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Well, it’s official!
We have landed in Madrid and officially live here now!
It was quite a whirlwind of a last week in the US with wrapping up our jobs, saying goodbye to friends and family, moving out of our apartment, getting Churro’s documents ready to go, and packing our suitcases!
Yes, it was a ton of stuff to do in what seemed like not enough time at all…
However, our flight from Chicago to Madrid was incredibly smooth—¡Gracias a Iberia! Churro arrived safe and sound too, even though it caused us a ton of anxiety having her fly under the plane.
While we officially arrived in Spain on September 16th, we’ve been quite busy getting settled, orienting ourselves, setting up appointments so we can legally live here, apartment hunting, and doing all the little things to start our lives in Madrid. We also had a friend fly out from the US with us for a week, so we were out exploring the city with him too!
So far everything is going really well, and we are excited about living abroad and starting our lives here. Obviously, there have been ups and downs with the excitement and challenges that come with anything new in life, but especially in a different country.
The most challenging thing so far has been trying to setup all our necessary appointments in the correct order:
- Setting up a bank account
- Finding an apartment
- Visiting our new schools
- Getting Spanish documents to work at our schools
- Empadronamiento appointment
- Metro card
- TIE appointment
We think that’s it. For now at least…
For those of you looking to move to Spain, whether it’s teaching English like us or not, we will do posts on how to make all these appointments and add links once they’re posted in hopes it’ll make moving to Spain way easier for you!
Luckily, there are have been a bunch of people who have been willing to help us out and the other staff at our schools have been very supportive! Most importantly, we have each other, which has really helped during this move to Spain.
We officially start work at our schools on Friday, October 1st and can move into our apartment as of today, so keep an eye out for an apartment tour and more updates about life as an auxiliar de conversación in Madrid!
In the meantime, make sure to also follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok for daily updates of what life is like in Spain!
