A Spanish Sunday Kind Of Mood
On - an absolutely beautiful day doing nothing-in-particular nowhere-in-particular (a win when “doing nothing” has been something you’ve been running from for years). And, realizing that you don’t need to change time-zones to learn how to not give a f*ck about what people think of you.
Last Sunday Sevilla was on a buzz. The sun was out, claro (of course, one of the few phrases I’ve mastered here). For the locals, that’s no surprise, but to my Canadian-bred-skin, I still live with the imminent fear that clouds, snow, or hail will come back at any moment.
So as any good Canadian does when the sun comes out, I spent the whole day outside, excessively shedding off layers while old woman pulled their “winter” coats tighter around them. It’s moments like this that remind me I’m not “blending in like a local” as much as I thought I was. It doesn’t help that my friend and I completely missed the entrance to the Triana Art Market, I wish I could blame it on the sign but it was definitely big enough, as the people we asked pointed out.
Another dead giveaway? Spending the morning with your South African friend, cameras strapped securely around the neck, snapping photos. (It also doesn’t help that, because my friend is from South Africa, she’s hyper-aware of pick-pocketing and won’t even take her hand off her lens. She told us that she’s seen people go up to cameras, push down the button to release the lens, take cet lens and run-off. I don’t blame her for the caution.)
After taking photos as any semi-evolved Tumblr-era gals would, we went to get lunch at an outdoor patio, our friends from Germany and America came to meet up with us. I still can’t get over how cool it is to be able to have four girls around a table all from different countries, with completely different life experiences, who didn’t know about the other’s existence until two weeks prior - chatting like best friends.
Travel brings out this weird side of you that’s open, vulnerable, and have you telling someone you met two days ago about your therapist’s joke she made the other day. When you get a group of people that are throwing themselves into a completely new culture, removed from all your friends, there’s some kind of instinct that turns on that makes you crave connection.
Okay, so that may be a no-brainer. You’re in a new country and you don’t have friends - obviously you want to talk to someone, no one likes to be lonely (and there’s a difference between alone and lonely).
I expected loneliness coming out here, but I didn’t expect it to be so easy to get rid of.
After lunch, we crossed the Triana bridge back to the “city-center” side, ran into some other Au Pairs with their friends and joined in for a Trinity Bellwoods-esque afternoon (obviously featuring a dude slack-lining, people ‘jamming’ on their guitars, and a healthy mix of speed walkers, runners, and people posing for photos).
So there we were a huge group of strangers coming from literally every corner of the globe, sitting in the sun, and overlooking the river. If it sounds idyllic it’s because it was, all we needed was a ukulele and we would have been the stereotypical Instagram story your friend Karen posts (#livelaughlove).
It’s surprisingly easy to talk to people you’ve just met in a rose-tinted situation like this one. But even when you take the glasses off, I still feel like I’ve met a group of people I can rely on, just like I do at home. You ask the classic first-date questions (where are you from, what do you do, did you creep me on IG before this etc.), but can go beyond the surface-level chatter within an hour with someone from the other side of the world.
Meeting new people, you can feel like you have to put on an “act”; I didn’t want them to judge me for having bad days or not always being the go-to ‘fun one’. But with people I’ve met, that hasn’t been the case. We’re all living abroad with no connection to this city or culture besides the temporary visas we have, which already opens you up a little bit (read: a lot). More importantly though, the people I’ve really connected with, in the nicest way, don’t give a fuck.
We were talking about this a lot at the river, the way that travel makes you cut-out the bullshit, something I didn’t expect to happen. People come as they are and have lived the life they’ve lived. It’s not about not caring about the other person, it’s about not caring what the other person will think of you and actually just being *pause* yourself. Ground-breaking news but when you’re authentic and don’t really care/give a fuck about what people think about you? It’s so much easier to attract the people you vibe with.
Growing up, I always presented a side of myself that I thought other people wanted to see, but when you do that, you barely make connections. How can you? I’d be talking about things I was kind-of-sort-of interested in but thought I should be because other people were also, and making connections based on things I didn’t really care about.
When you actually think about how much you change just to please other people, it’s insane (or to continue with the theme, fucked). Say you’re getting dressed in the morning, and you really want to wear one thing but you think everyone will judge you so you wear something else, and then all day you’re just making up stories in your head that people are judging you anyway. So now you’ve had a shit day with a boring outfit all based on random thoughts that aren’t even real. Or you could want to start blogging (meta), but you don’t want to start writing because you’re scared of what other people think. We’re not the center of attention, even if someone does judge you - who cares. It won’t affect your talent, it won’t affect how much you like doing something, and if you live according to what someone else wants; you’re never going to actually live for yourself.