You moved to Spain? Tell me more! 🇪🇸

Last Friday, I invited two women to join me LIVE to talk about what it’s actually like to build a life in Spain.

Not the logistics.

The life.

Kay Fabella is a Filipina-American Third Culture Kid, former inclusion strategist, and counsellor‑in‑training who has called Madrid home since 2010. She writes Edgewalkers Collective on Substack for long‑term expats and global citizens navigating the “no longer new, still not home” phase of life abroad — giving language, story, and emerging research to what many experience as migratory grief. If you want to connect with her, you can:

• Read Edgewalkers Collective on Substack.

• Book an Expat Orientation Conversation.

• Connect on LinkedIn.

Asia Dawn Simonelli is a writer and relationship coach exploring what happens after life doesn’t go according to plan. Since 2017, she has coached women through breakups and divorce, helping them move beyond simply “getting over” an ex and instead create lives they genuinely love. Asia currently lives with her young daughter in Barcelona, but has also called California, Mexico, and Italy home. If you want to connect with her, you can:

• Read The Next Chapter on Substack.

• Book your free 30-minute Detox Your Ex call.

• Connect on Instagram.

For Asia, it never really felt temporary. She moved to Barcelona with her four-year-old daughter, so there wasn’t much of a honeymoon period. There were schools to figure out. Apartments to find. A 40-minute Metro ride to school. Work. Groceries. Dinner. Everyday life started pretty much immediately.

Kay’s answer was different.

After sixteen years in Madrid, she said becoming at home somewhere is less about a moment and more about a slow accumulation of firsts.

The first time she gave a paid talk in Spanish.

The neighbors who slowly became friends.

The kids in her building who gathered around when she brought her pandemic ukulele downstairs one summer.

Becoming the cool aunt who cat-sits and whose husband plays Fortnite with the neighbors’ kids.

And the first time a visitor asked her where to go in Madrid and she realized she had options. Did they want authentic tapas? Avant-garde Spanish food? A café with good Wi-Fi and a little ambiance? She had a Google Map for that.

Kay: “I don’t think it was one moment, but it was more like an accumulation over time.”

This is one of my favorite questions to ask people who live abroad. Because moving to Spain doesn’t mean your life becomes one long afternoon of sangria and tapas. Which is unfortunate.

Kay’s ordinary Tuesday? “Honestly, it’s me in front of this same laptop working from home.”

Fair.

But Asia Dawn talked about something that has changed. Her life feels less programmed and more…spontaneous.

She might take her daughter to school, work from a café nearby, stay after school while her daughter plays with friends and then, if someone asks, go hear live music or meet a friend on a rooftop that night.

Asia Dawn: In the US, there’s a lot of scheduling and planning in advance with friends, very far in advance to get together. I’m noticing living in Barcelona, I could get invited to something last minute or maybe just a few days in the future. And I’ll prioritize it and I’ll have the space for it because I’m not over-programmed.

Kay has noticed the same thing. An afternoon at the pool in her apartment building can turn into someone grabbing beers, someone ordering pizza and everyone still sitting outside together hours later.

And then there’s sobremesa.

Lunch is finished.

The plates have been cleared.

And everyone just...keeps sitting there.

Kay: Why are we still at the table? Why are we still talking? Why are we bringing out drinks? And you’re there for like three hours after the actual lunch is finished. And that’s the whole bit. I’m spending good quality time with my people. It doesn’t matter how long this takes. I think that sense is very embedded in Spanish culture and lifestyle, regardless of whether you’re in a big city or not. And it’s something I’ve come to appreciate a lot.

Well.

Kay studied Spanish before moving to Madrid.

Asia Dawn majored in Spanish and studied abroad in Madrid before moving to Barcelona.

So I asked Kay if she was fluent when she met the Spanish man who would eventually become her husband.

Kay: I thought I was.

Asia Dawn: Sometimes I’m like, wait, why don’t I understand? I speak Spanish. I studied Spanish. I studied abroad in Madrid as well. I majored in Spanish. I have this full love for it. And I feel like I’m learning it again now that I’m here in real time. It’s just…listening to it is just different. And also I have to deal with Catalan. Sometimes they’re speaking in Catalan and not even speaking Spanish.

Apparently there is nothing quite like arriving in Spain to discover that the Spanish you were so proud of speaking bears only a passing resemblance to the Spanish currently being fired at you at machine-gun speed.

Asia Dawn didn’t hesitate: You need housing to feel stable and secure and safe, right? And it’s a real struggle. … I’m not giving up, but it’s still the thing I wake up with every single day: OK, how am I going to find a home that’s in the ideal location and a school district I like that’s also affordable.

Why is housing so hard to find?

Kay had a very different answer after sixteen years.

This may actually be one of the better descriptions of long-term expat life I’ve heard.

Because sixteen years in, you’re not still wandering around Madrid thinking how charming everything is.

You’re married to the place.

You’ve seen some things.

And yet.

I asked them what they’d tell their best friend if she called tomorrow and said, “I’m thinking about it....”

Asia Dawn: Go. Give it a shot. That’s my approach to living anywhere is just to give it a shot and then you’ll know. Because otherwise you’re going to always wonder what it would have been like if you hadn’t gone.

Kay’s answer was a little different. There are a lot of reasons she has stayed in Spain for sixteen years. But one of them is the space it has given her to live life a little more slowly. She can go to a networking event and the second question someone asks her is almost never: So, what do you do?

Kay: One of my last roommates before I moved in with my now-husband listened to all of our American stories of why we moved to Madrid and how we ended up there. And she was like, “So maybe Spain should rebrand itself as the lung for America. The place where people come to breathe for the first time.” And that has stuck with me ever since. Because she heard it, each of our stories. And I was like, you nailed it. We’re all here to breathe.

Six months. Sixteen years. Three apartments, one giant Google map, countless bureaucratic forms, a second language you thought you spoke, kids asleep in strollers in the bar at 11 p.m., accidental pizza parties on school nights, and apparently quite a lot of vermouth.

Somewhere in there, you stop being a person who moved to Spain.

And you become a person who lives there.

PS. The Expat Diaries is spending August talking with women who left one life and built another in Europe.

Our first stop was France. Then we landed in Spain. This week we’re headed to Portugal.

So you moved to Portugal…Tell me more! (Friday, August 21)

Can’t join us live? No problem. I’ll send the replay every Sunday.