After two months visiting the U.S., we’re only a few days away from heading back to our other home in Alicante, Spain. I’m really excited to get back, though I’ve definitely enjoyed our time here this fall. But it has been endlessly busy! From playing in a soccer league and sand volleyball league, to two friends’ weddings and our own wedding reception, our annual Halloween party, fostering a cat, and watching the Chiefs games with family and friends, life here has looked a lot different from the Spanish lifestyle we’ve gotten used to.

But the lifestyle is one of the biggest reasons we love living in Spain, and it’s hard to believe we’re already coming up on a year since we moved to Alicante! While I had lived in Madrid for two years, life in Alicante looks a lot different, and I’m always excited when I get to experience new aspects of life in Spain.

So I thought it would be fun to share seven new experiences I’ve had living in Spain this year. [Read more…]

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. [Read more…]

Special edition blog! It’s officially been a month since Matt and I got married in a 10th-century castle in the countryside of Catalonia, Spain. And it was more than a wedding venue — the castle had 8 bedrooms, which meant that up to 16 people could stay there, so our families came a few days early and we spent three nights together. (You can book it on your favorite homestay booking app, like Booking.com!) Then, on the day of the wedding, about 15 more friends came in by shuttle bus from Barcelona for the ceremony.

As you can probably imagine, planning a destination wedding wasn’t easy — especially because I didn’t have a wedding planner. I figured that since it was going to be so small, I’d be able to figure it all out on my own. And I did! But it was a lot harder than I was expecting. 😅 So I thought I would share some wisdom about what it was like to have a destination wedding in Spain. [Read more…]

My dear readers and fellow Spain-digital-nomads-to-be: I want to warn you that becoming a digital nomad in Spain is not for the faint of heart. I’ve been working through this Spain digital nomad checklist for the past two+ months, as we’ve been going through the steps ourselves, and writing it all down has really caused me to reflect on la locura of the whole process.

I really hope that this Spain digital nomad checklist can be helpful, but there are a few disclaimers I want to give. First of all, I lived in Spain as a language assistant through the NALCAP program from 2018-2020. For that reason, I had some advantages when it came to several items. Not only did I already have a Spanish bank account, but I was familiar with the processes for getting a TIE and empadronamiento. [Read more…]

Now that we’ve been in Alicante long enough to feel like we actually live here, I’m able to think about how different life is in Alicante compared to life in Madrid. In case you didn’t know this about me, I lived in Madrid for two years from 2018-2020 when I was participating in the NALCAP program as a language assistant. I loved Madrid, and I will always love Madrid! And I had never lived anywhere else in Spain — until now.

When moving to Alicante, I was super curious to find out which things I thought were “Spain” things, that were actually just “Madrid” things. And after two and a half months, here are the biggest differences I’ve noticed so far between life in Madrid and life in Alicante. [Read more…]

When you move to Spain, there’s an unbelievable amount of bureaucracy to deal with — and even more so if you’re self-employed and holding the Spain digital nomad visa, like we are. While we’re figuring it out little by little, and I’m working on a checklist for new digital nomads in Spain, one thing that inevitably brings up a lot of questions is the topic of health care.

On the digital nomad visa, my understanding is that we are eligible for Spain’s public health system due to the fact that we’re paying Social Security. However, we still haven’t registered for it. There’s a certain order you need to do things in, and I’m not sure we’ve completed all the steps yet. I wasn’t planning to get a private plan, and I just figured we’d get the public health insurance as soon as we could, but there was one more thing that I was a little concerned about.

What health insurance would we use when we went home to the U.S. for a visit?

[Read more…]

Less than a week after arriving in Alicante, our new home, we’re officially settled into our new apartment! 🎉 While it took a lot of hard work — scheduling appointments, running around town for visits, and speaking Spanish with all the realtors/landlords — I’m glad that it paid off. However, it was a little more difficult than I anticipated in some ways. It turns out that it can be really tricky for digital nomads to find an apartment in Spain.

If you’re a digital nomad in Spain searching for an apartment, keep reading. Not only have I experienced the housing search here in Alicante, but I also went through the process in Madrid a few years ago.

So, now that I’ve gone through it twice, with two totally different experiences, in two different situations, and in two different cities, I feel like I have enough knowledge to share that could be helpful.

[Read more…]

Hello from our new home in Alicante, Spain!

Three and a half years after moving back home to Kansas City from Madrid, I’m finally back in Spain — and the best part is that Matt is with me now, too. 🙂 While our first few days here have been a whirlwind of adjusting to the time zone, looking for an apartment, and even having our TIE appointments bright and early on Monday morning, I’m ready and excited to start sharing our adventure with you all.

Of course, once we got approved for the Spain digital nomad visa, there was an important decision we had to make: where in Spain did we want to live? We talked about different cities for a while, but in the end, we decided on Alicante… a place that neither of us had ever visited before!

It was definitely a little bit risky (but so is moving to another country at all, lol). In the end, there were five main reasons we felt like it was going to be a great fit for us. So, without further ado, here’s why we decided to move to Alicante without ever visiting. [Read more…]

Five years ago last month, I moved to Spain to work as an English language assistant through the auxiliares de conversacion (NALCAP) program. I lived there for two years, four months of which were the initial onset and very early days of the pandemic. While I would have loved to stay in Spain for longer — and bring Matt, my then-boyfriend and now-fiancé — over with me, the craziness of 2020 and 2021 was not the right time to attempt an international move.

Although I moved back home to the U.S. in July 2020, the idea of living in Europe again never left my mind. We thought about applying for a digital nomad visa in Estonia, one of the only ones that were available at the time. But in August 2021, something caught my eye that remained in my sights ever since: a new digital nomad visa was coming to Spain.

Two years later, we’ve officially been approved to move to Spain on the digital nomad visa! Here’s exactly what you need to know if you want to apply for the Spain digital nomad visa as an American. [Read more…]