A Month at Home

We've been in our Bilbao apartment for a few days short of a month now.

Which brings a challenge. How do we pay rent for June? In Spain, most payments like this are made through direct bank transfer. Someone gives you their bank information, and you send the money directly from your bank.

Which means needing to get money from our US credit union account to our Spain bank account (something we accomplished this past month with the help of our relocation specialist!)

Which first means having money in our US bank account. There's not a lot there because we've been continuing to pay a mortgage in Seattle on an unrented home while also paying for all of our expenses here. (Thank you to our friend who's been managing the work getting done to get our home ready to rent!) We've also been needing to buy so many things new here in Spain.

A few other major milestones have happened in May.

Our visa application (which had been taking up tons of time as we tried to give our immigration attorneys what they were asking for day after day) was submitted on May 17th, one day short of our 90 days of being in the EU visa-free as an American was up. That was such a huge relief. We're now legally in Spain awaiting the response to our application. They owe it to us by June 12th, and if they done meet that deadline, we get the visa by default. We've applied for a Digital Nomad Visa, meaning I'm running online businesses making money outside of Spain. Please beseech any deity you have a relationship with or cross as many fingers and toes as you can, or otherwise send all of the good energy that the visa is approved without a hitch.

The other major milestone is that Pippin has started school! The school year ends on June 18th here, so we weren't sure if we'd be able to get Pippin in school for the last 6 weeks or so of the school year.

Early in May, we visited a Montessori school right outside of Bilbao, and they offered to have Pippin start school with them the next day. Pippin was eager to go, so we made it happen.

I'm appreciating about the Montessori school process that each student gets to explore and progress in the various bodies of knowledge and skills at whatever pace works for them, so the fact that they started at the end of the school year having had no academic schooling before doesn't put them behind or trying to catch up.

Among the things I'm concerned about about Pippin going to this school is that it's an English dominant school, with the main teacher in each classroom teaching in English and the assistant teacher teaching in Spanish. A good number of the kids are English language dominant, also. And, there's no instruction in Euskara/Basque, which is the language of the people of this area. I know that my Japanese language skill development mostly stopped when I transferred from the Japanese first grade to the American school. Because of that, I have a hard time trusting what everyone says: that Pippin is young and will just pick up the languages like a sponge.