Why I am here

My name is Mirzania and I am from England but I live in Spain. Me and my husband are part of a rapidly growing group of ingleses who have decided that Spain is a much better place to live than the UK. However, unlike many ‘expats’, we are not retired and we are not rolling in cash. Also, moving to Spain was not a snap decision for us; we had planned this for a long time. We took Spanish lessons, checked and double-checked all legal details and collected and filled in all the correct forms for taxes, health insurance, residencia, etc. We travelled the length and breadth of the country to find a place to live we knew we would like (and, importantly, be welcome there). We checked out local diets, the cost of food and general living expenses (to make sure we could actually afford to live in Spain). We also spent ages studying the climate in different parts of the country, as this varies greatly and not only by region. We had done massive amounts of research on properties, building regulations and builders.

So you could say that we were not taking this on without giving the project due thought.

The problem is that despite all our careful planning (and even despite our ‘back-up plans’), if things have been capable of going wrong, you can guarantee that they have!

This blog is not a bitch about Spain, which we still think is a wonderful country, or about Spanish people, who, on the whole, have been overwhelmingly friendly and helpful to us. No. This blog is about things that have happened to us because we are us!

Surely the things that have happened to us couldn’t have happened to anyone else? Not with so much regularity anyway.

But I’ll spend the following entries talking about these.