Welcome to my world

Hey watch it or we will think that you are trying to steal our username!!!!!!

Rosemary

We too live on a small budget and can shop very cheaply. A chicken lasts us for four or five meals (just the two of us)

1. Roast Dinner using breast
2 'Fry up' - rest of the breast with left-over veg from above
3.. Curry with the legs
4. Sandwiches with pickings and wings
5.Stew with the carcase.

Easily done if you have the time (which we have)!

We did not come out here to live as though we were on holiday. We don't have a pool. We have a terraced house in a mountain village - we have to join in with village life.

I think expectations can play a large part in why people don't setle.

Reading between the lines....you stayed in Spain because of a romance..and perhaps returned when it ended?? Then this post becomes about something else entirely if this is so.

You couldn't be more wrong from what I know of the poster. Its a long story full of disaster and no electricity supplies! Sure she'll be pleased to enlighten you

We make many meals out the good old versatile chicken. As there are only two of us it goes a long way. We especially like what we call our two day casserole which contains about 7 different veg and the chicken, we serve it two days sunning hence its title.

Rosemary

wrong! seven years and still going strong, its Spain I grew tired of. As Mitzyboy said (thanks mitzy) many reasons.
I'm not going to defend myself anymore I've answered the OP original question many times over. To me leaving Spain for whatever reason does not equate to failure.

Since in your case you never planned to make it your home, then it is not failure. For people who plan to make it their permanent home and do not do so, it is failure. Again, fail, failure and failing, are just words. If some people find them so bad they need to reevaluate their interpretations of these words.

yeah your right I give up!

Maidstone is lovely Although it was for busisness not pleasure all though, I still crossed over the river to have quick peek in TK Maxx (didn't buy anything tho).
I went to see some employment agencies and got some really positive feedback so all in all in a good day. Apart from the blisters on my feet, and getting soaked when I got off the bus oh well the joys of british weather hey one minute the sun is shining next minute its pelting it down.

No one is criticising you Glad...well certainly not me. What I find interesting is your need to reassure yourself that you did not fail. You seem to be trying to convince yourself it was not failure. The sensible ones in this world just say.. hey that didn't work out , and move onto something else.
I look forward to each trip with intense pleasure, love it out there, and am always sad to leave. Could probably go and live there full time if I chose, by rearranging my lifestyle over here. However, I am wary. Would I be bored once the novelty wore off?? Would I miss Britain, and then would Spain become routine. Some people like the familiar, the routine. Some of use need adventure.

I really don't want to keep going back and forth on this subject but I feel I have no choice. I'm not trying to reasure myself of anything and haven't got any issues with the word 'fail'.

When I failed my exam last year I didn't go into dismay because of the word fail, but this isn't as clear cut as that.

Tell me that I failed when you have lived the life that I did. When you move to Spain, if you do. I tried everything to make Spain my home, I did everything right. I intergrated as much as I could but there was always obstacles..i.e my daughter coming home from school every day crying with migranes because she had been toremented all day, racially abused, told to go home to her own country, called ugly everyday. Getting beating up, pushed down the stairs all because she was foreign. In my eyes this was not my failing. What would have been my failing is if I let it continue.

Lack of work, lack of options I could go on forever but I've said it all before not my failing, out of my hands.

You seem to implying that I have no sense of adventure because I've returned that couldn't be further from the truth. At the end of day at least I done it, at least I moved there, rather than dream about it.

Going on annual holidays to Spain will not give you an accurate picture of what it is like to live there full time. Maybe you should try and get it out of system and move there for yourself.

But tbh would it have been different if you hadn't had all the housing issues with electricity and the neighbours places being pulled down?

Hi *waves* Mitzy,

I think it wouldn't have been as difficult, but in the end (apart from the legal issues with the house) everything had been sorted. In hindsight if I wanted to stay I probably could have. I could have found a new school (perhaps) but with everything that had happened I was worn down and tired of Spain. It made me depressed (as you may have noticed).

The first 3 years were spent on the coast with none of those issues and I didn't like the lifestyle hence the move inland. So I don't know tbh.

Good for you. When I read your first few posts on this thread I thought you were just another bolshy brit. I have warmed to your postings over the last few days, though. You are right. When you are in your nursing home at 94 years of age you can look back proudly and say -

"I remember when I lived in Spain. It was good but I was glad to get back to sanity."

Wouldn't it be sad, though, if you said (from your nursing home)

"I wish I'd gone and lived in Spain. Things could have been so different."

You had a go and it didn't work out. So you picked youself up, dusted yourself down and got on with your life. That can only be a positive thing, not negative, so to use the word "failure" would be wrong. Besides, I thought that we had decided that this thread was about "FAILING TO SETTLE" which, per se is not a failure. You have tried it, it went wrong for whatever reasons, and you did something positive about it. Many would just allow themselves to get in deeper, becoming depressed or worse; so you can rightfully congratulate yourself because you did what most people who want to live in Spain don't have the nerve to do - you followed the dream. It's just a different dream now, so good luck with it.

Don't we all admire people who try.

I'll get off now. I'm waffling.