| ,

A Tour of Our Barcelona Neighborhood

I thought I would take you on a tour of where we live in Spain. It’s quite unlike our home in Colorado. We lived on 2.5 acres at the foot of the rockies in a great home. Lots of space and comfort, the beauty of the mountains and a quaint, small town called Palmer Lake. 

In Barcelona, we live smack dab in the middle of the city. It’s a Spanish neighborhood which we love because we have the chance to interact with different people every day. You can see the pinpoint of where we are located in an area called, “Sants.” Hudson is giving you a nice view of our street. It is fairly quiet and loaded with apartments in a typical old-world, big city style. Our front door is on the right and Emily wants to paint it Robin’s egg blue. 🙂 

One of the biggest changes for us is transportation. At this point, we don’t have a car and its both liberating and constraining. We travel mostly by metro. The metro system here is amazing, primarily because of the Olympics that came to Barcelona in 1992. There are two lines next to our flat which makes it convenient. We spend a lot of time on the metro with all 4 kids all playing sports. They also have to hop the metro for a few stops to get to school everyday.

The funny thing is that sometimes, it can take you 45 minutes on the metro to travel someplace only 1.5 miles away. Enter the bicycles. We can zip through the city fairly efficiently on these beauties and a 1.5 mile jaunt only takes us 5-10 minutes.

A big shocker for the kids was school. They are enrolled in a Spanish school and were excited to learn spanish even though they knew it would be difficult. But school is not taught in Spanish – it’s taught in Catalan – the local language. So they are simultaneously learning Spanish and Catalan. Let’s just say that this is painful for them and they need a ton of prayer. 🙂 While not easy, the sports programs here are top notch…this is true of both volleyball and soccer. The seasons simply go for 10 months of the year for both sports so it is no small commitment. 

God is stretching us in many ways. It’s something we all needed. There hasn’t been a gradual escape from our comfort zones… it’s been more like a violent thrust into a world we are just beginning to understand. We do love the people here. They are incredibly kind and relational and we have some new blossoming friendships with Spanish friends that are growing.

We are also beginning a new ministry on this side of the pond I can’t wait to tell you about. Stay tuned!