August Travel Expenses

Since we were in Granada for the month of August studying Spanish, we found it all too easy to fall back into the comforts of a daily routine, and we picked up some awful habits of dining out in the process. As I suspected, almost all of our cost categories came down, most significantly Lodging due to our €490/month apartment.

Lodging consisted primarily of our apartment in Granada, but we also spent four nights in an Airbnb in Malaga to cool off and relax after our packed week in Ireland. Transportation included two one way flights from Dublin to Malaga on Ryanair, one of Europe’s many low cost air carriers, plus several bus tickets to travel around Andalucia including Salobreña, Monachil, and Granada. Dining out included too many donor kebabs for my health, late night trips to the local gelaterias, dinner out at a few restaurants, including Oliver which was featured on Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown, and one “Menú del dia” which is a common offer around spain; generally a three course dinner including a drink for ~$10-$12 per person. Entertainment consisted entirely of inexpensive ($1.80-2.50) beer and/or tinto de verano (good quality red wine ruined by being mixed with Fanta and a lime, but still tastes soo good) which always resulted in free tapas...we’ve talked a lot about tapas...here, here and here. This amazed me as we drank so much more alcohol in Spain than in Ireland, yet our per day expense was no different. Health and Medical costs consisted of 31 days of amortization of our travel insurance policy. Groceries went up a bit because we were able to cook in our kitchen. Attractions included admission to the Alhambra, the Alcazaba of Malaga, a Flamenco show, the house that Pablo Picasso was born in, the castle of Salobreña, and several other religious attractions in Granada. Miscellaneous expenses were a handful of post cards, stamps, and some clothing items we wanted for our future travel destinations.

The only item that significantly increased our per day travel costs over last month was approximately $1,100 in tuition for four weeks of Spanish immersion classes. This is certainly not something we needed, but we have found our new language skills rather valuable as we can now converse quite freely in Spanish. We could also do without drinks and tapas every night and could probably cut back on all the Attractions and other locations we visited, but for now I’m pretty happy with how we’re trending. With that being said, one could live a very luxurious life in Spain for about $2,400/mo or <$29,000/year. I think we may just retire here :)