martes, 10 de julio de 2012

Pets

A friend of mine who has recently moved back called me 5 days before leaving rather desperate as even though she had not had trouble with having American Airlines accept her cat as baggage, she did not yet have a reservation number for her cat and her travel agent was concerned that it had not come through by then. She had reserved her direct flight on American Airlines thinking that it would be easiest on her 18 month old daughter and since the airline said they accepted cats thought that was it BUT after checking around (5 days before flying at probably one of the most hectic times), found out that American Airlines would only accept the cat basing themselves on if weather temperatures would never be over 80 degrees. Well, when she figured out the language (because it wasn't quite that straight-forward) she realised that they were not going to accept the cat because even if it was under 80 degrees in Madrid, it was never going to be under 80 degree in Dallas when they landed.

She called around and found out which airlines do accept cats in the cabin with passengers - Delta is one, I think Luftansa provides air-conditioning to pets flying as baggage-- and she was lucky that my sister was in Spain on a short holiday and flying Delta. Well, between us we managed to convince my sister to do a favor and bring the cat back with her (my sister, the saint, was travelling alone with her four daughters and now a cat).

J, the cat's owner, called Delta and found out exactly what we would need to bring the cat. She also found someone to keep the cat for the weeks between her leaving and my sister's leaving (allergies at my house). They also brought the cat an hour and a half north to us in Vinaros.

Anyway, the cat arrived. We sequestered it in my empty laundry room for the night, giving it food, water and a clean litterbox -- I don't think the poor thing used any of it. At 5:45am my sister and I mashed up an anti-anxiety pill for the cat, made her take it and got her into her carrier for the 2 hour trip to the airport. We did not have a problem getting the cat on the plane, she got x-rayed with the rest of the hand luggage and got on a plane to Atlanta with my sister's family. A bit of wetness and smell was detected towards the end of the flight but they made it without incident to Atlanta.

In Atlanta, the first step is to go through passport control and then pick up your bags. After this you take your bags through customs and since my sister had a cat they had to deal with the agricultural customs agent. He wasn't interested in looking at the cat's passport, no, he wanted to see the cat's orifices, I am assuming that he thought a cat being brought into the states by a mother travelling with 4 children was at high risk for being used as a drug mule because if that is not the case, I have no explaination for it. My sister told J. that the good news was that the cat was not hiding any drugs and the bad news was that she was raped.

Finally, they did manage to get through and even managed to make their conecting flight to Dallas where J. met them to pick up her cat.

I have two large boxers that are somewhat deformed and are on the ugly side of the spectrum but we love them very much and they are very good and sweet. I already know that there are airlines that refuse to take dogs with short muzzles (like bulldogs, pugs and boxers - because they can have respiratory issues) so I guess we would have to fly in the winter on an airline that would accept them or I will have to do my homework and find out if Luftansa really does have a climate conrolled baggage compartment for pets.

jueves, 7 de junio de 2012

Taxes

TAXES

Who likes doing their taxes? Here in Spain we file by the end of June, in the States it is by the 15th of April.

On the second page of our American passports it says that we need to file our taxes in the U.S. as well as filing in the country that we are living in (in my case, Spain). Way back when this warning first started appearing on our passports, the American colony (of 4 or 5) around me asked the Valencian consulate and we were told not to bother filing because unless we earned more than 80.000 U.S. dollars we did not have to pay (and this amount goes up every year). I don't know anyone here who earns over 80.000 dollars so we all forgot about it (it is difficult, we haven't done it before, blah, blah -- end result -- nobody filed the U.S. tax forms).

Well, now people are going back and finding difficulty because for administrative reasons, banks and sometimes schools or landlords are requesting the tax forms to grant mortgages, enroll students, rent apartments to returning citizens. And we don't have this done -- very bad I know.

I reasearched it for myself, called the Embasy in Madrid who immediately emailed me some information, called the IRS office in Paris and spoke to a very nice young man who told me more about how to file etc. and I called a CPA living in Madrid. The CPA gave me the impression that I was owed money back for the child tax credit thingy. Well, that sounded great and I could claim 4 years so in my head I was saving and spending the $14,000 it came out to be (3 kids all under 17). Of course, when I actually calculated the taxes with the help of my accountant (who is so proud of himself for doing American tax returns), it is a tax credit not free money and if I had to pay American taxes (I don't) would reduce the amount I would have to pay.

I still have to send my tax returns to Austin, TX (don't ask me why they go to Austin, TX -- I imagine an anthill of IRS workers dealing with weird foreign-looking American tax returns). I need to get a document (from 2009 that I can't find) and take them to the post office. In the end, I am doing what the nice IRS man in Paris told me to do -- filing only three years and it wasn't so bad. I can almost do it myself.

martes, 22 de mayo de 2012

First post

Leaving and Going Back Home?

This is my first post and I need to tell you a bit about myself. A bit, just the important parts.

I'm orignally from Oak Park, Illinois, a Chicago suburb. I moved to Spain in 1990 right after I finished my Master's degree to marry my husband who is Spanish. We now have three children, 16, 15 and 8. My eldest son, Quique, is already living in the States with my sister to study because  the secondary schools here are basically impossible to deal with for him. He is finishing up his first semester there and will come home for summer. He is our advance guard scouting out the terrain where we may end up living.

My sister moved to Dallas in the early 90's so now when I go home, I go to Dallas and Dallas is what my children know as their "home" in the USA. Everytime I go to Dallas, I can go a bit further on my own but it doesn't feel like home to me but obviously I would prefer to live near my family and I really don't think I could last out a Chicago winter after having lived on the Mediterranean for 20+ years.

I am sure you have heard about the economic situation in Spain recently as, I guess, they have been mentioning it in the news all over the world for about the last month but it has been bad for the last four years. Personally, I fear for my job and if I lose my job I don't think I will find anything else around here and so I am looking worriedly to the future and thinking that I will have to leave Spain and go back home.

I am going to use this blog as a diary of worries, fears and to show the evolution of my journey either back to the States or the evolution of how things change here allowing me to stay.

For me going home is a frightful thought. All of my adult life has been lived in Spain, in our town of around 30.000 people. The normal things I have gone about doing here, I have never done in the States. I have never bought a car, rented or purchased a home, had a "real" job, gone to the doctor or dealt with the health insurance stuff that I hear about, had a child, registered one of my children in school and hundreds of other things that belong to normal life and these things are very different here. Sometimes they are easier and sometimes more difficult.

Right now, here one of the talked about things is the cutbacks in education. Teacher's salaries have been frozen and their bonuses eliminated. The government wants to change the September exams to the end of July. September exams are exams for the classes the student's have failed. Student failure here is very high and over 37% of the students do not get the diplomas they should get when they are sixteen. Now at the end of May, we still do not know what is going to happen. The government has asked the teachers to provide classes to failing students during July (school is out around the 20th of June) but I have read that the schools are not accepting this. The situation is uncertain in education just as it feels everywhere. No answers seem to be available.