona is the big array of small boutiques shops and not the same chains all over. Here you can find small shops selling one particular thing in a very unique way and with a lot of personality, and I do prefer that to the featureless sameness of European chains. To shop in small individual shops is much more exiting because like the proverbial Forrest Gump's box of chocolate "you never know what you're going to get next". It's a bit of a treasure hunting and not at all the experience of just going to pick up whatever you actually need.

There was also a movie theatre and my son got all exited to see that one of the movies they are showing is Garfield 2. So we bough out tickets and went in. First thing: here they don't have cheaper tickets for children, all seats are the same price. Second: the movie was dubbed!! Doh! I hate that!!
Badly dubbed movies are always a nightmare because they seem to have just 4 actors doing all the voices and without a resemblance of the original actor's voice whatsoever. In this case the dubbed was even more painfull for the fact the movie is actually set in England and some of the jokes were about the difference between American and British English and they were rendered worthless in translation. But surely the worst bit was to hear the dear old John Clease sounding as Manuel from Fawlty Towers.!!!! Yes, Clease was a posh peer in the movie who actually just sounded as Manuel the waiter from Barcelona!!!

The experience definitely put me off movies for a long while. I was thinking of going to see lovely Johnny Deep in the pirates of the Caribbean, mainly because I loved his Keith Richards's voice as captain Jack Sparrows. Well, I do love Johnny Deep full stop but not that much to let it be ruined for hearing him speaking as Manuel the waiter from Barcelona.
I'll have to wait until the DVD is on sale to see it in the original language. No more going to the movies for me until and unless I find a movie theatre where they have the movies in their original language. I do prefer not to understand half of the movie because of some wierd accent, as it happened with the Coen's brothers oh, brother, were art thou than to hear this horrible gibberish again.

jellyfish

The beach today had the yellow flag, which was a bit of a surprise because the sea was quite calm. But the yellow flag was up because of the jellyfish scare.

According to the BBC:
Mediterranean on jellyfish alert The chances of encountering a jellyfish are now much higher.
Thousands of holidaymakers in the Mediterranean have been stung by jellyfish as huge swarms of the creatures invade coastal waters. Some Spanish beaches have been closed, but Sicily and North Africa are also reported to be badly affected. Researchers say at least 30,000 people have been stung since summer began.

Luckily we didn´t encounter any and we had a great time swimming today. My son was even a bit disapointed of not having seen one.

Getting lost and finding hopes

I think that walking around and getting lost is a great way to know a new city. The Argentinean writer Borges wrote somewhere that he used to practised until he perfected the art of getting lost and thus got to know the soul of a place.

Well, we did it today. It was a bit cloudy and instead of going to the beach we took the tube and just walked along at the neighbourhood of Gracia.
In doing so we came across a bookshop that specialised in used books in English!! Great because we're running out of books and new ones in English are awfully expensive let alone hard to find. The place is called Hibernian bookshop (mush be some Irish connexions here) and it has a good selection, from chick-lit to young adults and not too out of date. Later on I googled it and found their web page and that they do more than sell books so I'm going to send them my CV, just in case they need someone. A long shot but it´s never too early to start searching for a job.

The plan, job wise, is to wait until my son is settled at school. I think that is going to take him a couple of months until he feels comfortably enough with the new everything. The lucky boy is going to learn a new language because school is fully in Catalan here. Due to the great number of immigrants, every schools has some sort of helper just for foreign children and my son also has the advantage that he can use Spanish if he get lost, and a bit of French that he already learn in England.

I also need to concentrate in finding and buying a flat before the end of the year, and that alone is going to be as time consuming as a fulltime job.

However, I'm not a natural housewife and I'll get mad if I do that for longer than a few months. I need the social side of having a job and, of course, the money will be most welcome.

Cleanliness is close to godliness

Finally the plumber arrived today with the new boiler and, yes you guessed it, and Argentinean helper!!! (the Argentineans here are as many as the Pakistanis in the UK). Actually the helper did all the job and the boss only assessed the situation, checked that he was payed and left.
All in all this took the owner of the flat back 1.500 euros!

Maybe will be wise to go back to school and do a plumber course, I'm bound to make more money than with all my language degree!!

After they left I took what it felt as a very luxurious shower. Great!

Mañana

The owner of the flat called and said that she arranged for the boiler to be replaced asap and that it´ll be already payed so not to worry.

I stayed at home all day despite being sunny and lovely out there, all waiting for the plumber/electrician to arrive with the new boiler and no luck. I miss a whole day of doing whatever and I'm cross.

Well... there you go.... maybe "mañana"?

Departure

My dad left today. We took him to take the train to Madrid and then he´s going to Argentina in a few days.
We´re already missing him a lot. And when we arrived back home and I went to store away the things that he's leaving here, I found a parcel with a note saying "to be open on September 2. Happy birthday. Dad". I just cried because he left me a present for my birthday!

He´s been with us since the end of March, first in Bristol and then here. He allegedly came to help us with the moving and everything but it was also a visit designed by my sister and us to help him cope with life without my mum (she passed away in December 2005). My dad was completely heartbroken then and we though that it´ll make him feel better to travel a bit and to have something to do. It worked.

As it usually the case, it also worked the other way too, in that we received more that we expected and not only in moral support but in very practical ways, such as with packing all the house in Bristol. He was the rock that was there for me all this months of uncertainty and hard work. I do believe that I couldn't have managed so well without him.

The plan is that he´s going to be a travelling dad. He´ll live half of the year in Argentina mainly with my sister, and the other half here with us. So he´ll be back soon.

"The husband" is in St. Petersburg since Friday and until Sunday, so my son and I are on our own again and without hot water.
So, we´re sad and not too clean.

The Middle East

An old friend of mine who lives up north in Israel just contacted me. I was worried about him because he lives in a kibbutz very close to the Lebanon. He's fine although he was sent to Jerusalem for a few days to get a bit of a rest of the bombing, he's very down and he told me that he doesn't dare to hope and cannot see an end to the situation.

I don't have any personal friends in Lebanon but nevertheless my heart bleeds for both countries and their people.

Watching the news today was sobering as it put my little problems and my moaning in perspective.

Let's hope that the situation will get better somehow but I believe that this sort of action and the unwavering support of the US will end up making the Lebanese people vote against their pro-Western government with all the obvious consequences.

Fixed and gone out in a flash

The plumber/electrician managed to reach us today quite early. He saw the old heater and all but guffawed disdainfulyl as only a proud Spaniard can do. He changed the fuse and charged us 40 euros for the pleasure but announced it that it´s not going to last, that the thingy is on his last leg and that it had to replaced as soon as possible.

Sure enough, when 2 hours later my dad tried to have a shower the whole thing blew up again, no lights for a while and then no warm water.

I sent my son to have a cold shower amid accusations of child abuse and then even I was brave enough to have one myself. Not too bad a deal if you consider that there was a temperature of 28 degrees outside.

40 Euros for 10 minute of work??? Maybe I should consider taking a course on plumbing and changing careers.

Fiesta!

Our first Fiesta! I adore the poster advertising the event, so here you can see it too.

All the shops were closed today. Again. I had to double check that it was not Sunday again. Nope, but it's some fiesta day and the shops are definetelly closed, this make it twice this week. Not brilliant if this catches you by surprised but nice to have a break if you're a hard working person (which I hope I'll become soon). We didn't have enough breaks in England at all.

There's also a big fiesta starting today at Gracia's neighborhood in Barcelona, so at around 5ish pm we took the tube and went. Actually, the tube here is called the metro and it's ok for me but not nice for my dad because most station don't have lifts and the scalators are usually only to go up; so it takes ages for my dad to go anywhere. A true nightmare for wheelchair bound people. Not nice in such a turistic hotspot.

We arrived too early and the streets were almost empty, which made it very nice to explore in peace before everybody arrived. But soon enought the quite and lovingly decorated streets were bursting with people.

Many streets were decorated using scraps and other sort of re-claimed material such as plastic water bottles in very imaginative ways. My favourite was one with huges sunflowers all over the place.

Mostly by chance we arrived to a square where a group of musicians (brass band) were geting ready to play. We even found nice places to sit (great for my dad as his knees can't suport him for long) and soon enough the band was ready and they started to play a nice, repetitive tune. A middle aged couple started to dance side by side holding hands in the style familiar with many Mediterranean's dances, from here to Greece and even Israel. Soon enough one lady joined them and they formed a circle. Then, more and more people joined them (even a couple of clueless tourists who did their best to try to follow the little jumps and turns) until they were around 40. This is called sardana and it's an ancient and traditional dance from Catalunya. It was lovely to see it. My dad told me that last time he was here (during the 70's) he saw it being danced at the Catedral's square; at the time Franco was in power and every show of Catalan culture was forbiden (from the use of the Catalan language in public to the use of traditional Catalan names fro children) so the dancing at the time was as much a political statement as a fun folky dancing.

We had some overpriced tapas (the fiestas in Spain are turist traps, we should had known better) and while we walked around we saw a group of people dress with blue and yellow capes with horns on their hoods carring sticks with fireworks on their tips. They lighted their fireworks and then performed a sort of dances while rotating the sticks around them. They marched along the street and were followed by a bunch of guys dressed similarly with drums and, of course, a huge admiring crowd. We loved it!

Soon it started to rain a bit and we were told that all music shows programed for latter will have to be cancelled if it keep raining, so we decided to call it a nigh and go back home. That was lucky because as soon as we were back home a big storm developed, tropical style with even very dramatic lighting. Pity as we've been told that ussually the party goes on until the early hours of the morning.

Beautiful.

waiting...

I'm starting to understand why the British said that in Spain you´ve got to get use to everybody teling you that things will be done "mañana" (tomorrow). The plumber/electrician that the owner of the house called to fix the heating told us on the phone that he'll be here sometime today or maybe ¨mañana¨.

The guys are starting to smell fishy.

Our first guests!!

We've got our first guests for lunch in Barcelona today. Finally some sort of social life as I used to know it.

"The husband" invited a couple of friends of his for lunch. It was a big deal for him because they were an enormous source of support while he was all by himself those few months. So he wanted to say thank you and sort of return the favour (although it seems that "the husband" used to invite himself to their house almost every weekend he had, so if we really had to return the favour I'll be cooking for them every Sunday for the rest of the year!).

They're Deby and Max. "The husband" knows Deby since they were in college (she's an architect) so they're old friends. Max, her husband (also an Argentinean) is a total dear, a teddy-bear of a guy and we soon got on like the proverbial house on fire and we had a lively lunch and were talking all afternoon. Even P. (my son) was quickly won over by Max and after lunch and to his utter delight (my dad was all too happy to join too) all the guys played "truco" (a South American card game) while I took the opportunity to grill Deby with questions about "where to"and "how to" in Barcelona, and she seems to know loads as they've been living here for 4 years.

(They're part of that wave of Argentinean migration that happened at the end of 2002, when Argentina's government collapsed spectacularly, the money all but disappeared and the country soon went into default. Young professionals were left facing the option of almost starvation or flee the country in search for jobs and opportunities denied in their own. I'm in total awe of people like them as I don't know what would I've done if I'd had been there then.
To their credit, Deby and Max made it here and they've a comfortable life and they even manage to bring most of their family to leave near them.
I can't help but feel that is such a miss oportunit for Argentina to lose people like them. It's very sad for my country that the most ambitious and capable people had to leave.)

Of course, things runt far from smoothly. I planed to cook rabbit casserole, fresh salad and ice cream and fresh fruit for dessert. However, when I went to the shops for my ingredients everything was closed and then I realized that everything closes on Sunday in Spain, there's actually a law stating that shops must be closed most Sundays. (For all I know there may even have a law about keeping siesta time... It most certainly seems so, at least in Sabadell which is a smaller town than Barcelona).

Panic followed and I had to improvise lunch for 6 in the new kitchen without my pots and pans or anything. To my credit and the never ending admiration of my family (I wish!), I managed to make a really good pasta-alla-improvisette (pasta with tomato sauce and chicken legs on it) but I swear it was tasty enough and they cleaned their plates and asked for more. For dessert I served some turron that my dad bought to take to my sister in Argentina (I replace it soon!) and coffee and after a while we all went to have icecream to a nearby shop. Apparently the law here does make an exception for ice creams parlours and cafes which is very civilized indeed.

Anyway, we were lucky that our guests brought their own wine. (they've got one called "vino de aguja" that translated something as "needle wine", a fresh and sparkling wine like cava or champagne. Really good, I'll try to remember this for future needs).

At the end of the day, "the (happy) husband" took our son to the beach to build a sand castle. They were back at 8:30pm, all happy and saying that there wew people at the beach even that late. P. said that the castle was quite good and that maybe passerbys will think it was built by professionals.

They're already loving it here.

Two nations separated by the same language

The first thing I though I had it sussed was the language.
I told everyone who´d care to listen that whatever different and new Cataluyna is, at least I speak the language and that was enough to make my life easier.

Well... I discovered soon enough that I don't.
I do speak Spanish, no problem with that; fair enough, it's a bit different and my accent is totaly Argentinean but that´s not a problem in a place where there's loads of Argentineans (and aparently the Catalans thinks that we have a lovely accent. Go figure!) . But I really though that because I could read Catalan, I 'd be able to understand it. HA!
The reality is that, yes, I can read and understand written Catalan but I cannot understand a word of it when is spoken. Not to people on the street, not the TV, and even less in the radio. Not a sausage. None. Nada.

just relax

After all this crying nights "the husband" start to realise that all is not well with me so he decided to show me the good, fun, side of Barcelona.

We spend the day as in holidays. Wake up late and after a really nice breakfast (my dad sort of overdid his task and brought at least 5 different nice pastries for us to try, well he´s very conscientious of his duties).

The beach is just at a stroll away from the flat. It´s gorgeous, sandy, quite clean and not too crowded. The sky is azure blue and the light has that famous Mediterranean shine. There´s a green flag and a proper lifeguard (an Argentinean one, as we were to find out later). The sea is lovely, not too cold, just perfect, and the four of us just leave our thing there and jump into the water. We splash around like overeager tourists. It´s great.

After a while my dad decides to go back to the beach and finds out that he can´t do it (he´s got bad knees after one-too-many parachute jumping and at least once having drop with a huge air balloon in his youth and he´s 82). He stumbles and falls and half the people run to his aid, and we all do a sort of save-the-marooned-pensioner thing; that´s how we got to know Javier, the Argentinean lifeguard, Rashid the (illegal) Pakistani cold drinks seller and half of the punters in that beach. (It´s not that Rashid himself is an illegal immigrant, at least we don´t know that, but he haven´t an official licence to sell drinks so he just park his drinks in a bag next to a tourist and goes around whispering: -"cocas? beer? agua?"). People were very friendly and not half of them are actually tourists, there´s seem to be a lot of locals too.

We got home well after 8pm and it was still sunny!!

We´re very lucky and have 2 bathrooms, great for family harmony.
"The husband" and I leaves my dad and son at home to fend for themselves, they´re tired, red and happy and we go for a long walk along the sea that takes up right into the Barceloneta (the old part of the city). There´s a street show of European street buskers, sponsored by the city council and some of them are really good and have a dancing crowd around. Some are solos, but we founded a band of 8 called "che, sudaca" that played salsa. We danced on the street for half an hour before heading to a nearby restaurant. It´s 12 o´clock and the streets are full of people having fun or just strolling comfortably, there´s even children playing out there!!!
Food was divine, all sort of sea creatures fryed mercilessly. Delicious and so much that we asked the waiter to give us the leftover to take home to our guys.

"The husband" takes me home and for the first time I go to sleep with a smile.

where´s the light gone?

All of a sudden the lights of the flat went out with a pop. "The husband" being clever and a scientist told me that it was a general light failure in the city. However and as far as we could see from our balcony, everybody else has the lights on, including our next door neighnour. So, after a bit of fiddling around "the husband" figured out that it was a fuse that has blown and he promptly get us out and about. But the heater was gone.

The weather is nice enough but we´re very spoiled people who like our showers warm, so we have to figure out this pretty soon.

Buying the house and other details

First thing in the morning: wake up with a smile and with a plan for the day: delegate tasks and organize the troops while serving breakfast.
Each and everyone in the household has a job now, "the husband" does the dishes and supervise the other two; my dad will take the rubish away, including recycling, water the plants, plus buy fresh croissants and bread first thing in the morning and my son will clean the floors and tidy around the living and kitchen. As for me, cook, buy food, do the washing up (no iron, thank God) and toilets, not bad.

Then the essential stuff such as opening a bank account, obtaining a debit card, a checkbook and so on. As all this has to be done in the actual place we´re going to live, we have to go to Sabadell because it cannot be done in the local branch of our Spanish bank. I start missing the UK again, the place where everything can be done at any branch or even by phone. Here everything has to be done in person, with loads of paperwork and in the further branch they can think of. So, it´s not even the Sabadell branch we need to go, but the one at the campus. Yes, the one that opens only mornings because we´re in school holidays and there´s nobody near the University campus.

My dad discovered that the rubbish collection system is very civilised, you take your trash bags at anytime to the local BIG container that´s emptied every night (in Bristol you take your rubbish bags to your black bin and that is collected once a week and you´re not allowed to take anything more than the one full black bin and one black box for recycling). Here they even have containers for glass, another for plastics and another for papel and cartons (in Bristol the council recycle paper but not carton). He also discovered the cybercafe around the corner and the best smelling bakery around. It looks like breakfasts are going to be good.

Off we go to the University campus, the train runs smoothly and its pretty empty, no surprises there. At the bank the cashier looks up when I ask for a cheque book and he kindly offers a piece of wisdom: -"In Spain, a cheque and nothing are the same thing; people don´t trust cheques and nobody will accept one, so it´s pointless to have them"-. But how are we going to give a deposit for a house?, we asked. He shrug: -"Cash, of course, is the only thing people trust here".

After signing the obligatory hundred papers we move on to Sabadell to check on state agents. No sign of them. Every single one is on holidays until at least the end of August. I start to hyperventilate and panic. How are we going to buy a house until then?? Where are we going to live??

"The husband" takes my hand and guides me to an ice-cream parlour nearby where he sat me down and order something cold. He´s wise and means well but I still want to kill him. -"What do they mean they´re close for holidays??" I hear myself scream in a very high pitched voice.

I save the rest out of modesty but I threw a big, huge, tantrum. Anyway it looks like we have to go now to plan B. The problem: we don't have a plan B. The idea, plan A, was that I was to sell the house in Bristol, move everything and that "the husband" will get a flat in Barcelona. He didn't do his part and right there right then I wanted to kill him a voice in my brain just said "exterminate, exterminate" (well, Dr. Who´s last series just finished back in the UK). He offers some sort of explanation about working all the time and not being sure if I´d like the flat (as if I was at all choosy!!).

So, back home to start thinking of plan B.

Another night that I cry myself to sleep. I really, really want to go back home now. Problem is; we sold it.

A mummy has to do what a mummy has to do.

First morning in Barcelona.

HOT! Really hot! And that must mean something if a (sub)tropical-born grownup person feels it. I couldn't sleep and the mosquitoes were having a feast on me. I was living far to long in England.

Crawled to the kitchen where my boys were happily expecting me to sort life out. After all I'm the mum here and the only woman in the house. What do they expect? Me to smile, grab my apron, twitch my nose and produce a home? Are we back to the 50''s for goodness sake??

Luckily there's some milk on the fridge (UHT) and some biscuits in a cupboard so I produce a passable breakfast continental style.

I can feel my hormones rising and my temper going haywire so I pull myself together, smile sweetly and sent the guys to the sea to find a beach and with orders to be back at lunch time. I have to remind then were their swimming trucks and beach towels are (they packed their own suitcases back in England so my guess is as good as yours here but... there you go with guys).

Once they're safely out of my way, I venture out in the new city thinking about the old roles of hunters vs. gatherers and I do believe now that probably most of our cave dwelling ancestors were vegetarians. Guys are so hopeless, at least mine are.

Incredibly, there's a supermarket just opposite our building, an amazing fruit and vegs shop next to it, a fishermonger in one corner of the block, a chemist opposite that, an ice cream parlour in the other corner and a sweet-smelling bakery just around the corner. Good grief!! I feel like I'm really living la vida loca!!

So, by the time that my guys are back for lunch there's a lunch on the table and they don't even blink at the marvel of my achievement. They sat there brightly eyed and interrupting each other to tell me how lovely the beach is, how warm the Mediterranean is, how brightly the sun shines without the wisp of a cloud in the sky and that women here have tits. Yeah. That came straight from my dad and everybody stop what we're doing to look at him in amazement. First: he's 82 years old and going blind but even so he didn't miss the topples girls on the beach. Men! His eyesight is better that what I thought and for that I'm pleased... for the rest, well... at least he's not that old as he seems.

We're staying for the whole of August in a flat belonging to some colleague of "the husband". It's really good, 3 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms, kitchen dinner, big dinner living room space, balcony, laundry room and a great location, quietish neibourhood, 3 blocks from the sea and a metro station at the corner. Fully furnished and there's even some food in the kitchen! And we're paying less than half the market prize for this.

And I'm hating it.

It defies reason but I'm utterly miserable. I'm totally PMT and I want to cry. I didn't have time to prepare for this, life is far to fast for me. My great-grandmother has months of time traveling until she reached her new life, while I'm expected to hit the floor running and it's just far too fast. I need time to prepare my soul for this and time is a luxury that I don't have.

I managed the rest of the day and once more, I cried myself to sleep. Now the chemist at the corner seems even more alluring than the ice cream parlour and I'm wondering if I can get prozac without a prescription.

Arriving in Barcelona

It was an unremarkable flight from Bristol y the no-frills airline EasyJet just a bit over 2 hours and we were in a new life.

Nothing like the trip that my great-grandmother did when she left the tiny village of Caravate in the shores of the Lago Maggiore in Italy to go to far away Argentina. She left her family and her job (making silk from silkworms), married her fiancee by proxy (her father would have never left her travel as a single woman and he was already in Argentina), packed her few belongings and just went. She has a very dramatic crossing of the Atlantic, the engine on her ship blew up living the ship and its cargo at the mercy of the currents for month until finally arriving to Tenerife by chance. It took her many month to make her way from her pretty village at least is pretty in the pictures now) to tropical and exotic Tucuman inn Argentina and nobody knew what had happened to her until she was able to tell the story. No fast communications then, it was at the end of the 19th century.

I grew up in a country made by immigrants and everybody there had a story (or four) of grandparents crossing the oceans to go to a sort of a promised land where they build a home and a family. I grew up thinking that THAT was emigration all about: adventure-like life-altering trips. But here and now, my life-altering trip took only a couple of hours in a sort of comfortable seats drinking overpriced Coca-Cola; and to take away any hint of adventure I it seems that everybody around us was ready to enjoy the three S (sun, sand and sangria). No grandchild of mine will be remotely interested by this start!!

For me it was literally flying into another life. One that I didn't even took the time to imagine beforehand.

Let's me explaining something about me first: I'm that sort of person to whom life has to be first imagined and only then is allowed to happens. I have a very overdeveloped imagination and just go around imagining all sort of possibilities around me and everybody alse. I've always been like that and, yes, my whole family thinks I'm funny that way too.

Anyway, I was so incredible busy the few months before this trip that I didn't had the time to imagine Barcelona, or better said: I didn't had the time to imagine Barcelona with me in it. That was an absolute first.

The busy months were all about packing and huffing and working and taking care of my son and my dad who were living with me. The husband moved to Barcelona 3 month ago to start his new job and we stayed behind in order to sort things out while waiting for the school year to be over. Migration or not, I thought that it wasn't fair for my son to move to another life in the middle of the school year. Far too disruptive, I thought, lets keep things as simpler as we can and split the family, pack everything and sell the house on my own, take care of my newly widowed and grieving dad and three month after the husband is gone and when I'm about to go mad... THEN, get the husband to come back, sign a few papers with a flourish, enjoy the farewell part and go to Spain.

The party part was great. Many of our friends went to M's farm near Weston-super-Mare and we spend our whole last weekend in England dancing and eating merrily surrounded by friends... Paradise. See picture so you can see it for yourself.

The arriving in Barcelona part was going hard only in comparison and probably because I had a bit of a hangover. Emotional hangover, thought, because I never drink much anyway. We flew away a few hours after the party, which in retrospect, was not a good idea as I had my heart wormed by my friends.

It was REALLY hot and dusty in Barcelona, again compared with the weather at the south of England which was -of course- rainy and coldish which is as good as you get in most summers. And my heart if felt cold and empty because all my friends seems to had been left behind. We managed to get a people's carrier taxi and we arrived at the flat that the husband had rent for us to live in August.

I cried myself to sleep that night.

Why oh why...

I was born in Argentina and I lived in Bristol, England, for the past 13 years. 12 days ago we left England to start all over again in Barcelona.

I'm an accidental immigrant in that I've never really actually migrated anywhere. I never feel "an immigrant" not even a ex-pat! I just went to the UK with "the husband" to learn English and the plan was to stay there for a year and happily go back home. That was 1993.

Then... I guess that life happened while we were busy making other things, as the songs goes (Lennon?)

I sort of learnt English (ship shape and Bristol fashioned), we made friends, I started and finished a bachelor degree in languages there, my son was born there, the husband started and completed first a MSc degree and then a PhD, we've found jobs, we bought a house and then Argentina's economy collapsed most espectacularly that usual and it felt as if the carpet had been removed from our feet: it was unthinkable to go back there where no jobs awaited us.

So, we keep on staying in Bristol and make it home, we became part of the community, we even became British and I though that that was it: we managed to make a nice life for ourselves.

Early last year my father-in-law died and that trigger a sort of middle age crisis in the husband and he wanted to go back home and to "life and he knew it". The problem was, where was home? What sort of life did he actually meant? Our life in Argentina was that of the happy-go-lucky middle-class single twenty something and we're not that anymore.
At the same time it was regarded as wise in his area of job (science) to move around and leave the cradle that Bristol was for him.
Then my mum died.
So, he started searching for options and found a job in Barcelona.

I was thrilled and also quite sad. I love Bristol and I loved my job and I had a life there but also Barcelona is such a lovelly place. (Altough, to be honest, I've only ever being there twice in my life: a few days in winter in 1978 and a few days in summer in 1996)

I've left Bristol 12 days ago and it both seems ages and minutes.
Ages because as soon as I was boarding the plane (EasyJet) the first things that seems to go was my English. And it took me AGES and a hard-won Bachelor (Hon) degree to get going in the language and I'm not ready to give it up (yet).
Minutes because I miss my friends, my job, my coleages there (spelling? see what I mean about loosing the language?) as if I just left.

So, I'm here and starting over once more. However, this time I do feel like I'm migrating, maybe is my age showing up?

At this exact minute , recounting the past few years in a nutshell for your benefit I'm feeling like this is it far too big for me and I want to go home... but I don't know where "home" is anymore. So, the only thing to do is: make a home here for me and my family and enjoy the ride.

I'm doing this blog so friends or foes can follow how things are going on and how I'm dealing with this starting all over once more in my forties. Also I'm doing this as a way of keeping my English alive, it took me a big effort to learnt it so I'm not going to let it vanish without a fight.

So here we go!!! Hope you enjoy this enough to keep on reading me!

Comments are very welcome, specially language related ones, please let me know when (no question of "if" here) I'm writing rubish