You have 6 weeks until your kids need to go
to school somewhere else in Europe. You have a house full of effects from your
life. You have kids that don’t know the meaning of the phrase “tidy up”, and
you need to make sure you can carry on your professional activities when you
get to wherever it is you’re going. What is your first emotion? If it is sheer
panic, you are probably right. But it’s the second emotion that will count, and
that is focus. Focus on what you need to do, when you need to do it, and how
you can get it done. Our list was daunting, the time frame virtually
impossible, but it had to be done if we were to make sure our three children were to carry on their education.
It went something like this:
·
Call the real estate branch of
our bank and request to put our house up for sale
·
Close down our Luxembourg
office
·
Make a list of countries and
cities we would be interested in moving to
·
Check out their suitability:
house prices, schools and quality of life
·
Single out some schools and
apartments, and start calling round (not just emailing and waiting for a reply)
·
Arrange a couple of days to go
to your chosen destination in order to tap on a few doors, because estate
agents don’t like to be accessible, unless they are confronted with you in
person
·
Order a large container to
throw out everything we don’t want to take with us: furniture, fittings,
flooring, general waste, etc.
·
Gather all the other waste from
the house, sort it, and throw it out: electric, paper/carton, glass, dangerous
materials, etc.
·
Put all the utility services on
alert that we’re going to close them off
·
Sign out of the local commune
·
Get the car serviced
·
Start gathering things we are
going to need, such as different sized house-move boxes, tape, markers, bin
bags, etc.
·
Begin washing all our dirty
clothes and then do systematic washes of used ones, so that we can pack them
easily when we need to.
·
Look for a person to keep an
eye on our house until we can return to get more stuff: feed the cat, water the
plants, put out the remaining rubbish on the right days
·
Start looking for a storage
place or garage to get our stuff delivered to once the house is sold
·
Plan our route to our destination
including booking stopovers – that would mean setting a deadline to get it all
done
And start doing all this as soon as we can
– no thinking “I’ll take a few more days off and then get down to it”, because
we risk being assaulted by all manner of extra tasks we never thought of. Take
this road, and you will find yourself wallowing in a massive pile-up of
uncompleted items. Also, don’t do one and then another – juggle five or six of them all at
the same time, prioritising one above the other.
We had to do all this while in the
relatively close background, three screaming, self-obsessed kids on their
summer holidays kept picking fights with each other, sabotaging our sorting
piles, and asking us for juice, food, a push on the swing, or to fix something they'd messed up.
Anyway, first task: deciding where to go
and taking steps to organise our successful installation there. As well as
plenty of housing and affordable living, the number one priority above all else
was finding a place with more affordable international schools than where we
were currently living. I looked at various countries on the International
Schools Database: Denmark had very few options, although it was cheap. France
was OK, but we were a little wary of all the current social and economic
problems there, plus their inclusive schooling was also not very developed.
Czechia was high on the list, but its international schools were almost as
expensive as Eton or Harrow – why cater to a lot of ordinary folk, when you can
put the prices up and have smaller classes with just sons and daughters of bandits
and oil magnates? Italy was out of the question – we went there in April to
check it out and I think the hype is really exaggerated. Sweden would be tricky
to carry on working as entrepreneurs. In Ireland, we could just put them in state
schools and the system would take care of it, but when I saw the house prices
(and the weather forecast), I got cold feet. Which is, incidentally, also what
I would get if I went paddling in the Irish Sea at any time of year.
It seemed that Spain was turning out to be
a serious contender. Or rather, the only contender. I checked out some cities
and found many had more than enough facilities, and the house prices in many
areas were quite acceptable. There were plenty of cities with international
schools and many had the right facilities.
But where?
Barcelona would be great, but it has a
serious crime problem and it’s full of tourists. Madrid is a lovely city but
it’s a cauldron in summer. Malaga would be a wonderful place, but the driving
habits there are frightening – I think it’s where even Grand Theft Auto refused
to go. Bilbao, San Sebastian, Zaragoza, Granada, Cordoba, all utterly
marvellous places, but possibly a little too small for what we need.
Hold on… what about Valencia?
You know sometimes when you’re looking for
something and you look everywhere else except *right there* because that’s
where it’s much too visible? It’s right under your nose, and that’s why you
can’t see it. Like when you’re in the kitchen and you’re looking for the knife
you were just using. You look around it, over it, even through it, even though it's so visible and so evidently close that you would probably put your hand straight on it if you were blindfold. Well that
was Valencia: I don’t quite know how we kept on missing it on the map, quite
frankly.
Qualities:
1.
A host of international schools
all vying for your business, keeping the prices reasonable and the competition
hot.
2.
Located at the very top of the
Forbes Magazine Best City To Live In Index, ranked first in quality of
life and third in ease of settling in by Internations, it has everything
Barcelona has but without being Barcelona: it’s between the sea and the
mountains, it has excellent food, splendid architecture, a superb social life,
an impressive number of cultural events, and such glorious weather almost all year round.
3.
What it has that Barcelona
doesn’t is also worth mentioning: low crime, friendly people, competent
governance, and a likeable football team come to mind, but I’m sure there are
others.
I had that instinctive feeling that I
didn’t need to search any more. This was our next project, and hopefully the
last one: we were going south – quite a long way south.
It was vital, therefore, that I went there
to check it out, visit a few important schools and estate agents, and see which
areas of the city would be good to live in. I booked a flight from Luxembourg
via Zurich, and found a cheap room in a student residence for a few days. We
had a Zoom call with one school, and they invited me to visit them when I
arrived, although I felt they weren’t so keen on us. I resolved to go there
anyhow, just to see the potential.
The impressive grounds were located quite
far outside the city centre, in a plush neighbourhood surrounded by villas and
parks. When I arrived, there was a summer English camp going on and the place
was full of Spanish kids enjoying the utterly amazing facilities. But it was
more like a sports academy than a school – there were copious sports facilities
catering to basketball, football, tennis, golf, track & field. Inside there
were classrooms with every piece of technology you could ever need – every room
looked like as if the Starship Enterprise had been a children’s space ship. The
immaculate marble-and-glass corridors led to different other facilities, such
as a fully equipped air-conditioned theatre with seating for well over a
hundred, a canteen the size of Gatwick Airport’s arrivals area, tree-festooned
walkways, and a rather large trophy room displaying the school’s impressive sporting
and academic achievements over the years.
The mouth-watering services and programme
on offer, plus the facilities, location and fee structure made me realise that
maybe back in Luxembourg we were being swindled. No, hold on, not swindled,
robbed. Pickpocketed. Mugged. Cheated. Fleeced. Ripped off. Defrauded. Conned.
Hustled. Deceived. Hoodwinked. Shafted. Taken for idiots. Imagine paying a vast
amount of money to a school to turn your child into a fully-functioning
citizen, only for them to tell you they’re not prepared to let her repeat the
year and grant you the time to put in place the appropriate professional help. What
kind of crapulous business model are you running when you ask thousands of euro
for your rather limited and unexciting services, and you act like you are the
client? What school – remember that, school – wants all of the children in its
care to conform to the system rather than to adapt the school to the
individual? The visit in Valencia had raised a whole new level of questions
that my brain was finding hard to answer. All I could think about was that we
had not yet wasted our children’s education, and it was vital that we put
everything in place by September. It was the second week of July.
At the end of the rather hasty visit, the
head teacher said something that made me feel we needed to look elsewhere: “we
can take Livia for a week and see how she gets on.” That was never going to
work for me, but one of the advantages of Valencia is that it has more international
schools than the entire Grande Région, which covers 5 regions in 4 countries.
So I aimed my intentions towards a lovely British school in another suburb that
had similar facilities and a powerful reputation. I called them up, they
immediately arranged a Zoom call for a few days later, we told the head about
our situation, and she sent us the enrolment forms.
To say that this woman is a mere head
teacher is doing her a disservice. She is a ninja businesswoman and astute service
provider. Every email answered, even if only a few words, all procedures
explained, and all steps towards onboarding in September laid out in front of
us. We were in.
Next, we needed a place to live.
Another thing I did while I was in Valencia
was go to some estate agents. I had the impression there were going to be some
heavier obstacles in this area, especially as Valencia is quite a popular place
to move to. I visited a few of them, dropped my details and what I was looking
for, and never heard anything again. Except from one; and yes, another ninja
businesswoman. See the previous article for details on how we procured our
beachfront apartment.
I also got reacquainted with the Spanish
character and way of life. I should elaborate at this point – back in the
twentieth century, my family had a strong connection to Spain. We had relatives
living in three parts of the country, and my grandparents had a holiday home in
the mountains near Malaga. They were special times – I loved the Spanish work
ethic, the positive attitude, wicked sense of humour, strong sense of
community, laid-back outlook, and ability to distinguish between fun and duty.
And I had a proper revisit to these feelings as soon as I landed.
It was a bizarre, disorienting feeling,
though, because I had been out of this environment for well over a couple of
decades. But it all felt so very familiar, so very comforting, and so
indispensable at that point. If I was going to leave behind my house that I had
poured 15 years of toil into, I wasn’t going to take a backwards step. And
here, in this blisteringly hot climate, with the nightly wind set to hair
dryer status and the daytime temperatures reaching a point where even the
devils of hell had gone back downstairs to cool off, I had my epiphany. I was, weirdly,
going back to my original second home.
But there was a daunting task awaiting us
before we got there: there was a house full of our junk that needed emptying,
we needed to throw out a lot of stuff that we hadn’t used or seen for years, deal
with some crap left over from the previous owners, and find a solution for a
grumpy, deaf, twenty-year-old cat called Baldrick. Oh yes, and I needed to plan
our route to Spain, dates and places to stay on the way.
I arranged for a container to be delivered
to the driveway, and we started to divide all the junk that couldn't go in there into categories to take
to the dump, a 35-minute drive away at the other end of Trier. I never realised
how much utter rubbish the average household could accumulate over time. It is
amazing. I did several runs to the dump, one of them just with electric bits
and pieces: old blenders, a few outdated printers, a ton of battery-operated
gadgets, obsolete chargers, lamps, broken plugs, sections of the Internet, old
modems, clocks, and even a battery-operated oil painting. Don’t ask me what
that’s all about, I have no idea, but it was a thing left in the bowels of the
house by a previous occupier. Kirsten said she supposed it played a tune.
Nobody buys that kind of trash, unless it’s a gift from someone who hates you!
The days went by, July finished and August
kicked in. We had boxes and boxes full of our stuff, packed high and stashed in
the flat below. I went up and down the steps carrying so much of it, I lost 4 kilos
in just 3 weeks. Our gardener, Benek, had also helped to get the place in
order, and without him I don’t know what we would have done.
The children were on summer holiday, and
they were constantly asking us when we were going on holiday. I felt bad
because we had so much to do and so little time, but yes, we all deserved a
holiday. We were supposed to start our rental period on 1 September, so I
decided that we should finish up on 21 August and the next day make our way
southwards. I would find us a good seaside holiday home near Valencia for the week before we
needed to move in, and arrange a couple of places to stay on the way that would count
as a holiday.
One of the best ways to experience Spain is
to go to a place where the Spanish go on holiday. The picturesque town of Peñíscola,
about an hour and a half’s drive north of Valencia, is one of those places.
It’s a quiet, unassuming resort, but it’s a beauty. Two enormous rocky
promontories, one with the old city on it, a small harbour, and some beaches
in-between that are protected from the main sea.
I found a delightful house in a typical
urbanisation up some very windy roads with its own garage and terrace
overlooking the sea – we would stay there for our final week from 25 August to
1 September. Now I could fill in the gaps to get there. I love planning holiday
itineraries, and my first and most important tip is planning backwards is so
much easier. Book your final destination first, it’s really then just a matter
of filling in the gaps.
I used Google Maps to search for a good
place in France to stay for a couple of nights, quite a long way south. I
decided we should leave early on 22 August, a Tuesday, and get as far as
possible towards our end point. Ambitious, but doable. I landed on Camping et
Chambres d'hôtes du Moulin d'Onclaire, near the delightful town of Privas in
the Ardèche. It had a swimming pool, and we could stay in a pavilion tent under
some trees next to a river. I thought the second leg should be less ambitious so
we could enjoy the Ardèche more and have a shorter drive. I found a delightful
little bed and breakfast in the foothills of the Pyrenees about an hour from
the Spanish border called Maury Cat Studio 66, where we would stay one night
before our week in Peñíscola.
It was all set, but time was pressing. I
would tell you what the months of July and August were like: imagine someone
gets a fire hose and sprays you for days on end. Not with water, but with an endless
number of tasks. You need to do some more packing, but you also need to collect
rubbish, but you need to sweep the toys up that the kids spread all over the
house, but you need to go shopping for food, but you need to put some washing
on, but you need to clear up the terrace, but you need to go to the council to
sign out of the community, but you need to arrange some meetings with a few
people to say goodbye, but you need to buy more boxes, but you need to occupy
the children before they turn the place into a set from Lord Of The Flies, but
you need to cook dinner, but you need to call the agent in Spain for an update,
but you need to put all these things in some kind of order of urgency so that
you don’t have to choose one of two impossible options later.
You get the idea.
Anyhow, by way of a miracle, we managed to fit
everyone in the car on the morning of the 22nd of August. I think it
was just getting to the point where we said “we’ve done enough, we can’t look
at it any longer, let’s just go.” So we did, with the aim of returning the
following month for a few days to put the rest in order. Good intentions, good
intentions…
We unceremoniously sped off towards our new
life without looking back. From what I remember, we stopped at a few places as
we moved southwards, and each time, we noticed an increase in the intensity of
the heat. It was really telling that by the time we reached Lyon, we were starting
to flinch each time we stepped out into the sun.
Arriving at the first destination at about
7, we immediately went to the local town, Privas. Having parked the car, we
headed into the blazing evening light to enjoy what was left of the day, sweat
a little, and allow the children to stretch their legs. There would be no set
bedtime that night, not now we were finally able to let go of many of the
obligations. Saying that, I think it still took six weeks for us to fully expunge
the stress and tension of the summer: for a long time, we were still quite edgy
and tense, always responding to every noise or movement, and finding certain simple tasks too heavy to complete, or even start.
The day after, we spent the day at the pool just generally trying to detoxify. However, another rather silly annoyance
crept up on us: the brakes of the car were worn and scraping metal on metal. I
was in no mood to drive all the way to Valencia with dodgy brakes, not now we
were south of Lyon, the kind of dividing line between northern and southern
driving habits (with a few southern exclaves, such as Paris and Brussels – and for
those who know, Esch-Sur-Alzette too…).
So I drove to a number of garages in the
hope someone would be able to change them as quickly as possible. In the French
countryside. In August. In a heatwave. A woman at the only garage that said it
could fix the situation told me they would order the part and it would be there
the following day, when we had to head south. It was the only possibility, so I
took it. It was a garage about 10 kilometres from our campsite, so the
assistant, a boy of about 19, was given the task of driving me back. The car was a tiny Renault Clio from about the late nineties and I had to heave my legs
in to be able to close the door.
That evening, we ate at the camp site’s
restaurant, a lovely courtyard terrace next to the swimming pool. There was to
be a concert afterwards, and we were encouraged to stay.
There is something about the French and
their stomachs that I will never understand. When the French go on holiday, so
do their taste buds... and their principles. Between September and June, the
French will look down upon the Americans and the British, the Dutch and the
Germans, even the Danes, and pour scorn upon their eating habits, always dwelling on how
superior their food is (despite there being a lot of cross-over), and yet when you
go to any French holiday resort, the only thing they’ll serve is brown or
orange-coloured fried food, often straight out of the freezer. There’ll be nuggets, breaded
chicken, croquettes, fish sticks, meat balls, these thin, quick-cook fries that
crisp up if you leave them in for a minute longer, and they’ll put them all in
the deep fat fryer. There will always be loads of ketchup, an almost
blasphemous ritual that the French seem keen on keeping alive as soon as July
and August roll round. I remember my mother refused ketchup in the house, but
in France, this is the summer staple. And they’ll charge you as much for this
fattening brown pile of factory-made offal and plant-based leftovers as your
local restaurant back home would for a decent salad, followed by an entrecôte,
vegetables and potatoes roasted in garlic and rosemary, plus dessert and a
glass of decent red wine. Not to forget a proper coffee, not the powdered crap
they lazily make themselves as soon as the calendar reaches July. The French will
forever bang on about their “marvellous cuisine”, even trying to bully UNESCO
into giving it World Heritage status, yet they themselves are close to the top
of the world rankings for fast food consumption. Go figure.
Anyway… rant over, back to the point. The
evening passed well enough, and we had a lot of fun with everyone else at the concert/party.
The performers, a man with an electric guitar and a digital mixer, and a woman
vocalist, both local, would regale us with some proper rock songs, many in
English. This, despite them not speaking a word of the language. They played really
well and their hilarious pronunciation of the English lyrics was just the tonic
I needed to cheer me up. I loved Suite Homme à la Bama by Aerosmith, Wok Ziss Ouais
by Aerosmith, Ail Oué Tou'elle by AC/DC, Aneuze Houane Bail Tzeu Deust
by Queen, Aille L’oeuf Roquenrol by Joan Jett, and Chize Gotze Louque
by Roxette. Despite that, they were a lovely pair, and they really knew how
to get us all dancing. I’d have hired them if I lived locally.
In the morning, I called the garage to see
when I should come and get the car. They said the part would be in but they
weren’t sure when. The prodigiously long, unnecessary rural French lunchtime
came and went, no car. By 3pm, I was crawling up the walls. We should have been
gone by then – our hosts for that evening were preparing dinner for us, and it
was 360 kilometres away. Another intolerable hour ticked on, no call. The
children were having a thoroughly great time all day at the pool, so the fact
that Daddy was having an internal meltdown was immaterial.
Finally, at about half past four, the
garage called to say the car was ready, and the boy would pick me up in twenty
minutes. I told Kirsten to have all our belongings waiting outside the tent and
went there expecting to pay, pick up my car keys and get the hell out of there.
Nope. The client before me had a list of demands and gave an explanation each
time: “The front left tyre might need some air – I was driving back from
Carrefour on Tuesday – or was it Monday? Oh no, it wasn’t Carrefour, it was Leclerc,
and there was one of those potholes that you can’t avoid. The local council should be ashamed. Anyway, I didn’t see it until
too late so I was going too fast. Must have been about 40. Could have been faster though. Anyway, it hit the
pothole and my coffee went all over the dashboard, I dropped my cigarette on the floor,
and the suspension took quite a hit.”
Oh please STFU, I have a bunch of kids
thinking Daddy’s hidden the car somewhere and I have to be in the Pyrenees by
8. I interrupted the conversation after a while and the chatty guy said “oh, I didn’t
see you there!” I wanted to say, “yeah, no surprise there… you’re so self-absorbed,
no wonder you hit a massive pothole. Why don’t you move your gaze away from the end of your own nose, you boring old troll, and take a wider look around you!” But instead I said “sorry for
interrupting this pleasant little conversation, but I do have quite a pressing
need for my car.” Regretfully, I held in my utter rage, because despite firstly
the little devil on my left shoulder telling me to give any idiots and time
wasters a good verbal slapping, and secondly the lack of an angel on my right
shoulder keeping me virtuous, there is a terrifying Kirsten-shaped leviathan at
home waiting to murder me for not having a placatory, well-meaning, non-confrontational attitude, even among people who really need to be told they're the main problem in their friends' and family's lives.
It’s a weird, paradoxical, almost hypocritical situation: she has a distaste to
point out other people’s idiocies or despicable attitudes, so as not to cause a diplomatic incident, or worse, to offend the bastard, yet I might get a full half-hour
sermon on putting too much salt in the pasta water. Believe me, the feeling of
self-loathing for not telling a stranger he’s cycling in the middle of the road
by hooting my horn loudly right behind him is better than the Full Kirsten Lecture
awaiting me if I did do it. But sometimes temptation does win, and I will take the verbal fallout heading my way.
We hit the road at twelve minutes after five.
I sent a message to the hosts with our excuses but that we were definitely on
the way, and they said not to worry, they would wait. Having committed a few
minor traffic infractions, we got there at two minutes after nine, and it was
truly worth the stress – from the front, it looked like an unassuming row house
on a very steep hill with some very dodgy surfaces, but the view on the other
side was simply breathtaking. You walked through a huge room containing a
proper, professional kitchen, passing tasteful but engaging décor, into the
adjoining entertainment room containing an immense dining table, and a circular
sofa for properly cosy moments (I’m quite sure that sofa could tell a few
stories).
Our hosts were a couple in their fifties
with the attitude and outlook of people half their age. They were in the midst
of preparing our dinner when we arrived, so we were escorted to our room. We
left through the back door, where there was a terrace overlooking the slope,
and up a metallic spiral staircase to a huge wooden platform. Our room was
through some hermetically-sealed sliding doors. It was so perfectly laid out in
a nautical style and even had a mini cinema at the back. The children’s room
was off to the side and had enough playful accessories to keep them
entertained, but it was the terrace that was the star. It was dark, the moon
was coming up, and we could make out the mountains in the back, the valley
below, and the trees straddling the river. I was impatient to see what it
looked like in the morning…
Dinner was served – a truly impressive salad
to start with, which could have filled me up on its own. But then came a dish
of local sausages, potatoes and summer vegetables. Believe me, about five years
ago, I would have eaten the lot. But then, I was 30 kilos heavier and had a
penchant for assuring an empty plate.
Dessert was equally delicious, and we were
thoroughly impressed with the entire experience. We moved to the terrace, where
it had got a lot cooler, for cigars and a nightcap, then we went off to sleep. Our
quarters, up the metallic spiral staircase, were not to everyone’s liking…
Dainoris needed his hand held and Milda was a little sceptical to start with,
but in the light of the morning, I was sure the situation would be different.
And yes, it was.
I woke up with the anticipation of a child on
birthday morning, and went over to open the sliding doors and the shutters. I
lost the ability to breathe for a few seconds – the vertiginous rocky mountains,
the fertile valley, the length of the view along the river – it was all so
immense, so wild, so raucous in a silent kind of way. I could happily have just
decided to move in there and then, but there were three kids to take to a
holiday home in Peñíscola, and then there was the little matter of our new life
in Valencia.
After a proper breakfast, we thanked our remarkable
hosts and once more got back in the car. An hour passed and we crossed the
border into Spain. The borders between countries in the EU are becoming more
and more difficult to discern, and the difference in my lifetime of crossing into
Spain in the 1980s compared to now couldn’t be more stark. Back then, we had to
pull up at a huge roadside installation and show our papers to some very
strict-looking geezers in odd hats and uniforms who used to make a habit of confiscating cameras, even if they had remained in your bag the whole time. How on earth they could suffer
the heat while wearing a buttoned-up shirt and blazer was as baffling as the
procedure they put us through. On this journey, we hurtled over the frontier without
even thinking about it… it wasn’t until I saw an advert for a restaurant serving
tapas that I realised we had left France. The European Union has a lot of
detractors – but it has made our ability to move around so much easier. We
would never have been able to do what we did back then: just pick everything up
and dump it 1500 kilometres further south without even needing to show our passports.
We drove some more through the flourishing
landscapes of Catalunya, deciding to pull off the motorway near Lloret de Mar,
where there were surely some places to stop for lunch. We found a roadside
restaurant that had ample parking and I put our long-suffering car under some
trees.
After what was a perfect “Welcome to Spain”
lunch, we jumped in the car and headed to Peñíscola, still quite a long drive
away, passing exit signs for some of the country’s most well-known tourist
destinations: Palamos, Tossa de Mar, Calella, Blanes, Sitges, Salou, not forgetting
Barcelona, then crossing the Ebro valley before reaching Peñíscola itself. The children
were veering between quietly interested in the scenery outside, to boisterous
and annoying. So it was a particular comfort when we arrived in the town. I
just had to get the keys from the tourist bureau on the other side of the town,
and we’d be all set for our well-deserved holiday.
The town itself is a bright, friendly and
laid-back place with a mix of restaurants and bars, tourist tat shops, and mid-range
clothes boutiques. There are two main beach fronts on each side of a huge promontory
containing the old town, with its castle on the top, seeming to rise out of the
land like a massive organ in a theatre. So the first thing we did when we
arrived at about five-thirty and got our keys was to change and head to the
beach. The evening warmth kept everyone on the beach until after half past
eight.
The children released a lot of energy that
evening, both there and at the restaurant we went to after, a ranch house with
a sprawling tree-speckled complex of tables and chairs, benches, chaises
longues, sunbeds and deckchairs surrounding a small raised pool with a bridge
over it. The Steakhouse El Campo is a seasonal venue open while there are enough
summer tourists, and it’s run by a German man and his son. The Vater runs the
restaurant in and around the ranch house while his Sohn runs the outdoor bar
and grill near the pool.
Now we really felt like we were on holiday.
During the week, we just did some typical tourist activities – visiting the
beach, going to the park, walking in the cool night air, going to bed reasonably
late, and eating local delicacies. We visited a lot of great restaurants and
other places to eat, such as Hogar El Jubilado, an old-style hostelry owned by the
local council and run by an elite team of workers. You queue up to make your
order, they prepare it there and then, and by the time you’ve paid for it, it’s
ready. There were potato salads, seafood salads, Russian salads, tortillas españolas,
meatballs, cheeses, fresh fish dishes, chicken drumsticks, and a whole 1-and-a-half-metre-long
fridge with whatever dessert you could desire. They opened for breakfast at the
crack of dawn with croissants and pains au chocolat and closed at midnight
after the last beer was poured. It was the town’s beating heart, and the people
working there were happy, mischievous and highly efficient.
You can tell the quality of the place by
the amount of insolence they are willing to hurl at you, and this place was
right there at the top. Their coffee was tremendous and so was their teasing.
It was here that I said to myself “I think we’re going to be all right.” I’ll
be honest with you, I was still in mourning for our old life, and I often had
moments when I just wanted to cry. Looking back, it was compounded by a deep
fatigue from all the hard work before we left, but it didn’t take away the sting
from having to uproot the entire family from everything they knew.
All I can say is the younger three were
having the time of their lives, and the last thing on their minds was returning
to our former house in Saarburg and going back to any schools in Luxembourg.
And that was the most comforting thing. Because after this week, we were to
start our new lives and they were to go to school.
But that is for another post.
