As I mentioned in an earlier post the decision on my part to make Astorga home was purely emotional. There was no reasoning to it, even for me. I didn't make any effort to tell even myself that there was a good, defendable reason to make such a move. I just knew it was home for some period in the future. Maybe not forever, but who knows.
When I brought Ann to see Astorga in April of 2018 several logic facts blended for both of us to make some rational sense of the move. Ann didn't have the emotional event to build that connection, it had to make some sense for her to move here. The following things came to light for us during that 2018 visit.
Physical size - it's not a big city
The town is pretty small as cities go, about 10,000 people in 18 square miles. It is located at 2850 feet above sea level on what is commonly called La Meseta, the high plains of Northern Spain. The weather is pretty moderate, and there appears to be infrequent snow accumulation, a factor for Ann. No snow was my promise. I understand that it snowed here one day and it was the day in November we flew to the US for a family trip. I was able to deliver on my promise, she never experienced it. Likewise, the summers are not as hot as the southern regions of the peninsula, and a nice breeze always seems to be sweeping across that plain.So the size of the town allows comfortable walking to all areas eliminating the need for a vehicle of our own. There are taxis should we need a car and we have used them especially when the family visits.
You may recall that the emotional decision was based upon an event with my Camino family in the gelato shop. The owner of that business is Leanna from Italy, seen here with Ann, who has become a friend. Her comment when I took Ann to meet her and discuss moving to the town was that it was a great place to learn Castilian Spanish with no regional accents or dialects that are found in some other areas. One of our goals was to learn Spanish, so that caught our attention.
With the exception of hundreds of pilgrims walking through the town each day, there are not a lot of foreigners living in Astorga.
Being an extrovert and having never met a stranger I knew if I moved to an area full of English speaking people I'd not learn much Spanish. So when I found that there were very few native English speaking people in the town that was a plus for me. We have met many of the English speakers in the town and surrounding areas. Each one is very interesting and we do spend a lot of time speaking English with them and with our Spanish friends who are eager to have practice hearing and speaking English.
The shadow side of not having many foreigners became obvious when we went looking for an apartment. Many owners would not even show us their rentals when they heard we were Americans. We are doing our best to provide a good example of Americans living in Spain and seem to be well accepted everyplace these days. In fact, everyone I can think of from medical people to local government and police staff to retailers have spent a lot of time making sure we were communicating clearly and filling our needs.
As I mentioned above we can walk anyplace in Astorga in about ten minutes, if we don't stop for a café con leche or glass of wine and tapa. But when we do need to go to another city we have both a bus station a few minutes walk for our home and a train station about a 12 minutes walk. From these stations we can go anywhere. We have traveled several times to Madrid and Santiago de Compostela, the terminus of the Camino de Santiago as well as León, the regional capital. León is a comfortable 45-minute bus ride and costs less than $10 round trip for both of us.
Most of the things we need are available in Astorga. It took some time to find what stores sold what items but we are pretty comfortable buying most anything. Plus we have Amazon and other merchants that will send anything to our home or a pick-up place in town. We do try to buy from local merchants as much as possible.
One story that is funny is that we found a 'dollar store' type place and as we set up our household we found ourselves there every day for well over a month, maybe two months. As we roamed the racks we discovered more and more items that we would find a need for a few days later. Many were kitchen items or seat cushions for the wood chairs or coasters or toothbrush holder or ... you get the idea. Anyway, they know us well and we still go in once or twice a month. Of course, they are closed during this COVID time but should be opening in phase 3 in about 6 weeks.
My first attraction to living in Spain was healthy food, and that hasn't changed. We buy wonderful bread from the panadería, vegetables and fruits from the frutería and other things from the supermercado.
All these shops are within a three minute walk of the house, in fact more than one of these in a few minute walk! One of my favorite breads is a whole wheat with walnuts. We have three different places to get it and each is a little different but I love them all.
Garden vegetables like tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, and zucchini are beautiful and taste great. Even after a year of eating them, each tomato brings some superlative to our lips. Ann has really enjoyed cooking with all these high-quality veggies. And they seem very low cost to me. The weekly outdoor market is pictured here, but we buy most of our vegetables from small shops in the neighborhood. A future post will talk about the cultural aspects of buying fruit and vegetables
Other merchants we have found and used include a picture framing store to reframe a lot of art Ann brought from the US or has produced here. The frame shop people you talk to actually do the work so you get exactly what you wanted.
Ann loves sewing so she has spent some time in sewing supply shops. Our daughter went with her one day and has said she can't wait to come back and visit Inez's shop again.
When we decided we needed a sewing machine the vendor located in León brought a few machines to our home for Ann to evaluate. Nice service!
Ann has also enjoyed some massage therapy and hair salon time and I have had a couple of haircuts. I was impressed that the barbers I went to used only scissors - many different ones - and were pretty fancy with their moves. They also spent over 30 minutes doing the haircut and made sure I liked it. Cost? about $10.
This is getting pretty long so I think I am going to save the museums, pilgrim culture, and local dogs content for the next post.
Please do comment if you have any questions about what I've written or things you are interested in me covering in future posts.
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