Your Key for Getting Online, or How to Get a Cl@ve

Like governments all over the world, Spain has spent considerable time and resources making many of their bureaucratic procedures available online. Using sites like those for the Agencia Tributaria (the Tax Office), the National Administraciones Públicas (for, among many other things, immigration issues, appointments, and procedures), and the Sede electronica for the Comunidad de Madrid, you can make appointments to take care of immigration issues, get help with public services or taxes, and request a variety of other documentation you might find you need.

One site I've found especially helpful is the one that allows you to pay traffic tickets online. I cover how to do this in a separate post.

Regardless of the site, however, one thing you'll find you need on most of them, if you're going to request any personal data or documentation, is a Cl@ve.

In case you don't know, clave means "key" in Spanish. The Spanish government swapped out the "a" in clave for an "@" symbol (called an arroba in Spanish, which is useful to know when giving out your email address), and used this to brand their online identification-verification system. There are actually at least three different setups that accomplish the same thing, but the Cl@ve is the one I was able to get, and so it's the one I've used and the one I know the most about.

Cl@ve is essentially a two-factor authorization system. Once you apply for it, you download an app for your phone and sign in using your NIE (NIE is an acronym for número de identidad de extranjero; it's often referred to as your "foreigner identity card" and is a pre-requisite for almost everything you'd need to do if you're going to stay in Spain for longer than allowed by a tourist visa.) When signing in, you use both your NIE and a "support number", which is printed on both the top right of your NIE card, and in smaller text on the top left, immediately below the "ESP" symbol.

Once you input both of these items and click Obtenir Cl@ve ("Obtain Cl@ve"), the App on your phone should get sent a three-character code. Enter that code in the "PIN" textbox and click Acceder ("Access"), and you'll be validated.

Great. Now, how do I get one?

Right, so that's what we're here to answer. According to the Cl@ve website, you're supposed to be able to request one online. The process is:

1. You go online and submit the request.
2. You wait to receive a letter in the mail (regular mail, or Correos.)
3. Once you receive the "invitation" letter, you go back online and use the code on the letter to register.
4. Once that's all done, you can proceed with downloading the app, signing in, and whatever else it is you want to accomplish with your new Cl@ve.

Now, this worked for my wife. We were able to do the online steps and, about a week later, we received the "invitation" letter in the mail. For me, no such luck, which was a real bummer since all of our visa and residency status was tied to my identity, since my job is what allowed us to get a residency visa in the first place.

In my case, I actually had to go to the Agencia Tributaria (the Spanish Tax Office) to get mine. For whatever reason, the online process wouldn't work. But I was able to make an appointment and get the nice person at the office to help me get set up. So, while perhaps not as convenient online registration, I was able to walk out of the office with my Cl@ve set up and working without having to wait for the invitation letter to show up in the mail.

So there you have it. Whether you go the online route or the in-person one, I highly recommend you dive right in and get yours as soon as possible. It really has opened up a wealth of online possibilities when it comes to getting or updating official documentation.

¡Buena suerte!

Help for Solar Panels in Sunny Spain

When we decided to buy, and then renovate, a house here in Madrid, we wanted to make it as energy efficient as possible. For one thing, we just believed it was the right thing to do. For another, looking around most days here and seeing how much sun there is, it felt like the environment was showering us with free money. We just had to put the equipment in place to collect it. Add to that the soaring costs of energy all over Europe, and...well, it just seemed an obvious choice.

TL;DR: This post is about our experience getting the paperwork done and navigating the bureaucracy to get financial assistance from the Province of Madrid (El Comunidad de Madrid) with the solar energy installation for our home. If you're just interested in the juicy bits, skip the next few paragraphs.

Back to our regularly-scheduled program: The biggest thing that keeps most people from installing a solar-energy system is the cost. Most people look at the initial outlay of cash required, do a rough amortization, and quickly figure out they'll need to be in their house years, if not a decade or more, before they could claim to have recouped their investment. And while the cost of solar panels and related equipment has dropped pretty dramatically over the past ten years or so, the bottom line is that it still ain't cheap. 

There are an increasing number of programs, however, to help incentivize people to make the initial investment. In Spain, where government-run programs tend to move even more slowly than in the U.S., it can make someone think twice before deciding if they want to go through the hassle of applying. Add to that the fact that it's not very clear how much help one can receive, plus trying to navigate the paperwork and bureaucracy involved in making an application, and many people quickly decide they don't want to be bothered. Or if you're like me, you won't actually make a decision; you'll just put it off indefinitely because you don't know where to start and the whole thing—especially the thought of doing it all in another language—seems overwhelming.

(And please don't anyone go taking offense to my statement about the speed of Spanish bureaucracy. In a country with less than 50 million people, it took more than seven months to get our tax refund. U.S. bureaucracy is no picnic, but I can always count on getting my refund no more than 30 days after submitting my U.S. income tax returns.)

In general, the company that installs your solar energy system should help you and file most of the paperwork. Some people to whom I've spoken about this said they didn't recall having to do any work for the process. Regardless, our installer needed us to get several pieces of paperwork to add to the packet he's submitting.

The documents you'll need to provide are:

1. Documento Acreditativo de Residencia Fiscal. This is a "tax residence document". If I understand correctly, this document basically verifies that you reside in Spain for the purpose of being taxed. It differs from a couple of other, similar documents that do similar things (specifically, the Certificado de residencia fiscal España-Convenio and the Certificado de no residentes en España, which serve other purposes I won't get into here.)
2. Certificado Corriente de Pago Tributario. The title of this document translates as, "Current Tax Payment Certificate". Again assuming my understanding is correct, this document verifies that your property taxes are currently paid in full.
3. Certificado de No Tener Deudas con la Comunidad de Madrid. Like the previous document, this "Certificate of No Debts with the Community of Madrid" certifies that you don't have any other money you currently owe to the state. I'm not sure everything that this includes, but basically, the state wants to be sure you don't owe it money before it considers giving you some.

There are a few other things that will be needed to submit the application for assistance, but your solar installer should be helping you with those. The ones above were the ones that we needed to get ourselves. I'll discuss actually getting these documents in a moment.

For completeness, the other document that I know about is called the Tasa Por Presentación de Servicios Urbanísticas ("Fee for Provision of Urban Services"). Again, in our case, the solar-system installer filled it out and submitted it for us. There was an associated fee, as the title suggests, of 288€. The installer paid this for us and then billed us for it.

The million-dollar question: how do you get the documents listed above? 

This is the really valuable part of this post, which hopefully makes it easier for you than it was for us. All three documents must be obtained from the Agencia Tributaria de la Comunidad de Madrid (the Tax Agency for the Community of Madrid).

Supposedly, there is a way of requesting these documents online. After searching the website for Agencia Tributaria, however, I couldn't find any reference to them. So, in our case, we did what's worked for a number of other situations: we made an appointment to go see someone at the tax office.

In case you're not familiar with navigating any of this, you generally need to make an appointment online before you try to go see someone at the Agencia Tributaria. The same goes for anything you may need from Spanish National Government. If you make an appointment beforehand, you'll be presented with available dates and times, and be (relatively) assured of getting to see someone. In fact, there are many times when the guard at the front door to a government building won't even let you in if you can't show them evidence that you already have an appointment booked for that day. 

One other important note: Once you get inside the building, you'll still need to go to the little kiosk that doles out the numbered tickets and get yours. Without that, you'll never get called to one of the desk, whether you have an appointment or not.

So anyway, we booked an appointment. Now, the last time we went to see someone at the Agencia Tributaria, we went to the office on Calle de Guzmán. This is a huge building with several floors of information desks and cubicles and lines to wait in. The last time we went there, we kept getting sent to different departments. But that's a story for another time.

When we went online to make this appointment, we couldn't get a time at the Calle de Guzmán office that would work with our schedules. So we wound up going to the office in Alcobendas, on Calle Ruperto Chapí. It was a little farther away, but what a difference it made! Because it was smaller, if someone at one desk didn't know something, or needed some extra information, they just walked over and talked to the person at the other desk! It was awesome. 

Seriously. I'd worked to set my expectation super low, telling myself that, while we probably wouldn't get even one document we needed, at least we would gather some information that would help us decide what to do next. But I was wrong, and in a great way!! We were able to order all three documents we needed, and we were in and out in under 40 minutes!! Afterward, we went for a celebratory lunch in the mall around the corner.

Now, in true Spanish government fashion, we didn't actually leave the office with the documents. But we did leave with recibos de presentación, essentially receipts showing we'd requested each of the documents. Now we just have to wait for the actual documents to show up in the mail, scan them, and send them to our solar installer so he can finish submitting the paperwork.

Conclusion

To wrap things up:

• There is financial assistance available, offered by the Spanish government, to help defray the cost of installing solar panels. 
• There are three documents that you will likely need to obtain in order to apply (see above.)
• You can order all three documents by going to the Tax Office (the Agencia Tributaria.)
• If you're going to go to the Agencia Tributaria, you should make an appointment first.
• Going by our most recent experience, I suggest going to a smaller tax office as opposed to one of the bigger ones, even if it means you have to travel a little farther.

One other bit of info: while writing this post, I used Google to search for "purpose of Documento Acreditativo de Residencia Fiscal", and found what appears to be the place for requesting this document from the Agencia Tributaria website. Subsequent Google searches found this link for the Certificado Corriente de Pago Tributario, and this one for the Certificado de No Tener Deudas con la Comunidad de Madrid. This would, of course, save you from needing to get an appointment and go to the office. I guess my mistake the first time I searched was using the search feature on Agencia Tributaria's website. Let that be a lesson to me.

A few notes other notes on using the online government services: first, the link above is good as of the writing of this post; no guarantees after that. Second, you'll need a Cl@ve, which is used across Spanish government sites in tandem with your national ID to verify your identity and requesting all kinds of things online. I talk about how to obtain one of these in a different post. 

Perro + Dinero = Dog in Spain

So...we have a dog. One question we frequently get when people here in Spain find this out is, "Did you get him here, or did you bring him with you from the U.S.?" 

This answer is, we brought him with us. His name is Ace. He's cute and super-sweet, and we definitely didn't want to leave him back in the U.S. when we moved. It was the middle of the pandemic, and moving to another country was already going to be stressful enough, and we thought it would make the transition easier on our kids (we have two of those) if, in addition to their friends, they didn't also have to leave behind their dog.

So we brought him.

Or, rather, we had him transported. And it wasn't cheap and Amazon wasn't about to pay for it. And did I mention it was the middle of the pandemic?

Now, normally what people do when they're going to move and they want to bring their pet is they arrange to bring the animal on the plane with them. Depending on the size of the animal, that might mean said animal can accompany these people in the cabin, or it might mean the animal has to impersonate luggage (albeit, very special luggage) and ride in a carrier, in the cargo hold. If the pet is an emotional support animal, they can be granted special status, and ride in the plane even if they're a little larger than is normally allowed. But that's a different issue, and in any case it didn't apply to us.

Our dog is just barely over the limit. At the time, I think the limit was ~18 lbs. (approximately 8kg), and he was 20 lbs. (approximately 9kg). (As an aside, don't quote me on that 18 lb. limit; you'll need to look it up yourself if you're really interested). In any case, the point is that he's not big, and we thought we might just be able to get him in the cabin with us.

As it turned out, however, because it was (as I may have mentioned) the middle of the pandemic, no airlines were transporting pets. None. At all. 

But let's back up for a moment, because we really didn't know this until we actually went looking for airline tickets. Before that, we researched what would be needed to bring a dog from the U.S. to Spain. In case you're wondering, it was the following:

1. Get a special veterinary check-up to confirm he wasn't carrying any communicable diseases. At first, we thought we needed to go to a special vet to get this done. After speaking with the vet he'd already been seeing, we found out that our vet could do the exam. It was a pretty standard deal and not too costly.
2. Ask the vet to submit some paperwork to the state veterinary office in the capitol (Olympia, WA, for us since we were living outside of Seattle at the time).
3. Wait for the state veterinary office to review the paperwork, place their stamp on it, and send it back. The most important part of this was that there was a time window: the exam and resulting paperwork was only good for a short period of time (IIRC, it was a week, but again you'll need to check on this for yourself as I may not remember correctly and the requirements may have changed since then.)
4. Get a "pet passport". This was essentially an identification for the dog stating who he belonged to and including the relevant veterinary details.
5. Find a flight.

I was actually surprised that there was no mandatory quarantine required upon entering Spain. This was really good news, as it would have definitely complicated matters.

Simple, right?

So, we went about getting the paperwork together, got the pet passport, and gave some thought to whether we could bring Ace in the cabin with us or if he'd have to ride below. But now we're back to the part of the story where we couldn't find a flight.

We talked to every major airline going into Madrid, or even getting close. Nothing. Nada. Zip. Thanks, COVID.

We were getting desperate. At this point, everything else was already in motion--the house was about to sell; our stuff was being packed up and carted away by the movers; and we had finally received our residency visas, which we'd picked up from the Spanish consulate in Seattle (it was actually just this guy's house in Bellevue. But that's another story.) 

It was at this point that we broke down and hired a pet transport company. We'd actually considered this early on in the process, but decided against it because it was so expensive. This first place we talked to wanted more than $5,000, which just seemed outrageous. Also, it annoyed us that the guy we were talking to kept referring to our dog as, "your fur baby", just as a matter of course. I mean, it's one thing to make a joke here or there, but this was every time. It felt like he really couldn't care less about the service he was selling, or about our dog, but if he kept referring to the dog as, "your fur baby", it would somehow seem like he actually did care. It really felt like we were being "marketed to", which immediately made me suspicious and mistrusting. (Let that be a note to anyone looking to market services to people already in a vulnerable position: just be honest and earnest, and don't try to blow smoke up peoples' backsides.) Anyway, we figured that, for $5,000, we could get the paperwork done and find him flight on our own.

But now we were up against some deadlines. So, after calling around to a few other services (there were a bunch of them at the time, all eager to take our money), we finally found one that quoted us around $2,500. Yep, you read that right. I'm still embarrassed to say how much we spent. It pretty much screams "privileged" and "idiotic", and probably a bunch of other things. All I can say in my defense is that, if you have a pet, you'll likely understand our desire to take the dog with us. And if you don't have a pet, well, maybe you can sympathize with us already going a little crazy between the moving, the paperwork, selling the house, and worrying about COVID.

And if you can't sympathize with any of that, well... either you legitimately had something more stressful going on, or maybe you didn't realize the rest of the world was dealing with COVID?

Anyhow, we hired the "pet relocation specialists" and assumed all would be well. We were wrong. First, they couldn't find a flight either. I guess I knew this was coming, but part of me was hoping that maybe they had some special deal with an airline that we weren't privy to. Regardless, even if they didn't have a flight right away, we figured it would only be another week or so before they found something. And fortunately, we already had a really great border that we'd been taking Ace to every time we took a family vacation. He absolutely loved her, and she him, so we weren't worried about him being properly cared for in our absence. So we took him to the boarder and said goodbye, and figured we'd see him in a week or so.

Three weeks. That's how long it took for Ace to finally get to Madrid. I suppose it could have been worse. First, it took forever to find a flight. (Lufthansa, in case you're wondering, was about the only airline that would even consider transporting an animal at that time.) Next, because it took so long to find a flight, all of the veterinary paperwork had to be redone. (Again, thank goodness we had such a great lady boarding him: she took him back and forth to the vet at least twice.) While trying to get the paperwork redone, the transport agency messed up and didn't make sure it actually got signed and stamped before they picked it up. You'd think that would be top-of-mind, given that they paid a courier to drive from Seattle to Olympia and back to get it (about a 1.5-hour drive, depending on traffic.) And because they missed getting the paperwork back, Ace missed his flight. 

After all that, it turned out that no airlines could actually fly the dog to Madrid. This point was actually not made clear to us in the midst of the paperwork-and-missed-flight fiasco; it only became clear later, when we were told that the dog would be flying into Barcelona.

Barcelona!?! Apparently, due to the heat, Madrid doesn't allow animals to be flown into the airport during the summer. This actually makes sense, given what we know now about the temperatures in Madrid in September. At the time, it was just one more twist to an already-crazy story.

To wrap this up, our dog was eventually put on a plane and flown to Frankfurt, Germany (a place I still haven't been). Once there, Ace was taken off of the plane by a handler and allowed to walk around (this was a special service for which we had to pay extra.) Then he went onto a second plane, on which he was flown to Barcelona. After arriving in Barcelona, he was picked up by a special pet courier and driven to Madrid (a 6.5-hour drive).

At 2:30AM, we finally received a call from the courier that he, and Ace, were parked outside. We went down to greet him. He was so excited when he heard our voices that the crate started rocking from him jumping around inside it. We were so relieved he'd finally made it.

In his excitement, he peed everywhere.

Everything is Normal

Todo es normal. It's become our in-joke whenever we have a problem at the house, or the tax office, or the electric company, or anywhere, it seems, we're having a problem. It's because we've lost track of how many times we've been told that after telling someone we've recently paid that we are having a problem with the thing for which we paid them. Whether it's a purchase or a service, when you have a problem with something, the first thing you'll usually hear is, "Oh, that's normal."

Take, for instance, shortly after we moved in to the house we bought. We actually bought the place last year, but we've spent the last year renovating it. That's a story for another time. Anyways, we finally moved in at the end of June. And the first morning we woke up in our new house... it smelled like a combination of poop and rotten eggs.

Turns out it was sewer gases, coming from the shower drain. But when we told the contractor about it?

"Es normal."

Like, really? It's normal for my bathroom to smell like a frat-house refrigerator at the end of the semester? Like, instead of a toilet, we had a port-o-let installed? I've moved a lot since I left home, and I've never  known that to be normal.

"Oh yes, in Madrid, if people go away for a few weeks in the summer, when they return home it's typical for the house to smell until you air it out."

Great. Except that this wasn't after a few weeks. It was after a single night. Every night.

It turned out that it really wasn't normal. The problem was a combination of issues: first, the trap installed in the shower wasn't deep enough. In case you're not familiar with them, it is common to have a piece of plumbing installed in the drain of a shower, toilet, or sink that uses water to "trap" the naturally-occurring sewer gases and keep them from coming back out of the drain. (That actually es normal.) Under the sink, it's that curved piece of pipe at the bottom of the drain, and in the U.S. it might be called a "j-trap" or a "p-trap", because the pipe is shaped like the letter "j", or like a letter "p" laying on it's face (or maybe just because it's supposed to trap the smell of pee before it gets into your bathroom.) 

In a shower, the trap is typically shaped like a bowl with a smaller bowl inside of it. Regardless of the shape, though, the function is the same: the trap uses water to keep sewer gases from coming back out of the drain by acting as a one-way valve.

So, back to the issue at hand: the trap in a shower is not, as a rule, very deep because it has to fit under the shower pan (the "floor" of the shower that keeps water from running out when you're actually using it). And because it was so bloody hot inside--due first to it being July, and second to our air conditioner being on backorder--the water in the trap would evaporate overnight. It didn't help that it's so dry in Madrid. Even if we took a shower at night, resulting in the trap getting filled with water, by morning all of that water had evaporated, freeing the gases to enter the bathroom.

So there it was: a shallow trap; too much heat and too dry a climate; overnight evaporation; and voila: poop and rotten eggs.

Fortunately, it turns out there's a solution. In older bathrooms, builders used to install a "whole-bathroom trap". This was a water trap that was usually less susceptible to the water evaporating out of it because it would be set into the floor and thus not so exposed to the air. Historically, this was done for most bathrooms because, historically, there was no air conditioning. Since everyone had to suffer with heat, evaporating water and sewer gases were more common. So someone figured out that they could solve the problem by putting an extra piece of curvy pipe--basically a j-trap--in the drainpipe taking all of the water away from the bathroom. Since air conditioning has become more common, however, the extra trap has gone out of fashion. For one thing, it's an extra piece of plumbing that has to be installed, meaning the bathroom floor has to be designed in such a way to allow extra space for it. For another, because it's a curvy piece of pipe, it's easier for clogs to happen there. And because it's under the floor, if you can't unclog it with a drain-snake down the toilet, well... get ready to rip up your bathroom floor. So, since people could add a water trap for each fixture (toilet, shower or tub, sink, bidet), which was both effective and a lot easier to unclog, the "whole-bathroom trap" went out of fashion.

Still, this elegant old solution proved it is still relevant: At the plumber's suggestion, we had him install a secondary trap under the floor of the bathroom. Fortunately, our bathroom is situated above the kitchen stairs. I know what you're thinking--You'd better hope your toilet never floods--and you're right, I do hope that. But the bathroom isn't one the whole kitchen, just the stairs. And thanks to this, the plumber was fairly easily able to go through the ceiling above those stairs (and below the shower) to access the drain pipe. And since we also had him put a little trap-door in the ceiling underneath where the drain is located, should we ever really need to, we can access the trap without having to tear up the bathroom floor.

So anyhow, that's how we got rid of the nasty sewer gas smell, and now waking up and not smelling that stink es la nueva normalidad.

Greetings from Madrid

 I originally started this blog to document some new programming and tech stuff I was working with, but I quickly let that lapse and haven't posted in years. In a few words, life happened, and a blog just didn't seem that important. A lot has happened since then--my children have gotten older, with all of those child activities that any parent will understand; I changed jobs; I started my own company on the side; I broke my foot. And now, we've moved to Spain! 

It's that last bit that's making me want to write again. People ask how it's going and I find myself giving these long expositions over email. Heck, a complete stranger just emailed me and I definitely over-shared. At least this way, if you get bored you can just stop reading and move on. 

In any case, I'm going to start writing about the experience of moving over here from the US. I'm going to do that partly because I had a lot of experiences and gained a lot of insight into the process that could definitely benefit someone else. At least, I wish someone had told me a number of these things rather than my wife and I having to figure it out on our own. 

Another reason I want to write this is to help me remember some of the things we've done and experienced. It's already been quite an adventure.

And, so I have a place to start the next time I sit down to write, here are some of the things I might write about: 

• Getting over here. What a process that was! Of course, it didn't help that the world was hit with a global pandemic just about the time I accepted the job and we started working on moving over here. It took us five months to get here, which I'm told actually isn't too bad, especially considering the uncertainty brought on by the pandemic.
• Kids missing their friends. Mine are school-age: one in elementary school and one in middle school (in the US system), and both with established groups of friends they've known since daycare. We've had some tears.
• Things you just can't get over here. Some of it would be useful; some of it's just stupid but we miss it anyway. It all falls completely into the category of "first-world problems".
• COVID. Life during a pandemic. Moving during a pandemic. How can I not mention it?
• Travel. This is one of the biggest reasons why we moved: so we could travel all over Europe. We've already seen some beautiful places and we have plans for a lot more.
• Working remote. I dunno. It's a big part of life; I'm sure it'll come up.
• Navigating bureaucracy. Spain has a lot of it. I mean a lot. I'm sure part of the problem is that I've spent most of my life in the U.S., where I already had most of the paperwork taken care of from a young age. I've heard horror stories from co-workers in the U.S. trying to make sure their work visas didn't expire, and I never had to deal with it. And now, I'm a foreigner in someone else's country. Fair enough; we should probably all have to go through this at least once in our lives to get an appreciation for what others have to do. Still, Spain seems to have an inordinate amount of bureaucracy. I think God is trying to get me to work on having more patience.
• How to get here. Definitely some advice to be dispensed. We got over here in spite of travel bans and a raging virus. And with a dog, no less!
• How to find an apartment. And a school for the kids. And healthcare. And get your NIE card. And what an Empadronamiento is.
• Lanzarote. We went. It was beautiful.
• Skiing near Madrid. We've only been once, so far, about an hour away by car. Had a great time. Maybe explaining how it works here will save someone else the hassle of showing up and not getting a lift ticket (it's actually a pretty common thing here.)
• Buying a car. I mean, speaking of driving... we decided to go ahead and buy a car when we got here, mainly so we could take road trips. We're also lucky enough to have a garage to park it in even though we live right in the city.
• Driving in Madrid. It's an adventure all to itself! But don't speed past the speed-cameras, even a little bit. 
• Segovia. And Paradores. And Cuenca, with its "hanging houses". And Manzanares el Real. And...
• Living in Madrid. It is a truly amazing city. And we're only four blocks from Retiro! Crazy!

I'm sure there'll be more, but that's a good start for now.