Monthly Archives: April 2017

At the end of September we were once again back in Berlin. The weather was still relatively mild, Monika and I had a lot of our mind and loads of work to do (unrelated to our “volcano lair” aspirations), and so we pushed the thought of moving to the Canaries out of our minds for a while. However, as early as in the beginning of November, the weather got utterly obnoxious very abruptly and with what seemed (and turned out to in fact be) a six-month finality. Thus our search for a flat to rent on Tenerife rose higher on our list of priorities with every passing week.

We put out lots of “feelers”, thanks to our newfound contacts on Tenerife. However, everyone involved soon started suspecting that, contrary to what all of us had previously thought, renting an affordable flat there would most likely turn out to be impossible. Our own online research proved the same: the influx of tourists to Tenerife towards the end of 2016 was shocking, even to the local population. All the capacities were filled to the brim, and even rooms that people there rent out en masse via Airbnb were relatively hard to find. It was obvious that Tenerife would, until further notice, be profiting massively from the fan-hitting shit and the resulting decline in tourism in the usual winter retreats of European tourists like Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, Turkey… Even Greece, to a degree. So everyone in search of some sun during the winter (as well as spring and autumn) headed to the Canary Islands instead, also thanks to a large number of low-cost airlines flying there on a regular basis. In such circumstances nobody was renting flats long-term under anything even remotely approaching passable conditions.

One after another, our contacts on Tenerife started coming up with the suggestion that the only thing that made sense at the moment was to buy an apartment there – while one could still afford such a thing. At first we thought the idea was preposterous: how were we supposed to come up with the money for such a stunt? However, the idea soon turned out to be more than just a pipe dream: at the time apartments on Tenerife were still relatively cheap, even shockingly so, in comparison to, for example, Slovenia or Germany. Of course, the comparatively low prices of apartments on Tenerife were the result of the Spanish real-estate bubble that had burst during the 2007-2008 financial crisis, and we decided to take advantage of the situation while we still could – as it was, we were already two or three years too late to really “capitalise” on the best opportunities. The prices of real estate on the Canaries would most likely keep inflating, at least until the next financial meltdown that is most probably in store for us all, so there was no time like yesterday to get a move on.

It did not take us long to figure out that servicing a ten-year loan that we needed would be significantly cheaper than paying our rent in Berlin, and, of course, at the end of the ten-year period we’d end up with our own flat instead of merely shovelling cash out through the window for the next decade or more.

Theory is often far more elegant, simple and shiny in every aspect than practice, and trying to get a loan as a freelancer… Well, I can only say good luck. I will deliberately refrain from blowing my lid and embarking on an endless rant about the woes of the precariat in the brave new millennium at this point, because I’m so fed up with the issue that I don’t even want to write about it. Instead I’ll just say that after lengthy and frustrating negotiations, involving numerous complications, a load of paperwork and a fine selection of catch-22s, we managed to get a loan. We also liquidated our life insurance savings accounts back in Slovenia.

Finally we bought one-way tickets to Tenerife: at the beginning of January (after the Christmas and New Year frenzy would be over), we’d be looking for an apartment to buy. It was about time to start reading up on all the legal and bureaucratic mumbo-jumbo involved in such a transaction, as well as looking for flats for sale online, so that we’d get to Tenerife armed with at least the basic information.

After years of thinking about it and postponing it in favour of vacationing on one of the Greek islands, September 2016 was – as we had already been thinking about the possibility of moving to somewhere in Spain – finally time for our first visit to Tenerife. The additional reason we apparently needed to finally check it out was to visit a dear old pal of mine, whom I hadn’t seen for some ten years or so and who had moved there last year. He was overjoyed when he heard we were thinking about doing the same, and urged us to get our asses in gear. He would also introduce us to a fine collection of his buddies, so we could get our bearing more easily.

Unfortunately it eventually turned out that this friend of mine, who intended to start a craft brewery – and offered me, at least in theory, a job there – would soon have to move back to Slovenia for reasons beyond his control that I will not go into here, but otherwise his plan to introduce the island to us (or us to the island) worked out well. We did get to meet a number of great people, some of them Slovenian, some Serbian, some Italian et cetera – but scarcely any Spanish characters. (Here we go again – in Berlin we’d also spent most of our time in the company of former Yugoslav brothers, Italians, Turks and other foreigners, crossing paths with Germans mostly only in various companies, offices, bureaus and administrations). My old pal also showed us around some of the island, told us everything about it, and we took a week-long rent-a-car trip around the rock ourselves.

As far as geography goes, Tenerife (or Canary Islands in general) must be the single greatest location you can find in the European Union. Yes, the French and Portuguese have other remnants of their former colonies and outposts left that may officially be considered EU as well, but generally speaking the Canaries are it, especially if you take their relative accessibility into account: five hours by plane from Germany (or Slovenia) is about as much of flight time that you can stomach in one sitting without going nuts, and the flights are relatively cheap. As far as the European Union goes: do not underestimate the advantages you enjoy as a citizen of the EU. The horror stories I’ve heard from non-EU citizens who moved to Berlin, as well as those told by some of my Slovenian compatriots who have emigrated – or have attempted to emigrate – to destinations outside of the EU, provided ample reasons against trying to live outside of the EU for any considerable length of time. There is more than enough hassle with bureaucracy as it is, even with the European Union’s “freedom of movement of people and capital” and “freedom of labour”. Even in the absence of any problems with visas and work permits, which you encounter should you try your luck outside of the EU bosom, migrants much too often feel as if we were tragicomic characters in a dismal yarn penned by Kafka. The fact that Canary Islands are officially a “remote region” of the EU (which they are, as they’re technically in Africa, of course) will surely provide for enough tax, shipping and other complications as it is – no need to get even more radical than that.

So, Tenerife. Is it beautiful? Worth it or not? What’s not to like: it’s a volcano in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Northern Africa, dominated by Mount Teide, which looms over the entire island from its height of 3,718 metres. No, I’m not particularly worried it might suddenly erupt, but if it ever does blow its lid, we’ll definitely go out in style. Apart from that, well… Once you get past the very idiotic notion that you’re going to stay in some kind of a tropical paradise with emerald lagoons and coconut palms and manage to replace that image with a desert in the vein of Nevada (at least the south of Tenerife, where we are going, is like that), you can finally start to appreciate the place for what it is. However, I will not spend any time writing any odes to Tenerife at this point, because we haven’t really explored much of it yet, at least not in enough detail. Instead I’ll leave the island-born poetry and reggae tunes to any sporadic bouts of inspiration I might yet experience once we finally manage to pull this off, settle there, and start enjoying everything that our volcano lair has to offer.

By driving around the island and talking to as many people as we could, we also decided that the south of Tenerife was the way to go. Most importantly of all, it is the south of the island that boasts the world-famous climate, the so-called “eternal spring”. Of course, this is a bit of a cliché, a moderately white lie that tourist agencies keep spouting… However, even without any embellishment, the night-time temperatures during the winter (in the south of the island!) in fact barely ever fall under 15 degrees Celsius, so winters are practically non-existent and it almost never rains. Showers do happen, but legendary drizzling like Berlin? Forget it. Summers are usually warm, though not steaming, as the temperatures only occasionally go much higher than 30 degrees Celsius, and even then it’s usually dry and windy, so as long as you don’t forget to wear a thick layer of sunscreen in order to avoid skin cancer at the age of 55, you’re good.

The north of Tenerife is nothing like the south, though: the climate there is much more similar to the south of the European mainland, with hot summers and reasonably mild though still relatively cold winters (night-time temperatures of about 5 degrees Celsius, especially at higher elevations) – and lots of rain and fog. Naturally, the north of Tenerife looks better: it’s indeed green and lush, with palm trees everywhere… But I experienced enough Mediterranean winters when I lived on the Slovenian coast to be itching for more.

There’s one thing about the climate in the south of Tenerife that we have yet to experience and which is allegedly far from pleasant: the so-called “Calima”. The Calima is basically a hot sandstorm that comes blowing in from the Sahara, especially during the winter. The insidious dust and sand fills the air, sometimes for a few days. That, however – eternally chewing on grains of sand and trying to wipe a fine coat of dust off of everything even when the calima is nowhere to be seen – is just one of the many things you have to come to terms with. Another annoyance is that tap water is not good enough to drink, except in emergencies, and thus lugging stockpiles of bottled water from the store will definitely become one of our favourite pastimes.

However, another exquisite detail about the south of Tenerife, resulting from its desert climate, is that there are no mosquitoes! It’s too dry and too windy! As far as I’m concerned that’s simply heavenly, because in Izola on the Slovenian coast, where Monika and I had lived before we moved to Berlin, it had been impossible to sit outside due to literal clouds of these bloodsuckers – the tiger variety, no less – trying to exsanguinate you. In fact, there are barely any buzzing insects and no poisonous varmints whatsoever. Forget about ticks, venomous spiders, scorpions, centipedes, fire ants and other monstrosities you might stumble upon elsewhere in this geographic latitude; forget about snakes, poisonous or otherwise. The only pests you have to come to terms with are cockroaches – lots of them – and rats. I know, these are not cuddly and cute, either (yes, I know, rats do have their charm, but not the pestilent ones), but at least they’ll go out of their way to avoid you (as long as you keep your food out of their reach). In any case, rats are everywhere – you’d probably have to move to Antarctica if you have a serious aversion to those.

It is also important for us that the south is mostly populated by foreigners, while most of the Spanish minority (haha) can speak English to at least a certain degree. That especially makes a difference in my case, as I don’t speak a word of Spanish yet, apart from being able to order a coffee or beer – unlike Monika who is fluent.

Furthermore, the south of Tenerife is where tourism has gone completely insane, and this will be useful for us when we’re trying to find work… And finally, all of the people we currently know on Tenerife live in the south.

Thus that part of the equation was settled. We decided we’d rent a flat somewhere in the vicinity of El Médano in the beginning of 2017, live there for half a year or so, and then make the final decision. Little did we know how soon that scheme would change.

Dear Berlin, you’ve been good to us, but it seems it’s time to go our separate ways.

You have some serious advantages going for you. You’re still reasonably cheap, though the prices of everything are, sadly, steadily getting worse, fie on you. I don’t need a car to navigate your innards as your public transport is superb. Your multicultural atmosphere and complex, fascinating past – yes, I know you hear this cliché far too often and you’re probably sick and tired of it, but it’s true – makes you one of the most vibrant and enchanting cities I’ve ever set foot in. Perhaps you don’t make a fabulous first impression, but you’ve certainly grown on me: once I got to know you, it became hard to let you go.

Indeed, Berlin is a city that never sleeps, but at the same time it’s so far from any sort of extreme hustle and bustle usually associated with beehive metropolises and their go-getter, yuppie populations that staying in Berlin still feels like living in a real place inhabited by actual human beings, not all of whom are completely revolting, miraculously. Anywhere you happen to be in Berlin – with the possible exception of Mitte, where barely anyone strays voluntarily if they don’t have some specific business to attend to – you’re most likely just a stone’s throw from the nearest park. The city itself is surrounded by lakes and forests that you can escape to simply by hopping on a train any time you feel like you’ve had enough, though you almost never feel confined or constrained: the city is airy, green, easy-going and open-minded; if you don’t like something, you just go and look for something else, as the possibilities are innumerable; and, most importantly, people live and let live, which is so very unlike Slovenia, where it seems that your life and your opinions are just about everybody’s goddamn business. So, all in all, the Berlin stint has been a very useful experience: if nothing else, Monika and I have learned some German while basking in the freedom that Berlin provided.

However, after a few years in Berlin – once we had separated our business from all aspects of the Slovenian system for good – the most mundane reason for our move manifested itself: while Germany offers much better conditions for freelancers than Slovenia (at this time, Germany doesn’t force you to contribute to the pension fund, so it doesn’t bleed you dry with these contributions whenever you’re not making nearly enough money, which is, in our case, most of the time), Germany also has horrendously expensive health insurance in comparison with Slovenia. Thus, once you exit the Slovenian system and can no longer take advantage the EU health insurance by paying for it in Slovenia where it’s cheap, you’re going to be doling out around EUR 350 per month for health insurance per person (or around EUR 260 at the minimum, provided that you’re broke enough and can prove it with your tax statements). Unfortunately this defeated one of our main reasons for living in Germany: because the conditions for freelancers were, at least in our case, better than back home. On the other hand, the conditions in Spain, when you take everything into account, are more favourable than even in Germany – let alone Slovenia, which has in the last decade or so become an absolute hell for freelancers. What is even more convenient is that Monika had graduated in Spanish, so we rejoiced in the fact that all the communication, especially with bureaucrats, would be much simpler than back when we’d moved to Berlin without any of us speaking (or understanding) German to any degree worth mentioning… And it has been her long-time wish to live in Spain one day, at least for a few years, so why not actually go ahead and do it.

Furthermore, we gradually realised that we were simply getting too old for the German capital – and I kid you not. Sure, life in Berlin can be spectacular if you’re twenty and looking to spend your nights partying your brains out and whoring around. However, once you hit an age advanced enough, you might gradually get sick and tired of meeting innumerable young so-called “creatives” and all sorts of clueless self-proclaimed artists, who do nothing but obsess about their “image” and work on “networking” by means of hanging around hipster bars incessantly, nursing their overpriced drinks, staring at their smartphones, and talking about themselves and their “awesome projects” that they never actually finish. You may suddenly feel that if you hear about one more cunning startup, another ground-breaking app – or have any sort of a new brilliant scheme, intricate concept, top-notch design, monumental business enterprise, and/or ingenious (crowd-funded) product described to you by a spoiled brat who invests all of his or her parents’ money in Apple products, beard oil, tattoos, piercings, ear plugs and coke – you’ll grab someone by the throat… Or hop over to the Ukraine to procure a second-hand AK-47. You may suddenly find innumerable bearded man-bun-toting blokes (with or without silly headwear) absolutely obnoxious, and you might even stoop as low as to abhor the very thought of spending any of your precious time in clubs, jumping to the infantile one-quarter techno beat in a drug-fuelled haze. Should that happen, it’s probably time to get out.

Don’t get me wrong, Berlin can be great. It was stupendous, and besides enjoying everything else that such a culturally-rich metropolis has to offer it’s also possible to see loads of first-class rock concerts here. That’s something that I’ve really taken advantage of, having, in the recent years, seen practically all the bands I’d wanted to see – but had been unable to – back in Slovenia. However, the relaxed and sometimes anarchic, chaotically liberal left-wing liberalism of Berlin has in the recent years given way to thorough gentrification, despite the constant and noticeable resistance from the leftists. The once colourful multicultural streets full of immigrants, crazy people, cheap dives and 24/7/365 liquor stores are currently being replaced by an increasing number of criminally-expensive hipster bars, vegan restaurants, vegetarian butcher shops (I’m not even joking) and yoga studios, populated by the global gluten-free convention of clueless, phony, spoiled brats – all of whom are driving the prices into the stratosphere with their idiocy. Rich morons are indeed the worst kind. You can’t even find a safe haven in the remaining traditional Berlin dives, as the hipsters have already invaded them all in their search of “authentic experience”. So the remaining authentic indigenous winos (who get their clothes by the side of the road or in dumpsters) can no longer afford to hang out in their former hangouts, as the clientele in these dives is rapidly being replaced by hipsters (who buy the same threads that the indigenous winos wear in hip second-hand stores for heaps of cash). Thus Berlin is gradually being transformed into a modern and utterly obnoxious European capital in the vein of London (it’s not nearly there yet, but it will be, eventually): the prices are being driven up steadily, and so are the rents.

To make matters worse, the weather is horrendous – as pedestrian as that may sound. No, it’s not so cold: in fact, my hometown in the north of Slovenia, which is a bit on the hilly side, can be much colder, on average, during the winter. However, without any exaggeration, in Berlin it’s a normal occurrence that the sun disappears behind an impenetrable wall of grey towards the end of September and doesn’t touch your skin for more than a minute or two at a time until the end of March or even April. That’s six or seven months of your life down the drain each year, because believe me, if you don’t have a very urgent reason to get out of your flat during the winter, you don’t. If you’re a freelancer who works at home, like my wife and I – or in case you’re a pensioner or zombie on social welfare – chances are you only leave your apartment once per week for months on end, and that only to buy groceries and run the most urgent errands. Cabin fever is so frequent an occurrence in Berlin that when the first truly sunny day hesitantly yet miraculously manifests itself sometime in March or April, after half a year of eternal darkness and tenaciously drizzling rain, the houses disgorge hordes of desperate, half-crazed people who are in such an urgent hurry to feel the sun on their skin that the parks immediately fill to the brim with half-naked and often blind-drunk characters that look as if they’ve just been released from subterranean dungeons or lunatic asylums. It really is pretty bad, and after five winters in Berlin I no longer have any wish whatsoever to spend more than half of my life hibernating.

Here, for example, is a photo of the barbecue frenzy on Tempelhof on the first sunny weekend in April:

Thus being moderately to clinically depressed in Berlin is not newsworthy at all, and during the winter sullen-looking, resigned people do little but complain about the weather: barkeeps, shopkeepers, waitresses, clerks, radio hosts, your friends and acquaintances as well as random strangers of all colours and creeds – they’ll all have horrible stories to tell about the dismal meteorological phenomena. No wonder that Berliners are relatively immune to ceaselessly fantasising about migrants, terrorism, or, perish the thought, refugees from the Middle East: they’ve already been terrorised by thick, droopy clouds, perpetual darkness, soul-leeching rain and bone-chilling wind that loves to swoop in from somewhere in Siberia just to see Berliners squirm; and they’ve all come together, internationally, to hate the weather equally under the united bearlin banner:

Yep, the first thing most of us foreigners learn here is to appreciate the hell out of the weather back wherever we’ve come from. Conceivably only Scandinavians would be able to stoically put up with the Berlin weather, but there aren’t too many of them around here, probably because they can’t come up with a reason to leave their own apartments back home.

In such circumstances I happened to talk to a very good old friend of mine who had moved to Canary Islands last year, so my wife and I decided to pay him a visit. As I have mentioned, we had already been thinking about moving even before that, perhaps to one of the Greek islands or to Spain, definitely somewhere far less “Nordic”… So why not check out what this friend was up to?

Last year, after four full years of our investigation into what it’s like to live in Berlin, my wife Monika and I decided to move yet again. After a long and careful deliberation we decided to go for the proverbial Monty Python “and now for something completely different” option, as we’d had our fill of exploring what living in a metropolis was like. The village people that still lurk inside us came a-knocking again, but they’re of the “coastal” variety: as far as we’re concerned, barely anything beats staring out to sea every day. Thus we decided to relocate to the Canary Islands. I know the idea may sound ludicrous and outlandish, but we’re no strangers to those sorts of schemes.

I won’t go into details in this short introduction, but it soon turned out that the very rational and well-considered “plus and minus table” with Berlin on one side and Canary Islands on the other tilted very much in favour of moving as soon as humanly possible. The urgency stemmed primarily from the fact that we had to move somewhere, as the translation work we do for a living is rapidly going down the drain, and Berlin is getting increasingly expensive.

Speaking from my experience with our move from Slovenia to Berlin roughly five years ago, radical upheavals like this usually result in a collection of tragicomic anecdotes, mostly involving Kafkaesque bureaucracy as well as a vast collection of screw-ups, thus making for a good source of at least semi-entertaining texts. Nevertheless, I wasn’t initially planning to write this series of blog posts or, for that matter, mention our newest “crackpot project” in public at all, mainly because I didn’t want to annoy people unnecessarily, and uncalled-for posts like this are just irritating. You simply can’t beat annoying your friends on Facebook with heinous provocations like “Hey everyone! While all of you are probably enjoying another horrific winter, let me just remind you that I’m currently scratching my nut sack on a subtropical island where temperatures barely ever drop under twenty Celsius. Speaking of which, here, feast your eyes on a gratuitous photo of me in my bikini (that I really took last summer)“. This is something I wanted to avoid (especially as I don’t have any photos of myself in a bikini that anyone could stomach without succumbing to a dizzy spell, at the very least).

However, a good friend of mine expressed genuine interest in this newest scheme of ours and asked me to write about it, because he was itching to see how we’d go about organising such a ridiculous undertaking. As I’m always glad to find that at least one or two humans on this planet still prefer a “tl;dr” wall of text to Twitter tweets, I decided to heed the man’s words and start describing the whole process in this here “Grumblin’ Ole Geezer’s Volcano Lair” series of blog posts. After all, why not: so many people seem to be moving to the Canaries these days that I may even unwittingly contribute a piece of information someone might find useful. If I happen to do that, please let me know so that I can edit it out! (DISCLAIMER: Jokery aside, I have no intention to write a “Moving to the Canary Islands for Dummies” manual, so don’t take anything you might read here for granted. Do your own research, so that you can make your own mistakes!)

Anyway, as great as moving to Canary Islands might sound in theory, in practice it’s already been pretty exhausting for about three months now. So, as far as pissing anyone off with my extraordinary luck goes: relax, because in general my life sucks donkey balls as much as anyone’s (I’m talking about the population fortunate enough to wallow in the misery caused by our “first-world problems” here, not about the much less important utter horrors occurring in the other 90 % of the world). Besides, our main reasons for the move are very mundane, even banal: Berlin has simply become too expensive to be a feasible choice for us under our current circumstances. The postponement of my next novel and the new Cynicism Management album, both of which are in the works but progressing much too slowly because the move has obviously taken precedence, is just the most obvious downside for me personally… While in the rest of the posts in this series I’ll mostly be whining about the more concrete snags that we’ve already stumbled upon, as well as the pitfalls still lurking behind the next corner.

Mind you, though: I started posting these contributions AFTER we’ve already secured our apartment on Tenerife – so unless something goes monumentally wrong from here on in, all should end well… That’s simply because starting a journal like this and having to conclude it with something like “so we fucked up – we tried really hard but it didn’t work and everything turned to shit” would be just too damn depressing. I have recently read one such journal, written by a friend of mine on that same island of Tenerife, and let me tell you: it sure gave me pause. However, on the other hand it, quite paradoxically, made me warm up to the silly idea even more. You know how it is, a terrier with a bone and all that… Anyway, I will explain more about it all as I go.