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.
