Today I left my girls in the park with Daddy, ready to ride across town (it’s only a mile) so I could put up flyers advertising my English tutoring. The park was new to us still, a dirt ground, a paseo of palm trees, bougainvillea, and hibiscus bushes intermittently spread among playground equipment. It was empty, totally empty, at 3:30 in the afternoon. The Spanish siesta is NOT a myth.

I pedaled across the ghost town of my city, seeing only a few cars. All the garage doors and persianas were closed up, waiting for tomorrow or the five o-clock hour. Only a few cafés were open and bustling with activity. I rode through the neighborhood adjacent to the harbor, at a slow pace as I still found myself mesmerized by all the shops, cafés, and architectural varieties. I managed to find fifteen poles/phone boxes to tape up my flyers, and came across the small park with the lorikeets that was close to one of the first apartments we looked at. Everything here, I realized, is becoming familiar to me. Soon I will know all the street names in my neighborhood, the major interchanges in other areas, and all the bus numbers we could possibly take to get across town. I won’t have to question which roundabout to turn left at, or which direction La Plaza de España is.

And while it is a relief, a burden lifted, at the familiarity of it all, there is also a sense of loss. Of fear. Eleven days into this new adventure, this almost still feels like a vacation. Yes, the four months of hell and paperwork beforehand kind of tainted the vacation feeling, but once we arrived, we’ve been eating tapas, spending the day at the beach, meandering around mesmerized by the warmth of the Spaniards, the intricacies of their city planning, and taking everything in with new eyes.

But tomorrow? Reality sets in for sure as the girls have their first day of school in their new country. Soon I’ll be working part-time and filling in the extra hours with tutoring sessions, and I will be traveling all over our city. And it will be ours, to keep, for a year.

So why am I afraid? Feel like I am losing something? Because I fear that with the newness wearing off, the vacation-like feeling disappearing, I won’t be so enthralled. I will be irritated with the deserted park at three, the dinner I don’t want to wait till nine to have, the cafés we can never afford to visit. And it might be just us. No family. No friends. Just the five of us, the girls getting into fights as they’re trapped in the apartment alone playing with the same old ten toys we lugged across the ocean, Bruce and I, trying to manage a lifestyle in a country neither of us are familiar with or accustomed to, the language barrier a thick wall that sometimes feels insurmountable.

It’s scary, isn’t it? Strange, unreal, many words creep up into my pedals as I take in the salty air, as the breeze from the Mediterranean pushes me up hill beside the Roman Theatre, as I come across a park, a roundabout, a beautiful view I haven’t seen until this moment. Am I crazy for choosing this, for putting my family in this situation? I’ve asked myself that thousands of times in the past months, and the only answer I can come up with, as we make ourselves at home, is that we’ll never know. There is no going back from the choices we’ve made. I will have to pedal further, see new sights, take in a different view, perhaps, to keep the adrenaline of the past couple of weeks burning in my blood, making me grateful for this amazing place, this amazing experience that I know in my heart we were meant to have.