I have mentioned this elsewhere, but I see that I didn’t say anything here (not that anyone actually reads this thing): I am on sabbatical for the Fall 2023 semester! I need this break from the usual grind, badly, and I am excited to have some time to breathe and “take stock” for a while.

Technically speaking, I have a sabbatical project that I am supposed to be working on during this time. This is the “reason” for my sabbatical leave, to give me time to work on this project that I otherwise wouldn’t have the time to do because I am too busy with my “day job.” But, between you and me, my project is pretty basic and won’t take that much time or effort.1 So, my sabbatical will mostly just involve me spending time seeing where my curiosity take me.

But, the most important part of all of this is that we have a new home for the semester! We moved in about two weeks ago, and we will stay here until mid-December. Our new home is in Santander, Spain.

The House

The house we are in is big, bigger than our home in El Cajon. This makes it especially big by semi-urban European standards. We are very lucky in this regard. The house has three bedrooms and five (5!) bathrooms in addition to a large living room / dining room area and bigger-than-usual (again, by European standards) kitchen.

My son was especially excited to not share a bathroom for the first time in his life. :)

The Arrangements

We are here through a home exchange. Basically, we swapped houses with a Spanish family for fourth months. When my wife and I started thinking about applying for this sabbatical, the idea of spending the time abroad was always part of the discussion. We have been thinking about something like this ever since our trip to Europe back in 2019.

There is a website called Sabbatical Homes that many people use to try to find semi-longterm housing for things like sabbaticals. When we got word that my sabbatical was approved, we started looking at this website for ideas about where to go. When you use this site, you can post your house for rent and view rental listings but you can also post your interest in doing a home exchange. I posted our house for rent, contacted a few people about their rentals, but also posted that I was interested in an exchange. In the end, this is what we ended up doing, which might be the easiest way of making all of this happen.

Why Spain? Why Santander?

The short version of why we chose Santander, Spain is that this is where the exchange opportunity presented itself. When I posted on Sabbatical Homes, I listed places we were interested in staying/exchanging; Spain was not on the list. But, this lovely woman named María from Santander contacted me and asked about the possibility of doing an exchange with her family. The more we thought about it, and talked with María, the more it all just made sense.

No hablo español.

I don’t speak much Spanish. Neither do my wife or son. I do speak French close to fluently, but before deciding on coming here, I couldn’t speak more than a few cliché phrases en español. Since we made this decision (back in February or March) I have been doing my best to study Spanish, but you can only get so far with ten minutes a day for a few months. I hope, of course, that by the time we move back home, that I’ll be in a much better place with my Spanish speaking/comprehension.

Our Home

We have been doing our best to try to make this new house feel like “our home,” and, for the most part, we’re doing pretty well. It is still a little weird to realize that this really is our “home”—in all senses of the word—for the next few months. We can’t really redecorate or make any other drastic changes, so whatever “homey-ness” we are going to feel will mostly have to be psychological.

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1 I hope to follow up with more detail on this project at some point, soon.