FIVE MOUNTAIN PASSES OF SPAIN: They Told Me: 45 Days

Ahead lay nothing but the unknown: eight days of road across a changing Europe, an aging car, a family, a handful of suitcases - and a final point on the southern coast of Spain, the small seaside town of Garrucha. With no connections, no command of the language, and no ready plan, the emigrant's road begins - backed by nothing but the trade of an engineer, a lifetime of hard-won experience, and the sheer will to adapt to whatever comes. But reality proves far harder than it ever looked from a distance. Obtaining and replacing documents becomes a quest in its own right. Re-registering the car - promised in forty-five days - drags out across half a year. Bank accounts are frozen without warning, employers break their word, and behind the handsome facades a whole hidden world opens up: bureaucracy, unwritten rules, and the tangled, difficult business of human beings. This is a book about uprooting, about survival, about finding one's professional feet in a foreign land. About the hard undercurrents that run inside companies. About loss, disillusion, and the encounters no one sees coming. About the people who helped and who hindered, who betrayed and who inspired - and who, one way or another, kept driving him onward. Five Mountain Passes of Spain / They Told Me: 45 Days is not only a story of emigration. It is a story about how to hold on to your inner core, how to keep your dignity intact, and how to keep moving forward when the familiar world caves in and a new life must be built from absolute zero. Because sooner or later, each of us has to take up the pencil and draw, by our own hand, the route of the life still ahead.