This week marks the one-year anniversary of our arrival in Sevilla, after months of planning, organizing, selling, packing, and all the other things that come with moving a family abroad. As we plan to celebrate with ice cream at Raya’s, the first place we ever got ice cream (our go-to for celebrations, bad-day pick-me-ups, and “just because”), I’m taking a moment to reflect on the last year, to breathe in the gratitude I feel for the joys and surprises we’ve encountered as we’ve created our life here.
In many ways, our lives are completely different than they were a year ago. We went from living in a car-dependent suburb to a public-transportation-dependent city center. We walk almost everywhere, take the bus when we can’t (or don’t want to) walk, Uber or taxi rarely, and rent a car for excursions outside the city. Our children went from starting school at 7:45 and ending at 3:45 to starting at 9 and ending at 2 (a change they highly endorse!). The oldest thing we might have encountered on a day in Charlotte was a house built in the 50’s. Here it’s not unusual to turn a corner and see some Roman or Visigoth ruins incorporated into a modern building, or standing in the median.
Yet, when people ask me how it is living in Spain, with what must be visions of us living a grand European adventure, I usually tell them it’s just regular life, just in Spanish. I wake up, make breakfast, get the kids to school, go grocery shopping, do some laundry, get the kids, make lunch, clean up, help with homework, make dinner, have some quiet time and go to bed!
And I love that! It doesn’t feel like a “vacation”, we are creating a life here. I love watching my children thrive with their newfound independence as they grab keys to the apartment and go down to the grocery store across the street to get something they want or walk to and from school by themselves. I love being able to sit and have a coffee in the shadows of a beautiful 16th-century building. Mostly, I love that we were brave enough to make the move and give all of us the experience of living in another language and culture.
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