Cost of Living in Valencia Via COMO Consulting Spain

 

Here is my survey about life and how much it costs in Valencia. This website is relatively new but incredibly helpful for people thinking of making the move from tourist to expat. Definitely check it out if you are thinking of coming here long-term or are just curious how much it costs to live in various places in Spain.

 

Click here for my story.

Road to Almería

I’m going to take you back 3 years to when I was first applying to come to Spain. Filling out the application and having to decide on the top 3 places I would like to be placed was incredibly difficult. I thought about Salamanca which is where I studied abroad but ultimately decided to try something completely different. I wanted to live in a big city so I requested Cataluña, Andalucía and Aragon, hoping to be placed in Barcelona. In the end I consider myself very lucky not to have been in Barcelona because their language assistants didn’t get paid until January!

I remember the day I received my placement letter perfectly. All that month I spent most of my time sitting by the window waiting to see the mail man come. As soon as I saw him round the corner I would run out the door to see if he had my letter. The day it arrived I remember dropping everything to read it in the street. It was like being accepted to college all over again! It had some general information and midway through it had the address of my school written like this:

CEIP Concordia
C/Italíca S/N.
(04110) Campohermoso (Almería)

At this point I had no idea how to read a Spanish address so I didn’t know if the town was Campohermoso or Almería. The first thing I did when I got back inside was to do a Google search for Almería. You cannot imagine my excitement when I saw the little red dot pointing to the southern coast of Spain. Thoughts of becoming a beach bum began to race through my head.

I later found some very limited information on Campohermoso, turns out it is a farming town where most of Spain’s cucumbers, melons and the famous Raf tomatoes come from. Luckily, I was able to live in Almería just a 7 minute walk to the beach! It was great; I had really nice roommates, great coworkers and lived in a perfect little beach town.

Always a beautiful sunset on the beach!

Spanish Food Epiphany

One food that I have hated all my life are olives. I have always found them to be just salty and sour, especially my dad’s favorite, dried. Yuck! Spain is one of the biggest exporters of olive oil and olives are served with everything here. When I first arrived I avoided them like the plague. They were tossed into salads, on sandwiches and sitting there menacingly on my plate trying to contaminate my tapa with its salty juices.

My first year in Almeria I lived with an American girl and her boyfriend was at our house a lot. The only plus about that was he was from a small town outside of Almeria where his family had a lot of orange, lemon and olive trees. So, one weekend after they got back with bags and bags of free oranges they also brought some home pressed olive oil and a few jars of Manzanilla olives. Everyone was raging about how good they were. I wasn’t convinced. During a dinner party (a few drinks may have been involved) they convinced me to try one. And you know what? It was pretty darn good!

A night out with my roommates in Almeria

That was my one and only olive for awhile until I went out tapeando with a friend one night. During a lull in the conversation she looked down and said: “I thought you hated olives…” I didn’t even realize I had eaten the ones on my plate! After that I could not be stopped. I was buying olives at the markets and going through about a jar a week by myself! I have since calmed down and enjoy olives in more reasonable quantities…and I consider myself very lucky to be living in a country with such fresh and delicious olives!

yum :)

Spain Buddy Interview

Hello! Here is another interview with an expat site specifically related to Spain! Check it out and let me know what you think. :)

Click here to read the interview

A Super Expat Thanksgiving

When I was growing up Thanksgiving was never a holiday I really understood why people got excited for. My family is full of good cooks, so we had gourmet meals practically every day. So, for us Thanksgiving was just a day to eat dinner at 3pm and in the dining room instead of the kitchen.

My feelings on Thanksgiving took a 180 turn once I moved abroad. Suddenly, I was very excited to share this American holiday with all my new friends! I have been lucky enough to be able to celebrate my 3 years here with people from all over the world. Here is the story of my first Spanish Thanksgiving 2 years ago, a very eclectic mix of food. Last year was a small celebration with my good friend, Roisin, who was visiting from England.

My vegetarian Thanksgiving with Roisin

This year I wanted to make Thanksgiving as traditional as possible. Since we don’t have a break here, we had to celebrate the Saturday after Thanksgiving. I spent the week preparing the menu and gathering the ingredients. Going off tradition, I didn’t get a turkey because I didn’t order it in time (oops!) So, we ended up with 2 chickens instead. The funny thing about poultry here, is it isn't as clean as it would be in the US. Sometimes there are still big feathers in the skin and little feathers that need to be burned off. Friday night, I went through each bird with a pair of pliers to take out the rest of the big feathers. Then, to get the small feathers off, Mo made a blow torch with the stove. I was a little worried we would explode, but it all worked out in the end.

Saturday morning I woke up early to start preparing everything. First thing to hit the oven was a pumpkin pie made from homemade pumpkin puree (actually a butternut squash.) Thanks to King Arthur Flour for the amazing recipe.

Beautiful color!

The pie. DELICIOUS!

Mashed potatoes are my specialty, and something I always have been in charge of for Thanksgiving back home. I FINALLY found “my” secret ingredient (I stole the idea from my mom, who has been nice enough to let me claim it as my own. Thanks mom!) so I was very excited to be able to make the perfect potatoes. I forgot how much time they take to peel! Well worth the time though.

After the potatoes were done I started on the stuffings. There were two vegetarians at the meal so I made one for the chickens and one with a watered down cream of mushroom soup for the base. Man, it turned out good! The stuffings were both flavored with rosemary, thyme and sage. We were very lucky to have some dried sage in the house all the way from Palestine! Although sage grows in the mountains near Valencia, I have, unfortunately, never seen it in the stores here.

After all those dishes were done, I took a quick nap and went out for a coffee to try to get ride of a headache that was bothering me all day. A side effect of some antibiotics for strep throat.

When I was ready for the kitchen again, my roommate was finally awake to help me with the chickens. To keep with the flavors of the stuffing we made a butter, fresh rosemary, fresh thyme and dried sage rub for under the skin of the chickens. We had a little too much fun listening to Christmas carols and dancing with the chickens while they were sitting on beer cans to let the rest of the blood drain.

Notice the green twine....

A few hours before our guests arrived we finished the stuffing the chickens. I realized then that we didn’t have any butchers twine! Luckily, she had some string from a craft project that worked just fine. It was colored though, so the only thing that was going through my head while we were tying the legs together was the scene from the movie Bridget Jones’s Diary where she uses blue Christmas ribbon to tie some herbs for a soup and the soup comes out blue! Luckily, our chickens came out a perfect toasty brown color and not green.

The spread!

The desserts! Homemade pumpkin and apple pies

This was probably my favorite of all the Thanksgivings I have had here. It was full of great people and great food. Did I mention we had 4 countries represented?? Talk about a true expat party!

American, Palestinian, Egyptian, Spanish, American, American. A very international Thanksgiving!