As much as we have cherished being on the road for the past six months, we are suffering from a bit of sensory overload. We hope that you’d all agree that 5 continents in 6 months requires a change of pace. We have zero regrets but a little routine sounds pretty good right now. We’ve visited amazing places, experienced numerous types of cuisines and met incredible people, but we are very excited to have a home base for the next three months.
As part of our eighteen-month adventure, one of our goals has been to experience living as locals abroad. Due to visa constraints, we have generally only been able to stay put for three months in any given location. Until now, we’ve compensated by constantly moving. But it’s time for that to change. We chose Sevilla for our home base because we wanted a location in Spain but one with a slightly more local feel. One that didn’t quite have a premium international profile. We are very happy with our decision and have quickly fallen in love with Sevilla.
What follows is a quick summary of lessons learned from our first week’s experience. Adapting to our new home and the local customs has been exactly the experience we’d hoped for!!
We hit the ground running, as we always do, and quickly immersed ourselves into this great city. In our first couple of days, we accomplished a lot:
- We joined a great gym, less than a 5-minute walk from our apartment. The pricing is much more reasonable than what we paid for gym memberships in San Francisco. Included is an indoor pool, three studios with multiple classes hourly, and a very sizable area of cardio, free weights and other equipment.
- E signed up for 8 weeks of Spanish classes at a local school. The classes will take place daily on Monday through Friday for four hours per day, beginning on October 15th.
- S found a wonderful co-working space. We are both spending time here initially until E starts Spanish lessons. This concept is a little newer to the conservative work culture of Sevilla and the city does not have the big players in town yet such as WeWork. Arcadia Coworking has a very intimate environment with a capacity of about 30 people. If you ever find yourself in Sevilla and need temporary workspace, visit arcadiacoworking.com. They will rent a desk or conference room by the hour, day or month. Discounts are available for longer contract terms. Victor and Sergio, who run the place, are top notch gentlemen!
- We have frequented the local grocery markets to stock up on some apartment supplies and food. Sevilla has a fairly typical mix of large format department stores, high end grocery stores complete with gourmet and gluten free sections, convenient bodegas and specialty stores. Located throughout the city is also a mixture of informal farmers markets and formal street markets. One of the (flea) markets near our apartment has been continuously running on Thursdays since the 14th Century! How cool is that!
- We went shopping for some local clothing and running shoes. Spain is a bit too fashion conscious for our wardrobe staples of hiking pants and water-wicking tops.
Here are a few fun stories and notes about our experience thus far…
Our apartment
E couldn’t have chosen a better location. We are about a mile north of the “tourist” zone in a cute little neighborhood just west of Alameda de Hercules. Picture narrow cobblestone roadways with archetypal Spanish architecture. Lots of traditional courtyards and the ever present blue and gold tile. The Alameda itself (a very large plaza one block from our apartment) has a plethora of outdoor cafes, bars and restaurants. Seemingly all the residents from the surrounding neighborhoods gather in the Alameda at night for cocktails and tapas. And because it’s Spain, school age kids are running around playing soccer and eating dinner until 11pm on school nights. As a special bonus, our school and co-working space are both about 15-minute walks to the south. Just as we did in San Francisco, we still commute together and stop for a quick café con leche before separating for the day.
We have a one-bedroom apartment with a large private open-air patio. The apartment itself is small but laid out efficiently. The kitchen has a small fridge/freezer, a two-top electric stove, microwave, toaster oven and pots/dishes etc. We do not have a dishwasher (very typical of Spain) but we are used to hand washing dishes just as we do when at home in San Francisco (though we do have a dishwasher at home). We have a clothes washer but no dryer (also typical of Spain). Luckily, we have the large patio and a drying rack we can use. The building also has a roof terrace with sunset views and clotheslines for drying laundry. We have air conditioning and heat, although we plan on using the windows and sliding glass door for fresh air as often as possible.
One curious feature of our apartment, and most every building in town, are metal roller shutters, located on the exterior of each window. To us, they look like apartment armor. We’re not sure if they’re purely for safety or function as knock out shades. Every time we leave the apartment, we close them for additional security and keep them open when we’re home. Despite living in a safe neighborhood, it is common for our neighbors to keep them closed even during the day – presumably to keep out the heat (it has currently been in the mid-nineties during the day). That said, we’ve adjusted to the routine of constantly opening and closing the shutters.
Because we live off of a very small laneway, trash service isn’t available outside of our building. We take our trash over to The Alameda where the city has provided trash, compost and recycling receptacles. The receptacles have underground storage areas that can be raised above ground to facilitate removal. Several times a week, the municipal waste management service stops at each receptacle, raises the entire block of receptacles, clears the underground storage bins and then lowers the receptacles back to the ground. It’s not pretty but it’s pretty darned efficient. Plus Sevilla is clean, so the process clearly works.
Dining
You have heard us say we do not get jetlag. That is true. However, our fear is that we will leave here in three months and experience “eat lag.” We’re not sure it exists, but it must. The dining schedule in Spain is much different than in the States. Here is a typical schedule in Sevilla:
- 7 to 9am – Pre-breakfast of coffee and toast at home or on the way to the office
- 10-11am is breakfast time
- 2 to 4pm is lunchtime combined with siesta
- 9pm or later is dinner time. Cocktails and tapas earlier but a proper dinner is generally later. Some restaurants don’t even open until 8:30pm or later. Chances are if you see someone eating at 7:30pm, it’s a senior citizen or a young child. Restaurants don’t get busy til after 10pm.
Locals dine out week nights too – even late at night! Speaking of dining out, we noticed something small. Every outdoor table has its own small trash can under or next to it. Spain has the trash situation figured out quite well.
Bars have coin operated machines with tinned olives or the famed Spanish almonds. Imagine a gumball machine – filled with tins of olives and almonds! And not just one kind of olive – every conceivable kind of olive! It’s not unusual to see 8 or 10 varieties.
Bars stay open late in Sevilla. A closing time of 3am or 4am is fairly typical here. We took a train to a nearby city early one Saturday morning and we saw late night revelers still milling about in The Alameda at 6:30am! Now you know why the apartments have metal roller shutters – they’re also knock out shades!
Shopping
Shopping hours also take some planning and getting used to. Stores siesta in the afternoons, for multiple hours. For instance, the running store from which we wanted to purchase shoes is open from 10am til 1:30pm, then again from 6 til 8:45pm. Every store is different, so you need to research ahead of time – or else one may be disappointed when you are greeted by a “closed” sign in the middle of the day. MOST everything is closed on Sundays. These hours require a little more planning than what we are used to. In the States, a store would go out of business if it wasn’t open on Sundays and holidays. Spaniards take Sunday very seriously – it is meant for friends and family, religion and rest. We agree with this concept.
It took us a few minutes to figure out how to shop for produce. Our local grocery store has two produce sections. In the organic section, you are not allowed to handle any of the produce. You ask for assistance and they choose on your behalf and bag it for you. There is a regular produce section as well. Here, you choose your items and weigh them at a digital station. You click on the proper produce number (each section lists the price and number to be typed at the digital scale) and it prints out a sticker with the cost, which should be placed on the sealed produce bag. We learned this one the hard way when we were at the checkout and the cashier asked us to go take care of this before she could ring up the item. Thankfully no one was behind us.
Our Fitness Experience
In the States, gyms are generally open from 5am til 11pm. Some are even open 24 hours, 7 days a week. We joined a high-quality gym and the hours here are more limited. Monday through Friday the gym is open from 7:30am til 11pm. Saturday hours are 8am til 10pm and Sunday features a limited schedule of 9am til 2pm. This schedule mimics dining and shopping schedules. Fitness classes are also very limited on Saturdays and there are no Sunday classes available. We guess fitness instructors need rest and relaxation time too.
As we mentioned, our gym has a large selection of classes and we are taking advantage of them. It is rather-humorous taking them in Spanish – but so far it has worked out OK. In Body Pump, it helps to watch the person in front of us. E is geared up for a Spin class, S is a bit more fearful.
When using cardio equipment, obviously you have to set it up in Spanish and the distance is measured in kilometers. This requires some quick and continuous calculations when following a fitness routine on our Aaptiv app.
E signed up for a local 5K race. It isn’t as easy as signing up for one in The States. You have to have a DNI# (a local ID card) to input while registering online. We were able to contact the race organizer and explain that we are from out of town, and they gave us a stock number to use. Obviously, these websites are also only in Spanish, so it takes a little longer to translate and navigate as you go. Plus the pre-race instructions leave quite a bit to be desired. That said, the race costs €6 per person so it’s far cheaper than in the States.
Medicine
We have great health insurance and prescription insurance; however, it seems we don’t necessarily need it here. Yes, we are keeping it should any major incidents arise! We had to get more medication for a maintenance prescription we have. We were wondering if we would have to first make a doctor’s appointment because we only have the prescription a doctor in the United States. We looked up the equivalent medicine, as some medicines are marketed under different names overseas. Then we walked into a local pharmacy and not only did we NOT need a prescription, they sold us a one-month supply for €2.81, or $3.24. The copay alone would have been $10.00 in The States. This made us seriously question why we have a prescription medicine supplement for our current health insurance policy. Our blog is not about politics, so we will skip further discussion here.
Small Shopping Errors
Chances are, you won’t live overseas without making a couple of small errors – gringo taxes as we have taken to calling them. So far, we have taken home two items in error that we otherwise would not have purchased:
- Hmmmm – this doesn’t quite taste like peanut butter? We were stocking up on a few staples on our first grocery store visit and decided it would be nice to have some crackers and peanut butter for an afternoon snack. After a visit to the gym, E spread some of the “peanut butter” on her crackers. Why are the crackers so damned sweet? After closer observation of the “peanut butter” jar, we figured out the jar contained crunchie cookie spread. It is called “Biscoff Crunchy” and actually does taste quite good. At first glance while impulse shopping, it looked like plain old peanut butter. That said, we were told to try the spread on apple slices and it’s quite delicious.
- This black pepper isn’t very spicy? We saw a salt and pepper shaker next to each other with other spices and grabbed the pair. We cooked two meals before we figured out it wasn’t black pepper. It was black salt (Sal Negro the bottle says)! That means we were eating double salt (luckily, we hardly salt food) and didn’t quite realize it. We had never heard of black salt. It’s even large grained so there’s no reason to think it’s not pepper. Lesson learned.
If this is all that has happened so far, we are winning!
As we continue to find our way in this city, we will be looking to attend local concerts and festivals, meet people to socialize with and other experiences far beyond touring any of the sites. We hope to pick up a little of the language, or to at least not be answered in English when we attempt to ask a local a question in Spanish.
Although these are our aspirations while we are living here, we would love to hear any feedback and suggestions from you on Sevilla too!
Wearehere 