We’re Residents!

Our friend, Rebekah, took us to Palencia yesterday to pick up our brand new Spanish ID cards. We are now officially residents of Spain. This gives us the right to live here and spend our US money as freely as we want. I had thought that the residency card would be for a longer term than one year, but we will need to renew at the end of 2009 if we want to stay here more permanently. We will also need, at some point, to get our residence changed to Sahagún, since we applied for Moritinos in the province of Palencia and it looks like we have found very comfortable lodging here in Sahagún, which is in the province of León.

I am feeling very much at home here now. My language is not improving by leaps and bounds and we are working day and night on Elyn’s new book, but I feel quite at home when I walk out on the streets and do our shopping. We even visited a “big box” store, Carrifour, in Palencia yesterday—almost like being in the US. Well, no US “big box” in the US has jamon ibirico and a fish department with eels and other delights. It is all very interesting and new for us here, even though we did live in Spain for a year back in the late 1990s.

A big part of our comfort here is the presence of American/British friends, Rebekah and Paddy. Also the Luna/Tovar family, which has been friends with Elyn since the 1980s have made our transition to Spanish life very easy and enjoyable. We also have American friends living north of us in the province of Asturias. They have invited us up to visit them one weekend while we are here this time. I haven’t seen much of Asturias, which is on the northern sea coast of Spain. I’m looking forward to a train trip over the Picos de Europa (the mountain range just to the north of us) and getting to know Asturias

All in all, we like it here and will probably be here most of the time for a few years. Santa Fe will remain our US home and we may purchase another house there when we sell our current home, but I anticipate spending the majority of our time in Europe for the near future. There are many places I want to visit that are easy travelling distance from Sahagún, so we can be the nomads we like to be for this time.