Not having a good time in Spain
Been wanting to find a place to post about my time in spain that won't lead back to my professional life, and here it is! Twitter is just not suited and I don't wanna annoy people with my daily complaints. My personal blog leads to work so no. Linkedin would be really hilarious, if I wanted to burn bridges XD
But so yeah. I was somewhat stressed and depressed in Vancouver. Looking back, I think I might have made a mistake coming here but you know what. I'm a cat. I make mistakes. And I'm certain I can recover from them. For example, I lived in a really, really nice apartment. Small, but I had mountain views and the landlord had not increased rent in the 7 years I was there. Perhaps it was because I only called him once to fix a broken shower, and that was it. I kept the place clean, replaced anything thats broken and never caused any issues. Model tenant, I'd say :P
Pay was bloody awesome as well, I socked aside probably 40% of my net yearly salary into savings/investments because my rent was low, and I'm not a big spender. However, the proverb goes, money isn't everything... right?
I just felt so alone in Vancouver, I tried making friends, furry and non furry by either going to local furmeets, gaming meetups, and non furry stuff like jewelry or yachting courses. I think the issue is while I enjoyed trying new things, I didn't have the passion for them, and I think people tend to befriend others with similar interests - a common topic to bond with.
I tried to organize after work dinner get togethers, but I was royally pissed because *every* single person who agreed to the dinner gave an excuse on the day, and I had to cancel the dinner.
This happened several times and I said fuck it. I also remembered - why bother trying to make friends at work. My "friends at work" in the UK fucking backstabbed me when I told them I was a furry, was gay etc. I definitely have trust issues with colleagues now.
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I remember the first two years, some nights I felt so lonely I just cried, then went to sleep.
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So anyways, in 2020, I made up my mind, fuck Vancouver, it's time to explore somewhere else. I actually got a job offer to Sweden... one day before their borders closed for covid. So I remained in Vancouver and got remote work from New Zealand for a few months, then to another company in Vancouver. Times were pretty good, I really loved working from home, I could be on a discord call with my uk buds watching them start their evening game sessions while I started my work day.
But I felt the distance was still too far. And when 2022 came around, I was like, fuck this, my life is not getting anywhere. I need change. And I sent in my resignation, in preparation for a move to Toronto. I was going to do the move in July/August, and had May, June and July to travel europe, do confuzzled, pack up the flat. That was the plan.
But around April, I had an interesting ping from a spanish company, and I thought, why not, let's do it. I'll be close to UK/Europe and I'll get to experience Spain for a year, maybe even migrate there permanently.
The main downside (as I thought at the time) was the pay - it was roughly 40% of what I was making in Canada, and when I think about it today, argh, I was getting paid more TEN YEARS AGO when I was in London! Ok so that's pretty unfair as the average salary and cost of living in Spain is pretty low - my salary by comparison is pretty good for life here. But my buying power when I travel to uk is a joke now.
Now one of the difficulties I would expect to encounter was learning the language. I'd asked my friends and siblings what they thought of thought of Spain, and everyone gave me positive feedback, it was great, people spoke english, and I gathered I could take my time to learn the language. I guess it would be like when I visited Netherlands and Germany lots of people spoke English at what I felt, was a native level.
It is not so here. Once I arrived at my temporary apartment and tried to get around, I realized that hardly any people spoke spanish (Entiendo espanol, por favor?). Evidently, the people who speak English here are mostly in the touristy part of the cities, and some of the younger generation.
In the back of my mind, I was like... have I made a bad choice? (This is a sentiment shared by several of my colleagues.)
So the first bit of drama was hunting for a rental. I've rented apartments since 2008 and I've never taken more than a week to find a place, but it was not the case here. This is probably because of a) pandemic b) I arrived at a time when university was starting and places were being snapped up c) I didn't speak the language.
Now I was willing to pay for a nice place, but fuck me getting an appointment was impossible as most of the landlords/estate agents only spoke spanish. I wished they would just say they won't rent to non english speakers because some of them required me to send in my bank slips, pay slips in order to get tenant insurance, and all of them fucking didn't reply after I sent in all these stuff. All in all, I'd put in probably 30 applications and I only had ONE reply in english. The others had zero responses.
I then had to rely on my hr department to be my go-between, and most of the times I had to go alone to the apartment viewing after it'd been setup, and it was difficult trying to communicate. I finally lucked out, my current landlord's kid spoke some english and I got the room. After almost 3 weeks of daily searching. Sigh.
Thankfully, lots of people were very accommodating, like the guy that came to wire my house up for internet. Didn't speak Spanish but we managed to get the internet hooked up.
You might probably be asking, why didn't I learn Spanish? Well... I did and I am! Just not enough. I currently have a teacher that I used to do two hourly sessions a week. Several apps like Duolingo, Pimsleur and others. I'd only spent like 3 months fooling on the apps before I arrived and realized that while I can string some basic phrases together, I could not understand anything being spoken to me. Like, nothing.
This brings me to the long term issue: Retirement. From what I gather, I'd need 15 years here to get a pension. But in those 15 years, I probably will be able to learn the language. In the short term though? Going to the doctor is going to be a problem. I already have problems buying e.g. painkillers. This is because medications are only sold in farmacias (Pharmacies) and these are small shops most of them speak only spanish. I managed to get some for when I twisted my knee, but when I visit the UK the next time I'm buying a whole load of panadol from boots or something. Not to say in an emergency like an accident or hospital, the inability to communicate could be bad.
But all in all, I've mostly settled into my routine here and trying not to count down the 9 months left. And that brings me to my work.
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The infrastructure in the office is unbelievably crap. It is worse than what I remembered from my time starting out in 2008. I can't go into details (ask me in person), but sad to say I think the companies I worked for in 2008 had a much better system to do stuff.
Some days, I simply could not do my job because things just didn't work for some reason or another. And I was told: you are used to working with the top companies in the US, this is how things work here. Look, I want to get my stuff done to the best of my ability. If I can't get shit done then what am I supposed to do? Browse twitter?
I was unbelievably stressed for those days and I am pretty sure I lost a fair bit of weight, and quite a few white hairs have sprouted >.>
I'm doing better now; I've just given up and if things work, things work. If not I just don't care if no one else cares (long story short, budget is allocated to a new system, the system we're running on is deprecated). I'm just focusing now on just planning holidays and learning unreal, and fooling around with my synths.
And then there's the office infrastructure. I'm used to having a small kitchenette nearby to make tea, a break room. Nope. None of that. Back in Vancouver we had bloody bean bag rooms, pool table, foosball table, console gaming room - ok not that I used them personally, but other colleagues have mentioned that they were very surprised at how lackluster the facilities were. I personally only have a difficult time without a kitchen as I can't make tea! Or more to the point, a way to store milk. I've resorted to drinking soft drinks and instant coffee from the vending machine at this point because I'm just so tired of it all.
So currently I have about 9 months to go till the end of my contract. Usually, I would stay till the project is complete before I send in my resignation letter but for my mental health, I'm planning to just leave after the end of the contract. I will likely stay on in my apartment for maybe another two months to tour around europe - I regret not touring europe more when I lived in London - I will blow up my savings account to make sure I don't make that mistake again.
So yeah. This was a long one. It's quite funny looking back at my other private posts, they're mostly about complaining about other low times in life, as well as all my moaning about "WHY DOESN'T HE LIKE ME" lol.
I'm probably gonna vanish for another half decade but who knows. It's quite carthartic to write stuff down. Have to do it more often.