Going to Barcelona
I’ve just booked my flight (January 7th) and accommodation for the course is sorted. All that remains is to complete the pre-course task and to pack.
I keep telling myself that I’m not going to a Gulag. I’m going to the world’s top beach city. Barcelona gets a hundred hours more sunshine per month than London, year round. In January, it will be as sunny there as it is here in September.
I should be thrilled. I love to travel, to explore other countries, and nothing rejuvenates the mind more than learning another language and adapt to another culture. I would be over the Moon—if John was coming with me.
But John is not coming. This isn’t an adventure, a couple of months or years in the sun until we return home, full of tales and ready to face a contented future together. John is already home, but I am not.
I’ve lived in the UK for twenty-three years—exactly half my life—but in all this time I’ve never asked whether I could stay. I was already here when we met and got married and kind of … just settled in.
It never occured to me that I couldn’t just do that. Thankfully it’s not too late. My sister, married to a Brit, is applying for her ‘voluntary’ permit to remain, and eventually ILR and citizenship, while she is still working, and before she finds herself back in Germany sans her husband, because she has fallen on mis-fortune, ill-health or old age.
I do not have that option because six years in Tadley mean that I haven’t been working and therefore cannot apply for a permit. I’ll have to start all over again. And since I will have to retrain—and with the job market being what it is—I may as well go down the TEFL route. Perhaps there is work in Spain. I hope so. If John finds work in Barcelona or Madrid for a couple of months we could then apply to return to the UK in an orderly fashion, with me as the duly declared spouse of a returning EU national.
But this won’t happen for a while. I’ll have to go first. I’ll have to hope that I can find enough work in Spain to cover national insurance and qualify as a resident, at least for the time being.
This isn’t a trip.
This is exile.
Tags: Spain, TEFL, Tag Index
Denni