Nine years here, a mortgage, and still treated as a tourist
Posted as not_passing_through
- Looking for
- someone who will not ask how long I am staying
- Experience
- Twelve years in total, nine of them here, both directions.
- Around
- Malasaña, Madrid
The question arrives in the second message, every time, in a slightly kind voice: and how long are you here for. Nine years. I have a mortgage, a dentist, an opinion about the water pressure in my building and a Spanish tax number older than some people on this board have been doing any of this.
Forty one, English, Madrid, switch, twelve years in it and nine of those here. I understand why the question exists. Half the foreigners who post here are gone by September and I have been stood up by enough of them myself to sympathise. It is still tiring to be sorted into that pile before I have said anything.
My Spanish is fluent and slightly wrong in ways that are apparently charming, which I have stopped fighting. I would rather write in Spanish than in English once we are past the first exchange, because I want the dynamic to happen in the language I live in.
I top more than I bottom now. What I want from the other side is genuine appetite in both directions, and I have learned to ask early because saying switch and meaning it are two different things.
Practically: I can host, I live alone, my hours are normal, my Augusts are quiet because I no longer go anywhere. Not looking for a language exchange. Not looking for anyone who finds the accent more interesting than the person attached to it, which happens more than you would think, and always makes me want to go home.