A Bag Wrapped in Tape, and the Start of Our Move

I think it was the summer of 2022 when I first wanted to live in Barcelona. I say I think because that summer was the first time I came to Barcelona, and it may have been after spending a few days here that the thought came to me. But maybe, deep down, I had wanted to live here since long before that.

In June 2022, my wife (who wasn't yet my wife then) and I got hold of Star Alliance round-the-world tickets and set off, just as the name says, on a trip around the world. With this ticket you can't freely change your route along the way; you have to decide the route when you book. So the two of us worked out route after route before we booked. In the end we went to more than twenty cities in more than ten countries, and the place we decided to stay longest was Barcelona. I'd never been there, nor to any other European country, nor to a big city like New York, and I don't really remember why we decided to spend the most time in Barcelona. For some reason, though, I sensed a future in spending a long time there, and felt that doing so would give this grand journey its meaning. We ended up staying about ten days, found it more wonderful than we'd imagined, and talked about how we'd like to live here someday.

I could go on forever about what makes Barcelona wonderful, but the first time I came, and ever since I began coming back again and again, what I always feel first is the climate. From the last Sunday of March, when summer time begins, until the last Sunday of October, the days are long with sun, and day after day brings the Mediterranean weather that people find truly comfortable. We don't adapt well to cold, nor to humid heat like Japan's summers or Southeast Asia's. That leaves only two options: move around to follow the good seasons, or live somewhere with a Mediterranean climate.

Cities with a Mediterranean climate come down to the cities of California in the US, Perth in Australia, Santiago in Chile, or Barcelona. We couldn't make it to Santiago, but in Morocco we met a Chilean who lived there, spent a few days together, and heard all about it. San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego and Perth we actually visited. Weighing the climate, visas, cost of living, safety and so on, we came to the conclusion that Barcelona was the best after all. When we returned from the trip, we had given up our home and our jobs, so we had to start life in Japan from scratch. Starting a new life from nothing is truly hard, whenever and wherever it is, and as we did, the idea of living in Barcelona gradually became something like a fairy tale.

Still, maybe deep down I never gave up. We rented a place and started living there, but bought almost no furniture and tried to keep our belongings to a minimum. So that we could move right away if something happened. In reality, though, in the two years we lived in that place, that “something” never happened, and we simply lived plainly in a plain room.

Two years later, it was time to renew the lease. Keep it, or let it go. After much thought we let it go, and rented a small studio in Kyoto, not to live in but as storage and an office. At the same time, I built a camper van myself, and we began living sometimes in the studio, sometimes in the van, sometimes in hotels. This too was a life chosen so we could move at any time, but it suited us very well. We could live while traveling all over Japan by car, the studio was useful for keeping our things and important documents, and without a big home our fixed costs went down, so we could put that money toward hotels and plane tickets and go regularly to Southeast Asia, Europe and America. Along the way we returned to Barcelona several times, the moment came when we could get the visa, and about three and a half years after that first visit in the summer of 2022, we were finally able to start living in Barcelona.

The visa process alone had worn me out, but the real problems came after. As I wrote before, you have to register your fingerprints for the TIE within 30 days of approval, yet it's impossible to get an appointment. What's more, the booking page can't be reached from a Japanese connection, so every day I opened it through a Spanish VPN, my nerves as unsteady as the internet. On top of that, you also have to register as self-employed within three months, and for that you need a Spanish address and phone number. After talking it over many times, we decided to go to Spain right away. We had pared our belongings down to what the two of us could fit in a car, but even that we couldn't take in full. We somehow packed everything into one suitcase and one spare bag, left the studio and the camper van as they were for the time being, and set off for Barcelona.

On the bus from our hotel near Narita Airport, where we'd stayed the night before, to the airport, the driver yanked our spare bag out so hard when unloading the luggage that one of the bags was torn to pieces. Given a roll of painter's tape in lieu of compensation, we wrapped the bag round and round with it, and dragging that bag and our big suitcase behind us, we arrived in Barcelona.

There were a few things we had to do.

The first was to register our fingerprints for the TIE. By the time we reached Barcelona, 45 days had already passed since approval. Legally, we were already out of time, but from what friends told us and what we'd looked up ourselves, we told ourselves we'd be fine. Once you start worrying about the details, the worries are nearly endless, so all you can do is tell yourself it'll be fine because almost everyone (and every source) says so, and keep going. Incidentally, when we arrived in Barcelona, we still hadn't managed to book the fingerprint appointment.

The second was to get the phone number and address we needed to register as self-employed.

As for the phone number, I figured we could just buy a prepaid SIM somewhere, so I wasn't too worried. And in fact, we walked into a shop whose sign I spotted in the street, bought a prepaid SIM without trouble, and got a phone number. The problem was the other one: the address.

From Japan we had been looking for rooms on Idealista and Spotahome (the major sites for finding a room in Spain), but even when we found a place with good terms and sent a message, no reply ever came. Hardly any owners will rent to foreigners like us, especially ones with no income earned inside Spain. In the end we couldn't find anything from Japan, and concluded that we'd figure something out once we got there. When we arrived in Barcelona, we didn't even have a single viewing booked.

Thinking we'd need to move in as soon as we found a place, we first booked an Airbnb for a week and headed there from El Prat Airport. On the way, when I let slip, “Are we really going to be okay?”, my wife said, “We'll just have to make it work.” Looking out at the streets of Barcelona, I thought it would probably work out somehow, yet felt a vague unease about a future I couldn't see. My wife's “we'll just have to make it work” seemed to me fundamentally out of step with my “it'll work out somehow,” and that made my unease swell again. Well, it'll work out somehow. And if it doesn't, we'll just have to make it work. With that in mind, we decided to give it a go. Nobody asked us to do this. The situation we're in now is one we chose ourselves. In life, the bigger the decision, the more it gets made on the momentum of the moment. And acting on momentum is best. Because the bigger the decision, the easier it is to find reasons not to do it, and the more you think, the more you lean toward not doing it.

Carried along by momentum and by the wording of the visa approval letter, with a bag wrapped round and round in painter's tape, our life in Barcelona began.