The non-EU expat who logs five legal years in Spain can reach for a glittery brass ring at the end of year five: a “larga duración” residence permit, either for Spain alone or for both Spain and the rest of the European Union. I opted for the second, got it, post today to share juicy…
Edith Kulstein: 97 Year Old Zoom User
The photo above was snapped in Algiers during World War II. The attractive young woman is a French Jewish refugee, had fled the Nazis with her family in 1940. She would soon marry the serviceman shown and move with him to the United States. Three-quarters of a century later, I met her online. Edith is…
Brothers of the Milky Way gets a new cover
Feast your eyes! Pretty slick, no? Better than I deserve! And the spatial, three-dimensional novel may look better still, even with cover text and ISBN bar code. (I pause to lovingly heft the paperback that now graces my computer desk, to fan its crisp pages, inhale that dreamy new book smell. And you thought I…
Recommended Madrid Businesses
I am or was a client of all of the businesses listed below and recommend them to others. Services range from the short-term (at the century-old Peluquería Moderna, which cut hair I no longer have) to the life-transforming (at ICUA, which relieved me of 117 grams of prostate tissue). I receive no compensation from any…
Madrid Impressions: Round Seven
Almost three years since my last installment! I again offer my advanced age as an excuse, lament that I never thought to employ this dodge for late homework assignments in fifth grade. FAMILY TIES … … strike me as sturdier here than in the U.S. Many Spaniards live unselfconsciously with their parents into their late…
Transitophile is Cookie-free
Internauts visiting this page only yesterday saw a pop-up in the lower right corner, modified to look like: The pop-up was furnished by Complianz, a WordPress plug-in for webmasters who want to comply with European Union data protection laws. Transitophile made cookies! I didn’t know how or why, had tried to be rid of them…
Trips to Catalonia
Catalonia is the triangular, Maryland-sized “autonomous community” that defines mainland Spain’s northeast corner. Its capital, Barcelona, attracts visitors from around the globe. Girona, Figueres, Lérida and other Catalonia urbs get less international attention. Catalans speak Spanish, even if some wish they didn’t, and a language of their own: Catalan, the mother tongue of roughly a…
Madrid Late Pandemic
Madrid’s subway is now sometimes crowded. Not as crowded as before the pandemic, true; I haven’t wriggled aboard a stuffed-to-the-stanchions car since early 2020, never now see riders forced to disembark to allow others to get off, as described in my first pandemic post. Official stats claim only 61.2% of pre-pandemic ridership. But, sometimes, crowded.…
I have a Covid-19 vaccine appointment in Madrid
(First, huge thanks to fellow expat Jim Forbes for passing along this information. I had given up hope.) Comunidad.Madrid now permits elderly vaccine seekers to book appointments online! Here’s how: (♦) Go to https://www.comunidad.madrid/covid-19 (♦) Scroll past the likely-familiar text on this page until you discover an unfamiliar gray rectangular box: (Para colectivos especificos means ‘for…
Ruta de las Caras in Cuenca, Spain
One unheralded day in 1992, among the young pines on the southern banks of Spain’s Buendía reservoir, Madrileños Eulogio Reguillo and Jorge Maldonado hoisted chisels to sandstone to commence the sculpture shown above. La Monja, they called it; they started a second sculpture, and a third. Twenty sculptures and bas-reliefs now grace the woodsy, 1.5…