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Welcome to the Travel Transformation Podcast, where we talk all things travel and all things transformation. I'm your host, Jessica Grace Coleman, and today is going to be a quick solo episode. I'm recording this from my bedroom in a villa in the Basque Country, which is a pop-up coliving experience that members of Sun and Co. have organised for the second year in a row. I came last year too, and I just want to apologise for the sound because, once again, I am not in the perfect conditions to record a podcast.

My bedroom looks out on a beautiful vista of the countryside, but it's also right next to a main road, and they're currently doing construction work. I'm sure you just heard that giant lorry go past. They also have traffic lights right outside the house, so we get people stopping in their cars. We can hear whatever music they're listening to in their car. Literally just before I started this, I went to press record and drilling started, and I was just like, “Oh, man!” We do actually have a room that we use for Zoom calls and things like that – it’s actually the best room in the house in this converted chapel. 

All the big houses in the Basque Country – and I think maybe in Spain in general, if they're big enough and if everyone was into religion in the house – they would have a chapel, and they've sort of modernised the chapel in this house. It has lovely pink wallpaper, but it still has some stained windows, and loads of books. It's on the other side of the house, so you can't really hear the road as much. But this is kind of an impromptu recording and it's already booked out. I will be doing a couple of interviews while I'm here – I'm here for a month – and when I do those, I will do them in the chapel. So, hopefully the sound will be better. But please bear with me for this episode.

I'll try not to ramble on too long because I know it's kind of annoying to listen to podcasts when the sound isn't great, but this is life. I thought I'd just go with it. So I poured myself a cup of tea and I'm just going to do it, so please bear with me, okay?

So, like I said, I'm in the Basque Country in Spain. I came here last year when they did the pop-up for the first time; the Sun and Co. house is usually in Javea, Spain, and I've been there too. It's just a really great way to live if you're a digital nomad, or even if you're a freelancer, a student, or someone who works for a company but can work remotely… there are loads of different people here. People who live in, like, a base and travel around a couple of weeks, a couple of months a year. People who are constantly on the road. Part-time digital nomads. Full-time digital nomads. It's amazing. And we all work together, we live together, we do professional events together, we do social events together, and we just hang out and have a great time. 

Where we are is a little village about ten minutes' drive from Guernica. You might know that from the terrible time it had with the bombings and also from Picasso's painting, Guernica. And there is a replica of that in the town, a nice mural. So that's where I am. There isn't a lot to do in the vicinity. There's like maybe three bars. One of them sells amazing cheesecake, although there's a whole story behind the cheesecake. Last year it was incredible, award-winning. I'm not sure if the same lady is making it. The first cheesecake I had here was a little disappointing, I have to say – not as good as the OG cheesecake. The second one was better. So I'm just going to have to keep trying it and hoping it gets back to what I experienced last year.

They're also doing it for six weeks this time instead of four, and two weeks have already passed – and I wasn't here. Unfortunately, we'd hyped up the cheesecake so much that when the people went to try it in the cheesecake place, they were a little underwhelmed. So that's a lesson not to hype up your cheesecake too much.

I'm here with people from all over the world. As far as I can recall, we have people from the UK, Iran, the US, Canada, Ukraine, Denmark, China, Slovakia, Brazil, Spain, Sweden, the Netherlands, Poland… and that's just this two weeks’ lot of housemates. It will change again and there'll be more in the last two weeks, and I think it's a few of us that are doing the last four weeks, so we'll get to meet new people. 

So, there is one thing I need to talk about, but I am going to do a whole episode on this, and that is Colin the donkey. And, if you follow me on social media, you’ll know that I am a little bit obsessed with this donkey. It's just across the road from the house. I named him Colin last year and I've come to the house this year to find that everyone is calling him Colin, which is great, but he does seem very sad. You can hear him braying, like hee-hawing, all day – well, throughout the day, and then I hear him at night as well at about half two and I don't know what's wrong with him.

He just seems very sad. When you go and visit him and then you leave, he will hee-haw at you. We went in a group the other day on our walk to Guernica. On the way there, when we left, he just started running around in circles and braying and it was heartbreaking! We never see his owners, we never see anyone with him – we know someone is moving his tether around the field, but we never see them. It's all very mysterious. We are in contact with someone who's going to come and check on his welfare, hopefully, but I'm not sure how that's going to go.

Poor Colin. Last time, I went around the field looking to check if he had any water bowl and that kind of thing and I couldn't see any. But the entire time I was walking around the field, Colin was right behind me. And I was looking at donkey behaviour about when they're stressed or when they're happy, and apparently they follow people around and like to be in close proximity to people they respect. So I think the love is mutual there! I'd like to think so.

Anyway, he now has a bag in the kitchen with his name on it – labelled ‘Colin’ – and we put leftover stuff in there. I went and bought him some apples and carrots and put them in there. So whenever anyone wants to go give him a treat from the house, they can grab something from the back and go and talk to him and hang out with him. And it's lovely to see him, but it's very sad. I think he's a very lonely donkey. I think he would like a nice field to roam around in – as a free-range donkey – and maybe a donkey friend as well.

I'm going to do a whole episode on him because I'm really passionate about helping poor defenceless animals who can't look after themselves. The thing is, lots of people have donkeys in the Basque Country and that's maybe just how they treat them. But in England, being on a short tether and not having access to water and stuff… that's a huge no-no. So we'll look into it and see what happens. 

Anyway, it's Thursday today when I'm recording this and I got to Spain last Thursday. I flew into Bilbao like I did last time, and I actually came two days earlier. Well, one day earlier, because there weren't any flights on the Saturday, which is when I could move into the house. There was one on the Friday, but it was at like 06:00 a.m., I think, and I am so over early flights; I can't do that anymore. So I came in the night before and paid for another night in the hotel just so I wouldn't have to get up at 06:00 a.m.

But it's funny – one of the women here, Kiana, flew from Manchester too. She lives in Manchester and she took the 06:00 a.m. flight, so if I'd taken that one, I would have been on the same flight as one of my housemates. And, considering we're from all over the world, I think that's pretty random and pretty cool. 

Yes, I went to Bilbao, and I was working at the same time. So, on the Friday, I spent most of the time in my hotel room working. I did go out for a little walk; I was hoping to find the erotic waffle shop that was there last time that I didn't go in – and I regretted not going in – but, sadly, it's not there anymore. I looked it up, and I don't know if they'd been cancelled… because they had created a Nativity display with erotic waffles. So you can imagine what baby Jesus looked like. And in a mainly Catholic country, I think a lot of people were very offended by that. I don't know if that's why it's not there.

Anyway, I went for a little jaunt. I went in some shops. I went to visit the Guggenheim Puppy, which is a big puppy made of flowers outside the Guggenheim Museum, and the big Guggenheim Spider, which is a big sculpture, which was really cool. I got some pictures and yeah, I just had a wander around and then went back to my hotel room. I did some more work, and then Kiana – who I mentioned – had flown in, so I met up with her in this nice plaza full of bars and restaurants. And we had Pintxos – which are tapas but not really, like small plates with bread topped with tortilla or with meat or fish or anything like that. And they're really cheap and really tasty. We had some drinks as well – tinto de verano… I may have got that wrong. I’ve also drunk a lot of calimocho since being here, which is half red wine, half coke. It sounds gross but it's actually really nice – but dangerous, because it doesn't taste like alcohol. 

So we did that and then the day after I went around the Guggenheim with Kiana until it was time to meet up with people. After the Guggenheim, I met up with two of my other fellow housemates who were in Bilbao in the old town. We got an Uber to the house and then we had pizza and drinks. We got to know everyone and stayed up way too late and drank way too much. 

So the next day I was a bit hungover, and we went to a nearby fair in a cute little nearby town and then we went on a hike, which I was not prepared for because I didn't know we were doing it, so I had completely the wrong footwear and, as I said, was very hungover, so that was interesting. But the view at the top of the hill that we climbed was amazing. It was looking out over the Bay of Biscay and it was all very, very cute. Beautiful views.

I'm going to do a complete recap episode at the end of the month to go over everything, because I've been making notes of what we're doing, but I just wanted to give you a bit of an update because I know people listen to this for ideas, for travel and for motivation for travel and for inspiration of things to do. And coliving is a great way to do this.

If you have the opportunity to work remotely – or even if you don't, and you just want to come and learn from other people for a week and work on your own projects, that's cool too – I would highly recommend Sun and Co. in general. And the pop-up is amazing. The Basque Country is really cool and they do lots of professional events. 

So this is only Thursday of week one and we've so far done a Playfulness 101 workshop, where we did some really cool creative stuff. We had to make structures, and two of the structures we made were Colin related; everyone loves Colin. We had Colin's House and Castle Colin, with a little picture of a little donkey and hashtag #freecolin. We had joked about doing a Colin TikTok but I might actually do it! If I had the time and I didn't already have a million social media profiles and this podcast to do, I would definitely do it.

But yes, we have done Playfulness 101. We also just did a little roundtable on ChatGPT and AI and all that good stuff, and how we can use it for our business and personal lives. That was really interesting. We have things called skillshares, which are kind of like workshops. We have roundtables where everyone gets a say and we can just learn from each other and we can pick a topic like ChatGPT and we can just have a casual conversation. And we have Masterminds, which is where one person comes to the group with a particular problem, everyone gives their input and their experience, and hopefully the person will come up with lots of ideas of how they can go about solving their problem, whether it's work-related or personal related or a bit of both – because, often, they're related. 

We had a mastermind on how to trust the people you work with, how to delegate, how to outsource, how to do all that stuff – and I can totally relate with this. It's very hard to delegate and outsource things that you've been doing yourself for years and you know the process inside out. Perhaps you don't have time to do all the standard operating procedures or record videos or create playbooks and all that kind of stuff, and you always think, ‘Oh, I can do it better or I can do it quicker,’ or, ‘What's the point in me spending weeks training someone when I could just do it myself?’ And it was all about that kind of stuff, which I think a lot of people in our group could relate to. And we came up with a lot of great ideas and perspectives on that. 

We also, so far, have gone on a walk to Guernica. It takes about 50 minutes to walk, but it's a really nice walk along a boardwalk along the river. That's our nearest town. A couple of people do have cars here, but generally we walk. Though there are buses and things, there are not many taxis. It took us a while to get back from Guernica after we'd gone for dinner and drinks, but I kind of like being isolated a little bit. I prefer that as you end up bonding a lot more. 

We do family dinners four times a week, going into cooking teams – and I cannot cook for anything. But it was our night last night and we did a sort of taco night, Mexican Night. Someone else is doing a Mexican night today, so we had to rebrand ours as Swedish Night because one of the women in our cooking team is from Sweden and she says they love tacos. It's all about branding.

You get to sit down and eat together four nights a week at least, and have wine and talk about our day. And we started doing this thing called A Rose And A Thorn. So we go around the table at dinner, and we say what was the rose of our day and what was the thorn of our day? So what was the highlight of our day and what was the low light of our day? And it's just a nice way to recap the day and appreciate the things that went well and commiserate on the things that went wrong. Mine are usually Colin-related, I have to say; either it was nice to see Colin or it was really sad to say bye to Colin. So that's been really nice.

I know the hosts from last time, but also I've known two people in these two weeks from last year and two people in the next two weeks. The ones from this two weeks are Bjorn and Basil – shout out to Basil, number one fan! I know you listen to this podcast, so thank you. Well, apparently, last year the Introvert Club was formed, but this was before I met them and I think I missed out on this whole thing.

Yes, introvert club. So last night, after dinner – which we had outside because it was a really nice day and it was still really quite warm in the evening – loud music went on, lots of people were dancing around, and the Introvert Club… went inside and played Jenga, which was actually really fun. Half of the fun of this Jenga is that it's colour-coded, but the dice that you throw to tell you which colour to use has completely different colours to the Jenga – it’s a mind exercise as well, trying to figure out the colours. But yeah, that's what I like about coliving. There are twelve of us, and you can go into different groups. Like, if you want to go outside and dance around and drink, you can. If you want to go inside, have a cup of tea and play Jenga, you can, it's great. If you need to go to bed early, that's fine. Get up when you want, it's all very chill. 

I hope this gave you some kind of idea as to what coliving is like. Like I said, I will do a recap at the end of the month, and I'm hoping to interview a couple of people while I'm here for the podcast. And it's just really great to meet people from all over the world and also to meet people from all different backgrounds, who have all different kinds of jobs, because you can learn so much. 

We also do one-on-ones with people if we have a certain skill that we want to learn or want to teach – a one-on-one on how to start a podcast, for instance – and other people, you can just be talking to them and you'll figure out that their job is something that could really help you, and then they'll be like, ‘Do you want to do a one-on-one?’ And it's a great thing because sometimes a one-on-one with someone, a coach or something, could cost you hundreds of pounds. And it's all about sharing and sharing your skills and learning from other people and giving back as well. That's what I love about co livings.

So, yeah, I just wanted to do a little quick intro episode to colivings and to the Basque Country, and to update you on what I'm doing now. Hopefully the sound wasn't too bad. 

I'll be back next time, hopefully with an interview. If not, it will just be me rambling about colivings again. But yeah, if you have any specific questions about colivings, about what it entails, about the stuff we get up to, about how you book it, about anything like that, let me know. You can DM me @traveltransformationcoach on Instagram, or you can email me at info@traveltransformationcoach.com. Okay, until next time, I'll catch you on the flip side, bye! 

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