Moving from a busy residential area in the Netherlands to a fifteen-person village in Ribeira Sacra sounds simple on paper. In practice, it’s a long list of small adjustments, most of which nobody warns you about. Here are a few of the ones that surprised us most.
The sound of silence, except when there isn’t any
Outside siesta hours, it’s never really quiet here. There’s always someone running a brush cutter or a chainsaw somewhere in the distance, and every so often a tractor rolls past on its way to a field. But once siesta hits, the whole village seems to switch off. It’s dead silent, to the point where even the birds seem to be taking a nap. Even our neighbors, cows on one side and sheep on the other, who are otherwise always doing something, quiet down and nap through the middle of the day. Apparently taking it easy at midday is simply a natural thing to do around here. It took us a while to register the flip side of that quiet: at some point we realized we hadn’t heard an ambulance or police siren in months. There’s no hum of a busy road nearby either, which is something you don’t notice you’re used to until it’s gone.
Driving slower than you think
Traffic here is a different world compared to the Netherlands. Roads are so much quieter that we’ve caught ourselves having to actively remind each other to stay alert, simply because you fall into such a relaxed driving rhythm that it’s easy to forget other people are occasionally on the road too.
No food delivery, just a kitchen and a menu del día
In the Netherlands, a busy day meant pulling out an app and ordering food from a kitchen more or less anywhere in the world. Here, that’s simply not an option. You either cook yourself or find a menu del día. Right now we’re eating vegetables straight from our own garden, and the meat here is noticeably better quality, so health-wise we’ve probably come out ahead. That said, we won’t pretend we don’t occasionally miss a kapsalon or a sate kroket from back home.
Losing a bit of yourself in the language
We’re not fully fluent yet, which means we can’t fully express ourselves either, and with that, a part of our personality stays hidden for now. Our sense of humor hasn’t changed, and it actually matches Galician humor quite well, but telling a genuinely good joke is something that has to wait until our Spanish catches up with the rest of us.
Bureaucracy works differently, and you have to let that go
Dealing with official paperwork here works nothing like it does in the Netherlands. So far everything has worked out fine, but figuring out how things actually work takes real time. Once you understand the logic behind it, it’s all fairly straightforward, but it’s different from what you’re used to, and that’s simply something you have to let go of rather than fight.
From 60 square meters to a garden you actually have to manage
Adjusting goes further than paperwork and language. In the Netherlands, our garden was about 60 square meters. Here, it’s a good 4000. Maintenance takes a lot more time as a result, but surprisingly, it turns out to be something we genuinely enjoy doing.
Half a year in
We’ve been living here for half a year now, and we still can’t get enough of the nature and the culture. Since we’re still busy sorting out all the practical things, our plan is simple: integrate and join in as quickly as we can.
One thing we still consistently get wrong is the greeting. Here, it’s two kisses on the cheek. In the Netherlands, it’s three. So I still hand out one extra, as a little bonus. 🙂
