At 30 years old I quit my job, sold everything I owned and moved to Spain.  Here’s how and why I did it

 

How a failed drug test and Andrés Iniesta changed my life forever

 

Jersey Boy

 

When I was 19, a friend of my father’s got me a summer job as a stock boy at the local electric company. These jobs were tough to come by back then they typically paid extremely well for doing relatively little actual work.  They were essentially more of a tax write off for the company than actual internships.   One of the kids they hired, however, couldn’t stop smoking weed long enough to pass a drug test, so there was a vacancy. My wasn’t too thrilled with the idea of me just sort of lounging around the house all summer so he asked if I was interested. I don’t come from a particulary wealthy family and my car had just been stolen, so I took the job.   I spent the summer of 1999 unloading trucks, sweeping the warehouse, and making beer runs for the guys who worked on the power lines.  In September of that year, the summer “internship” ended so I said goodbye to the cast of lunatics who had been my co-workers for 3 months and got ready to start college.

I was apparently pretty good at sweeping and rarely messed up the beer orders, so they invited me back the next summer, and the one after that. Eventually, they offered me a full-time job after one of the senior forklift operators retired. I was almost 23 and still studying for my Marketing degree, but this was a steady, well-paying union job with great benefits. The job also had a program that paid my college tuition. It wasn’t exactly my dream job, but saying yes was a no-brainer.

By the time I was 25, I earned more money than both of my parents and was on my way to buying my first house. I finished my degree in Marketing in 2007 and thought I was set to hang up the hard hat and steel-tipped boots to begin a career at some fancy NYC Advertising Agency.  Soon after, a vacancy popped up in the company for a higher paying, more technical position.  I had no intentions of turning that summer internship into a career but I had the opportunity to earn twice as much as the typical college graduate in marketing earns so I submitted the internal application, passed the required exams and eventually got the job.   I would spend the next 3 years learning how to read blueprints, testing high voltage circuit breakers and learning which substations had the cleanest bathrooms.  My coworkers were some of the smartest guys that I’d ever met but their main talent was being to turn a 5 minute lightbulb change into a 16 hour shitshow that required overtime pay and weekend support.  At first, this didn’t seem to bad as we would spend most of the time sleeping in the work van, reading the newspaper or trying to hit random utility poles with rocks until, eventually, changing the light bulb and going home.   Despite not working particulary hard most of the time, the job required many late night shifts, weekends on call and eventually I started to feel trapped.

 

Time for a change

 

I’ve always been curious about everything and eager to learn everything about everything.  I remember spending hours as a kid watching The Discovery Channel with my grandfather and counting down the days until Shark Week. I was obsessed with learning about history, languages, and cultures. I often fantasized about traveling the world and experiencing life outside the Tri-State area.  My career however, which I just sort of fell into at 19,  wasn’t conducive to world travel.  When you spend 60 – 75 hours a week in a work van, there isn’t much time left over to visit museums, take French lessons or learn to play jazz piano.

 

I come from a neighborhood in New Jersey with a heavy Western European / Latin immigrant population. When you walk down the street, it’s not uncommon at all to overhear more conversations in Spanish or Portuguese than in English.  For that reason, soccer ( which is even weird for me to say at this point)  has always been more popular there than in the rest of the US. Every four years, during the World Cup, the whole neighborhood goes batshit crazy and everywhere you look there’ll be either a Spanish, Portuguese, Itlalian, Brazilian or Argentian flag.  

In the summer of 2010, the Spanish national team was making deep run into the latter stages of the FIFA World Cup.  They narrowly beat Germany in the semi-final and were set to take on the Netherlands in the final. A bunch of friends of mine, all of Spanish descent, were going gathering to watch the final at the local Spanish-American club. Rather than sitting on the couch and watch the myself alone in my apartment, I decided to join in the fun.  AndrésThe match wasn’t particulary exciting and was scoreless after the 90 mintue regulation whistle.  Other than Arjen Robben failed one on one vs Ilker Casillas, not a whole lot happened and the match seemed destined for penalties.    In the 116th minute, however, Andrés Iniesta found himself open at the edge of the 6 yard box and fired home the match winner.  Spain would hold on to the lead for the final few minutes, go on to win 1-o and lift the first World Cup trophy in the country’s history.  As hoardes of people flocked to Cibeles, in Madrid to celebrate the victory, over 3500 miles away from the Spanish capital, old men were crying,  beer rained down from the heavens and anyone with a drop of Spanish blood in their veins poured onto the streets.  Despite having no connection to Spain whatsoever, I declared myself a temporary Spaniard and spent the next eight hours dancing and drinking sangria with a Spanish flag tied around my neck like a cape (I still don’t know where it came from).  After participating in a mock bullfight with an old man dressed like a matador, a couple of friends mentioned they were visiting family in Spain in a few weeks. They suggested I go with them. That short, drunken conversation would change my life.

Off to Spain! (just to visit)

 

After taking a day or two to recover, I somehow remembered my friend’s proposal. I verified I could take time off work and took them up on the offer. Three weeks later, we arrived in Santiago de Compostela before heading to the small fishing village where one of their parents had grown up. I spent the next two weeks trying new foods, scraping by on the little Spanish I learned in high school, and drinking more Estrella Galicia than any one man should over a 10 day period. I had previously never travelled outside the US (Cancun doesn’t count).   I was astonished by just how friendly everyone was and, despite not really being able to communicate with anyone other than my two American friends and the 2 or 3 people in the village who spoke a little bit of English, I felt right at home.  I was fulfilling a lifelong dream of traveling to Europe, but before I knew it, it was time to head back to the US and get back to the grind.

 

We landed at Newark Airport on a Saturday, and I was back at work on Monday. Things picked up where they left off, and I returned to my “normal” life of waking up at 6 am, working all day, often until 11 pm.  Several months went by, but that feeling of being trapped begain to instensfy.  I didn’t realize it then, but looking back, I was likely experiencing a serious bout of depression. I felt unsatisfied with my life and career and didn’t see a way out. I had a college degree but was earning more than any entry-level marketing job would pay, so I couldn’t justify leaving. I began looking around at my coworkers, many of whom were 15-25 years older than me, and asked myself, “Is that what I want?”. Most of them had been on the job for over 20 years, earning heavy paychecks, but were miserable. More than half were divorced, as spending 60-70 hours a week at work doesn’t typically lend itself to a happy marriage. None were well-traveled, as limited vacation time makes international travel difficult. Most were begging for extra hours to pay off their kids’ college tuition and alimony payments.

My social life at the time consisted mostly of going out, getting drunk and spending the next 2 days in recovery.   I had a girlfriend here and there but wasn’t particulary close to settling down to start a family or anything and the idea of leaving it all behind started to creep in little by little.

It had always been my dream to see Europe, and I had fulfilled that somewhat by taking that trip to Spain in 2010, but it wasn’t enough. I wanted to see what it was like to actually live in a foreign country. At the time, it was just a pipedream because I wasn’t crazy enough to give up a well-paying, stable job to go backpacking through Europe like a nomad. But I started researching ways to move abroad, finding work as an expat, destinations for Americans to live abroad, etc. I found one major hurdle to living in Europe as an American: the work visa.

Becoming Legal

 

One random night, while having dinner at my mother’s house, we got on the topic of our family’s history in Italy.  She made a comment that I might be able to become an Italian citizen because she read somewhere that Italy will allow anyone who’s family immigrated after the war to reclaim their Italian nationality as long as they can prove a direct lineage back to Italy, no matter how many generations they went back.  My mother had no idea, at the time, that I was actually considering moving to Europe, but that night, she helped me take a major step towards making my dream a reality.  I went home, did my own research on the topic and found out that not only was she right, but I found a company called Italy Mondo that helped Italian Americans navigate the paperwork and reclaim their Italian Citizenship. I contacted Peter, the founder of Italy Mondo, so that he could run a check and see if I would qualify or not.  A week or so later I got an email from Peter that read “CONGRATULATIONS, YOU’RE ITALIAN!”  It was just a matter of filling out the paperwork (which I hired him to do on my behalf) , and in a matter of months, I could obtain an Italian passport that would allow me to live and work not only in Italy, but anywhere in the European Union!

It’s all starting to come together

The dominos were beginning to fall into place.  I now knew that moving to Europe was a real option.  I just needed to figure out where I could go and how I would earn a living.   I kicked around the idea of doing a masters degree, as it’s much cheaper to study abroad than it is in the US, but I needed a way to support myself while I was studying.  I read that a lot of Americans teach English as a foreign language in order to support themselves when they first arrive and some even make full time careers out of it.   Another chance conversation with a friend of mine revealed that his aunt had moved to Spain 30 years ago to be an English teacher and still lives on the island of  Menorca til this day.   He got me her email address so that I could reach out to her and we began going back and forth.   Being able to speak to someone who was in my shoes 30 years ago proved to be invaluable and without her advice, I’m not sure that I ever would have been able to make the decision to actually make the move over to Spain.  I learned that not only is it possible to earn a decent living as an English teacher, but that in Spain, native English speakers with European passports were in high demand.    Especially ones with an official teaching certificate…. Which was where I would turn my attention to next. 

Learning English

 

So I knew that I would be able to get over the legal hurdle of being able to live and work in Europe and that the demand for certified English teachers in Spain would allow me to support myself, at least for the first few years.  Now I just had to figure out how to go about getting that teaching certificate and where in Spain to go should I decide to actually pull the trigger.  After a couple weeks of research, I found several TEFL(Teach English as a Foreign Language)  certifications programs but the best one seemed to be one based in Madrid called TtMadrid.  It was a 4 week intensive program that not only taught the basics of the English Language (I had no idea what the conditionals were called), but also provided classroom practice and helped with the job placement post course.   I reached out to them and after going back and forth for several weeks, and doing some research on the city of Madrid itself, I came to the conclusion that if I decided to do this, Madrid would be the destination and this would be the program that I’d enroll in.  

Past the point of no return

 

 

At this point, I had dedicated so much time and energy into researching the possibility of moving abroad that I felt like I almost owed it to myself to at least try.  Had I decided to scrap the whole project and chalk it up to being a stupid pipedream I would have regretted it my entire life.   You miss 100% of the shots that you don’t take and this is my chance to get out of the rut that I was in in both my professional and my personal life.   It’s not easy to leave everything behind and start over and most of the people in my life thought I was insane for even considering it.  But I knew deep down that it was something that I had to do.   Whether I knew it or not, the decision was already made.   I was moving to fucking Spain!   Nothing was official just yet and there were still some details to be ironed out, but I had passed the mental point of no return.    I slowly started dropping hints to my friends and family, most of whom thought I was joking or that I wouldn’t actually go through with it.  I knew that I would never be able to convince everyone that it was a logical decision, because it wasn’t, but in November of 2011, it happened.   I officially enrolled in the TtMadrid TEFL program in March 2012  and booked my one way flight from Newark, New Jersey to Madrid, Spain on February 27.  The rest is history.