Malmö - the cool, green city of my dreams

Even with a heat wave and a drought, Sweden´s summer weather is still heaps better than Spain's.

Sweden, land of IKEA and pickled herring. And, more importantly for me, it is the land where my beloved cousins live. Cousins who not only put up with my biannual visits, but provide me with a very comfy guest bedroom and my own coffee pot. (Conveniently, I also really like the whole family.)

This year, they suggested an experiment where I stayed for longer, but my trip would be less of a visit and more as a member of a family. This means we get to spend time together and time apart, plus I got to spend two glorious weeks away from the heat of a Spanish summer.

By all reports, the experiment was a success and we hope to repeat it next summer. The pictures below highlight the family-bonding side of things, but I also took a lot of long, solo bike rides and met locals at meetups.

Midsommer´s Eve is one of the most Swedish of holidays. We danced around the Maypole at an event aimed at kids, so as far as I could tell from the few words I knew and the hand gestures, we sang of barnyard animals and musical instruments.

A requested a belated birthday cake, specifically an almond cake with cherry filling and coconut filling. I did the baking, but L and N did a bang-up job with the decorating. I need to use more gold dust in my baking, that´s one thing I learned from them.

We built and successfully flew a kite, an item on N´s bucket list. 

All those years of studying physics finally paid off!

Reflections on the last year

Since last September, I've been seriously considering whether I want to continue living in Madrid. (Spoiler alert: I haven´t made any decisions.) I´m quite sure I don´t want to live in a city of six million for the rest of my life, but weighing the factors of city size, weather, the prevailing culture, language, along with tax and visa options, is a complicated process. I don´t have any particular deadline, but I feel some impetus to decide within the next year, mainly because I want to start living whatever life I´m choosing sooner rather than later. I do feel like I have been making progress - I have visited possible cities and countries, investigated immigration laws, and started learning a new language. At each point, it´s been pretty clear what are the next two or three steps I need to take, and I´ll just continue until the right decision seems obvious.

In the meantime, I have been reflecting on my three years thus far in Spain. Moving to a new country is hard. I knew that even before I came, and I came prepared to be lonely and bewildered. And I certainly was, although with diminishing frequency as I learned both the language and how Spain works. So although I feel apprehension about possibly starting over in a new country and a new language, I am also appreciative of how easy my life is now. Three years in, it's quite rare that I encounter a new rule / holiday / life admin problem that I don't know how to deal with. With my B2** level in Spanish, I can generally communicate in any situation, even if I still sometimes sound like an idiot. I've made a huge number of friends in my choir, which means I feel like I have a strong support network and ample opportunities for socialization. I don´t know what the future holds, but the present is a pretty good place for me to be.

** That's level 4 of 6 in the Common European Framework for languages, described as, “Can interact with a degree of fluency and spontaneity that makes regular interaction with native speakers quite possible without strain for either party.”

Bureaucracy

Who wants to look at a picture of paperwork? 

Here´s a nice photo from a German garden instead.

No one likes paperwork and bureaucracy, but it all grows more complicated once you live in a new country. You suddenly need to make sure you are living there legally, something you did not need to worry about in a place where you have citizenship. You have probably always paid taxes, but now you need to think about paying taxes in multiple countries, and how those countries' tax rules interact with each other. As an adult in the US, I could rely on my parents and friends to teach me about the paperwork of being an adult, and use them for advice when I got stock. In Spain, I have generally needed to pay experts to help me, because I have a lot fewer everyday resources to draw on.

In my first two years here, I hired a paralegal (aka “gestor”) to file all my visa paperwork. Gestors are hired even by locals, because navigating the legal complexities of Spain is considered too onerous for regular people. I also spent a lot of time looking for someone who was licensed to file both Spanish and US taxes, because understanding and applying tax treaties between two countries is pretty specialized work.

This year, with my increasing language skills and experience with previous visas, I planned to file my American taxes, my Spanish taxes, and my renewal visa application all on my own. I have managed to do this (hopefully correctly) for all three situations, although the Spanish tax preparation involved a week of paper collection followed by 20 adrenaline-filled minutes of individualized help at the equivalent of the Spanish IRS. I definitely found the limits of my language skills as I struggled to explain capital gains and interest en español. This took weeks of work throughout the spring, but I estimate that I saved several thousand euros. My promise to myself was that if I managed this, I could spend a percentage of the savings on a very fancy raincoat. So now I´m reveling in the fact that I don´t have to think about taxes for another year, and just waiting until the fall, when it will rain again and I can enjoy wearing the stylish raincoat.

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Lo siento, hoy no hay ninguna entrada en español. 

Los padres en Madrid

Before the Pope's visit. I had some even more illustrious and beloved guests, my parents. This is their fourth visit to Madrid, so we more or less have a routine. We don't worry about cramming the itinerary full of tourist activities, and allow lots of time for drinking coffee on my terrace or naps when jet lag hits.

I am always on the lookout for museums or activities related to vehicles for my father. Alas, Madrid is a city of of art, rather than vintage automobiles, so this can be rather difficult. However, two different people had recommended the airplane museum to me. It's far out of the city, next to an air force base. They had half a dozen hangars and a large field of planes. My father spent the four hours they were open carefully examining planes, and my mother and I looked at a few, then enjoyed a very long coffee break at the cafeteria, so a good time was had by all.

I really appreciate the efforts my parents make to visit me. I'm well aware that airplanes only get less comfortable as you age. On top of that, two of their four visits have had delays of more than 24 hours, so it's even more impressive that they keep coming back. 

 It was a short, six-day trip, but we managed to have really good gelato twice.

A chance encounter

Madrid felt like the center of the universe this weekend - both Bad Bunny and the Pope were visiting. Bad Bunny is pretty famous, but it´s hard to compete with the Pope when you´re in a Catholic country. The planning for this visit was tremenous: while there was lots published about who the Pope would meet and where you could see him, I was even more interested in learning about where to avoid. They closed 15 metro stops throughout the weekend, and on Sunday they expected more than a million people to attend the open air mass. (The mass was held in a huge traffic circle, normally circled by six lanes of traffic. I still don´t know how they maanged to fit that many people in one plaza.)

So my main goal this weekend was to avoid the hoopla. The city government gave lots of instructions about how to prepare for the influx of tourists, including the recommendation to buy all your groceries three days before the Pope arrived. I mainly stayed close to home, but I thought I was safe on Monday, when the Pope had only private appearances. However, since teleportation hasn´t been invented yet, the Pope has to travel on the streets, like a regular person (okay, not really that regular). My friend and I were having coffee in our favorite cafe with a view, when we realized that if we hung around, comfortably, in the cafe for an extra hour or two, we could probably catch a glimpse of him and his entourage. We did, and I found it delightful, simply because it´s fun living in a big city where things like this can just happen. 

All things The Pope, exhibit 1: The news was 100% about the visit. Even the weather was branded with his image. 

All things The Pope, part 2: metros and buses were decorated. This one said, "Welcome, Holy Father," and the blue car next to it had his portrait.

And, the main event. 

Final Germany post: Things that might not happen on everyone´s vacation

My bicycling buddies and I are all physicists, with some additional culinary and sartorial interests. I wanted to capture some of the things that make this special. For example, above, I´m enjoying four different pieces of cake. The intense focus on baked goods during my trips is not unique, of course, but I blame it on my year working in a French bakery when I was younger.

S is a solar physicist, who uses data from satellites to study the sun. When we found one of those solar system models with the planets proportionally spread across a few kilometers of park land, she cycled back to the beginning to get a selfie with the sun.

N appreciates the finer things in life. He found this incredible German hatmaker at the top of a mountain, and convinced me to drop a ridiculous amount on this hat. I love it. I do actually wear sunhats every day in Madrid, so it will be used, and you can really see a different between this and my 5€ convenience store hat. 

The guys really, really loved the extensive hotel breakfasts and occasionally sneaked out a "road sandwich", aka one for the road. 

Emergency coding after a long ride. 

Taken at the airport, before the trip began, discussing physics. N actually travelled with several physics textbooks. I didn´t ask, but I really hope they weren´t actually in his pannier the whole time.

Germany: All the best things

There is a lot I miss about Germany, and I tried to soak it all in while I was there. Of course, many of those things are food. Spain has excellent produce and nuts, and is rightfully proud of its Mediterannean diet. But it´s also a little lacking in food for vegetarians, and of course every country has products you just can´t get anywhere else.

May is prime asparagus season in Germany. That really is an official thing - it´s called Spargelzeit. Especially beloved is white asparagus, and many restaurants offer special menus featuring asparagus. I didn´t find anthing as unique as the aspargaus burger (six huge white stalks piled on a hambruger) compared to our last bike trip to Germany, but we ate lots of asparagus soup, asparagus and hollandaise sauce, even asparagus pasta dishes and flatbreads. 

As is tyrpical in the US and the UK, almost every restaurant has a vegetarian option on the menu, something that I can´t rely on in Spain. This was my favorite - "napkin dumplings" that are wrapped in cloth before being boiled. They were topped with a creamy mushroom gravy. It never occurs to me to make dumplings in my own kitchen, but I need to do so more often.

I am a fan of cake, and on all our bike trips I try to convince a group to make a cake stop daily. Usually we share so we can try many different flavors. I remember this particular cake shop had about a dozen options and I insisted my friend N come view them all before choosing. 

Cool, rainy weather! I don´t actually want to live in continuous rain, but I´d definitely take it over baking heat.

We were able to check a bag back to Spain, and had extra luggage space, so I quickly bought German products I miss. The incredible strawberries didn´t make it more than 15 minutes past this photo. The  rest I have been slowly enjoying over the past few weeks: soft pretzels topped with baked cheese (Käsebrezel), cherry yogurt, plum butter, hazlenut yogurt.

Since it was spring, and there was rain, flowers bloomed everywhere, helped by the German love of gardening. I am now back in Spain, where the temperatures are topping 32C / 90F. When this happens, all the grass dies and the city comes and mows it down to the ground and rakes it all away, leaving bare, dry earth (and presumably reducing fire hazards). So I am especially missing spectacles like this.