At the age of fifty-two, Dvora Treisman took her cat and flew off from the San Francisco Bay Area to a new life in Barcelona. She had gone salsa dancing, met and married a Catalan, and they were going to live in his hometown.
The adventures began before she even left with the purchase of an apartment in the Barri Gotic sight unseen and subsequent horrible discovery in a guidebook of what went on in that street. Then there was the shock of the deed arriving in the mail with a different price – a much lower price – than what they had paid.
Once there, things didn’t work out as planned and that set off an even greater adventure than she had bargained for. Things that should be normal weren’t: buying bedding, keeping drunks from peeing under your balcony, buying Chanukah candles in a country where there have been essentially no Jews since 1492.
Some of the greatest challenges were to learn to speak Catalan, get a Spanish divorce, and perhaps the greatest, get a Spanish driver’s license.
Of the many good adventures that included participating in the Catalan independence movement, learning to dance the sardana and celebrating Sant Jordi, the best was adopting two street cats and an abandoned dog. Treisman has lived in Catalonia for over twenty years and has many appealing stories to tell. People say she tells them delightfully.
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