Raise your hand if you’ve ever watched Emily in Paris. 🙋♀️🙋♂️ Season Four recently came out, and Matt and I watched it all within a week. We’ve been Emily in Paris “fans” since it first premiered in October 2020, as we got snowed into our Montana apartment and we decided to watch for the beautiful Paris imagery, dreaming of days when the pandemic would abate and we could travel internationally again.
But four seasons in, I have to admit that we’re hate-watching more than actually enjoying the show. Vapid Emily, who represents the worst of American corporate culture and does nothing but make one baffling decision after another, floats through life in Paris with no consequences to her dumb actions. The plot holes are too numerous to count.
Has Emily ever taken the metro? Why does she leave every cafe without paying? How was her suitcase not stolen when she left it in the middle of a plaza and walked away? Why does she still know like no French? When does her visa expire? Also (spoiler alert for Season 4/5) how can she just move to Rome with no paperwork whatsoever?
I know that it’s a TV show and it’s not supposed to be anything more than fantasy. But as an actual American living abroad, I feel that Emily in Paris is missing far too many crying scenes.
That’s because Cathy in Spain has featured many crying scenes over the course of about two and a half years in Spain. 😂
Life in Europe is definitely fun, and I absolutely love living in Spain. But it’s not just the highlight reel you see on Instagram. (I do try to be really transparent about the realities of living abroad, like with my post from 2019, The Truth About Living in Spain. )
So today I wanted to share a few stories… of five times that living in Spain has made me cry. (Also, this post ended up way longer than I intended, but I hope you still enjoy reading it. 🙂)
1. The time I learned I’d have to take the bus 4 hours round trip every day to work
In 2018, I applied to work as an English language assistant in Spain through the NALCAP program. I’d been placed in Madrid, but it turned out that meant the “state” of Madrid and not the city. When I looked up my school, it was alarmingly far away from the city center, but no matter — Google maps showed me that there was a bus that would get me there in an hour.
The day before my first day of school, I went to the bus station to scope it out and find out where I needed to board, and all that. I couldn’t find any information whatsoever about the bus I was looking for, so I went to an information desk. In shy, rusty Spanish, I asked the worker where I could find the bus or buy tickets for it.
“You can’t take that bus.”
“Why not?”
“You can’t. You can’t buy tickets.”
“Why? It goes through the town I need to get to.”
“It doesn’t stop there.”
“Google says it stops there.”
“It doesn’t. You’ll have to take a different bus.”
Already having learned in less than a month that many things in Spain are highly dependent on the whims of the person you’re interacting with on any given day, I decided to try another information desk on a different floor of the bus station.
But they told me the same thing.
I couldn’t understand how there could be a bus that people couldn’t buy tickets for. (And I don’t understand how, six years later, that bus is still showing as a viable option on Google, if it’s impossible to buy tickets…)
So, it turned out that the only bus I could take would be one that took more than two hours each way. 🙃 I sat down on a bench and tried to wrap my head around the fact that I would be spending four-plus hours on a bus every day for the next year. (Or two, because I was planning to spend two years there.) I started crying, until a guy on the other side of the bench told me I was too pretty to be crying, and then I put on my sunglasses so I could continue my crying in peace.
Epilogue: I found a teacher to drive me to school every day that year. And in year two, I took the 2-hour bus, but I mostly didn’t mind it too much.
2. The time I went to get a Regreso
I can’t believe that Emily has never even once had to deal with any legal/bureaucracy stuff. Like yeah, she has a visa (I suppose) but does she have a French ID? Did she have to register her address with the government? Has she had to pay taxes yet?
As I wrapped up my first year in Spain, my Spanish ID card (TIE/NIE) was going to expire on June 30. I’d made my request to renew it, but it was still in process. And I was allowed to stay in Spain while it was in the process of renewing, but leaving the country and coming back in without it required some extra paperwork: I needed a Regreso.
A Regreso basically says “Yes, this person is entitled to live here, and their documents are in the process of being renewed. This is a paper stating that the Spanish government has proof they are working on renewal, please let them back in the country.”
I was getting ready to take two trips outside Spain in quick succession — first, 48 hours in Rome with my family, then two days back in Madrid before heading home to the U.S. for the rest of the summer. The idea with a Regreso is that, once you present it to an immigration official, they take it from you and you can’t use it again. By that logic, I needed two Regresos in case they took it from me coming back into Spain from the Italy trip. Despite the fact that Italy is also part of the EU all my online research told me that I still needed a Regreso, just in case.
So I made the hour-long bus trek out to a suburb of Madrid, spent half the day waiting for my appointment in a stuffy immigration-paperwork-processing building, and got my first Regreso. Knowing I wouldn’t have time to get my second one in the the two days between my trips, I booked an appointment at yet a different suburban immigration office and repeated the whole process a week later. Long bus trip. (It was summer in Spain, so hot AF.) Hours in a DMV-style waiting room.
When I finally got called up to the desk for my appointment, the woman started running my information. And she told me I already had a Regreso on file. “I know,” I explained in slightly more confident but still tentative Spanish, “But I’m going to Italy, and then I’m going back to the U.S. a couple days later…”
“You can only have one Regreso at a time.”
“But what if they take it from me when I come back from Italy? I won’t have a way to get another one before my trip.”
“You don’t need one for Italy. It’s also in the EU.”
“But here’s an article I read online from an official government source that says I do technically need one.”
She looked at my phone, read the article, and shrugged.
“Well, there’s no way for me to give you another one since you already have one on file… Por qué estás llorando?” Why are you crying?
“Because everything is so confusing all the time and I never know what I’m supposed to be doing.”
She was a little bit nicer to me after that, but I still left sans Regreso.
Epilogue: No immigration officer ever asked me for a Regreso. Much ado about nothing, per usual.
3. The time I couldn’t get my bank account updated to my NIE
I may have already had two years of living in Spain under my belt by the time we moved to Alicante in January 2024, but Spanish bureaucracy stays undefeated against me. For every process that I think I understand and feel confident about because I’ve experienced it before, 5 brand new things pop up.
So, with the Spain digital nomad visa, we have to pay quarterly taxes (just like in the U.S.). I was told that X amount of money would be withdrawn from my Spanish bank account on a certain day. Cool, no problem. But the day came and went, a week passed, and the money was never withdrawn. I reached out to my gestor (kind of like an accountant) and she said that she could see the withdrawal request was made, but for whatever reason, it didn’t go through, despite the funds being available.
She asked me whether my NIE — Spanish ID number — was attached to my bank account, or only my passport?
When I set up my Spanish bank account in 2018, I used my passport and had never had a problem — even when I paid Spanish taxes for the first time in 2020. But we figured that was the issue in this case, so I called my bank’s customer service line to ask them to update my account number with my NIE.
One guy on the phone got all the way through the process before saying, “Sorry, but it won’t let me do it. You’ll have to go to the bank in person.”
“There are two branches near me — one is just an office, and one has a cash desk. Which one should I go to?”
“The office.”
“Will I need an appointment?”
“No.”
Well, guess what happened when I went to the office? They told me they couldn’t help me, and I needed to go to the one with the cash desk.
So I went into the other branch, where there was already a horde of unhappy customers waiting in line and only one person working. A second worker, who seemed to have decided it was time for her lunch break, walked up and asked whether I had an appointment.
“No, but I was told on the phone I didn’t need one.”
“What do you need?”
“I need to update my account info with my NIE instead of my passport.”
“Well, I can’t help you today. You need an appointment.”
And she walked out the door without a look back.
This would be regular-infuriating on a normal day in Spain, but my taxes were now 10 days overdue through no fault of my own, and we were getting ready to leave for a six-week-long trip to the U.S. just two days later.
I was so frustrated and confused that I went outside the bank, sat down on the steps, and started to cry.
I felt a tap on my shoulder behind me, and I turned, hopeful, that it was a worker from the bank saying they could help me.
Instead, I found a bank security guard. “You can’t sit here.”
Epilogue: I went home and called the bank customer service number and told the clueless representative about all that had transpired, and they made me an appointment for the next day. The aloof woman from the day before ended up being forced to help me, and after like an hour of working on it, with me still unsure why this simple task could take so long, my NIE was finally added. A month later, I got hit with a €120 late tax payment fee. Fun!
4. The time my wedding flowers got stuck in Spanish customs for almost two months
I did a pretty good job of planning our two wedding celebrations — destination wedding in Spain, reception in Kansas City — throughout the course of this year, I think. On top of that, I wanted to be able to re-use things between the wedding and the reception. Which meant that, after buying my wedding dress in Kansas City last winter, I flew it to Alicante with me, and then brought it back to KC last month for the reception.
One of the things I wanted to be able to re-use was my bouquet. While I was in the U.S. this summer, I had the brilliant idea to buy a dried/preserved floral bouquet on Etsy, which I could take over to Spain with me, use for the wedding, and then also bring back to Kansas City for photos. One bouquet, two weddings. Love the efficiency!
Except a few days before going back to Spain, I realized that you aren’t exactly supposed to take plants/plant products into other countries. The internet was divided over whether I would actually get caught, but I didn’t want to do anything that could risk my visa. And if the bouquet were to be confiscated, then I would have no flowers for either wedding.
After talking to the Etsy seller, who told me she could not provide the required “Phytosanitary” certificate, she told me that she ships bouquets to Spain all the time with absolutely no problems. I decided I didn’t want to risk anything, so I ordered a second bouquet from her shop, directly to Spain. I would end up with two bouquets, one in each country, but whatever.
I ordered the bouquet in June, and by early July, the tracking for the bouquet showed that it had arrived in Spain. But it ended up getting tagged to go through a special customs/import process, due to the fact that it was a plant product. I was unfortunately already experiencing this issue with something else I had ordered — a $10 pharmaceutical product that I had ordered from Amazon UK — that not only got held up for more than a month, but also required me to pay €50 in additional taxes to Spanish customs before there was even a possibility it would be released to me. (I eventually got it more than two months after the extra taxes were paid.)
Every time I tried to talk to the Etsy seller about what was going on — and my fear that I would have to pay 5x the value of the $200 bouquet (and shipping) in additional taxes, for something that wasn’t guaranteed to arrive in time — she would say “This has never happened to any of my products I’ve sent to Spain before. I feel confident that you will receive it before your wedding.”
Based on what, lady? You don’t know Spain like I do.
I asked if she could refund me so that I could begin trying to make other arrangements. She said no, but she would be willing to send me another bouquet. Why?! I never wanted two bouquets. Why would I want three? Especially when this one was also going to get stuck?
It was the beginning of August, and I had less than three weeks to get something figured out. I was making phone calls to the customs department, sending emails, and trying to figure out whether I should show up at the customs office in Madrid myself. The Etsy seller was pretty unhelpful and continued exhibiting blind optimism toward the whole thing, which made me feel so conflicted. I cried over this at least two times in our apartment, and Matt suggested that I try to order a (third) bouquet from someone based in Spain.
He helped me find an Etsy account in based in Madrid, who said she would make me a bouquet modeled off the original one(s) I bought. She estimated that shipping would only take a few days. So, finally at peace — though having spent 3x as much on a bouquet as I wanted — I was ready to put it all behind me.
Epilogue: There was a lot of bureaucratic back-and-forth with this online Spanish customs platform over the course of a couple of months. Eventually, I think nobody reviewed my case for so long that the flowers ended up getting sent back to the seller in California. I asked if she would refund me, she still said no, and then I opened a case with Etsy, who immediately refunded me.
5. The time my replacement wedding flowers got lost in the postal system
I was leaving for the wedding on Monday, August 19th. One week before that — on Monday the 12th — I got a notification from Etsy: Your order is out for delivery!
What a relief! The flower saga was finally almost over.
Matt and I went out to go grocery shopping, like we always do on Mondays. When we got home, an hour later, I saw that the tracking status for my flowers had updated. Now, it said that delivery had been attempted, but no one answered the door.
This was mildly infuriating because our apartment has a doorman that always receives packages for the building. Where had he been?
It turns out that other people had been wondering too, because there were now signs posted up around the apartment complex, typed in Microsoft Word by some unhappy resident, stating: “Arturo isn’t here today, and we contacted the security company to see why he didn’t show up for work. His whereabouts are currently unknown.”
So, that was awesome. The one and only time the guy didn’t show up was the one time I really needed my package. But it was only Monday, and I had until Friday. The tracking page said that the delivery would be attempted again the next day. Matt and I made sure at least one of us was home all day Tuesday in case the buzzer rang, so we could receive the package.
But Tuesday, the buzzer never rang and the package tracking had stopped updating. I decided to go to the post office that night to ask for an update. They told me that it should begin updating by the next morning, and if it didn’t, to come back.
Wednesday morning also passed with no updates. I went back to the post office in the early afternoon, as instructed, and I asked if there was a chance the flowers would be delivered either that day or Thursday.
“Well, Thursday is a national holiday so it won’t be tomorrow. But I would recommend you to go to the OTHER post office, the one by the train station, and ask for the jefe de carteleria.” Postmaster boss.
Trying not to panic over the fact that a random holiday meant one fewer day to figure this out, I walked to the other post office, waited my turn, and asked for the jefe de carteleria as suggested. They took my tracking number, printed something out, and disappeared behind a door after telling me to take a seat again.
Ten minutes later, they returned and called me up to the desk. “Yeah, we don’t know where your package is.”
“Are you looking for it?”
“Well, we close at 2 p.m. today. We’re not open tomorrow. And we’re only open until noon on Friday. So we’ll look for it but we probably won’t find it this week.”
I was stunned. They asked for my phone number “in case they find it,” but when I reminded them I needed it by Saturday at the latest, they repeated, apathetically, that they likely wouldn’t find it in time. Then they called the next customer to the counter.
I didn’t know what to do, so I did what I always do: I sat down in one of the lobby chairs and started to cry.
A couple of minutes later, an older woman entered the post office and sat down next to me. She started making small talk, something about wanting to get out of the rain, when suddenly she realized I was crying.
“What’s wrong? Why are you crying?”
“The post office lost my wedding flowers and I’m not going to get them in time.”
“Oh no! Well, I’m going to say a prayer for you.”
She launched into a stream of consciousness prayer to Jesús, asking for bendiciones that I would receive my flowers in time. When she got to the part where she wanted to insert my name into the prayer, she turned to me with a “Cuál es tu nombre?”
When she was done, I told her muchas gracias. And she actually was making me feel a little bit better, because I knew I was getting a story out of this whole experience. Only in Spain. 😂
And then she said, “You need to go back up there and tell them you’re not leaving until they find your package. Do you want me to go up and stand with you?”
I nodded, and we walked up to one of the available counters. I opened my mouth to start speaking, wondering what jumble of Spanish would come out this time, but she was way ahead of me. “She needs her package and she’s not leaving until she gets it. You need to start looking right now.”
The worker, who was now a little bit agitated, took my tracking number again. “Okay, fine. Is it a big package? Small?” I gestured with my best guess, somewhere between medium and large, and they told me that it did actually help a bit.
As we stood at the counter, I finally decided to ask this guardian angel what her name was: Mari Carmen. And a few minutes later, Mari Carmen turned to leave, without having done any business of her own at the post office, wishing me good luck as she left.
Finally, the postal worker told me that they thought they would in fact be able to find my package by the end of the week. I guess they were feeling a renewed sense of motivation, knowing that the package wasn’t super tiny.
With nothing else to do, I finally headed home.
Epilogue: I told everything to Matt in the apartment, and he said he would sit there in the post office lobby for the rest of the day until they found the package. And five minutes later, before he had even arrived at the post office, I got the phone call: my package had been found. I met up with Matt on the street and together we went to the post office, we picked up the package, and I knew I never had to cry over wedding flowers in Spain, ever again.
Despite all these stories, I promise that I absolutely love living in Spain. Well, most of the time. 🙂
Have you ever experienced something similar while living abroad? Did anything surprise you? Let me know in the comments!
-Cathy
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