Meeting people

Being, as I am, a little Ms pro-active, not exactly shy and feeling quite lonely here, I know that I'm going to make friends eventually; but it does takes time and I do miss opening my heart to people, asking opinion and sharing laughter and troubles alike with my friends.
(remember, ladies, me arriving to the library and saying that I needed advice? how many times?)
Somehow, writting is not the same.

So, sometime ago I found a particularly nice post in the local newspaper in my hometown in Argentina (thanks Goddess for the Internet) written by a guy living in Barcelona about his daughter 15th's birthday party.

In Latin America, there's a tradition to throw a big party when a girl reaches her 15th birthday. And I mean a big party, where the parents spend as much as they can, with a lovely dress for the girl (sometimes as good and expensive as a wedding dress), sometimes a meal, and usually a big cake. After the meal there's a ball opened by the girl dancing with her dad, who then pass her to dance with all the other guys in the party (first family and then friends) and everybody joins in the dance. It's a rite of passage from childhood to adulthood such as the bar mitzbah o bat mitzbah for Jewish teens.
Click here if you want to read about this tradition in Wikipedia. And click here if you want to see the the kind of party, dress, etc.
I didn't have the party because I exchanged it for a 2 months tour in Europe which was a great idea at the time and still think so. Some girls exchange it for a car or even cosmetic surgery (a friend of mine got her nose done instead and in her case it was a wise choice as her face changed for the better).

So, while I was still in Bristol, I read the letter that this guy posted in the local newspaper in my hometown telling how he and his wife thrown the party for their daughter here in Spain, where there's not such a tradition, and how the party was such a success and all the girls' friends wanted one and so on. It was a lovely entry so I wrote to them and told them so, introduced myself and told them that I was moving here. We've been in touch since and we finally meet on Sunday for a coffee.
It felt as nerve wrecking as if it was a blind date because this people could became my future friends, so I felt as if I had to give a great first impression and so I was nervous, I fretted about what to wear and so on.
How long since you've had to meet new friends? For most people this is a silly question and they've not done it since college! If it happens that you meet some new people is by chance and not something you're actively pursuing anyway. They don't have to. I do.

(By the way, it's not that I've much to choose on the what-to-wear area, as most of my clothes are still packed in boxes)

Anyway. We met a lovely couple with a similar background than ours and the conversation run easily enough. They also brought another couple from our home town and they were nice too. We found that we had friends in common and of course, we also shared the experience of being expats. Although they left Argentina around 2002 when the country went into default (or "free fall"), in the mist of a very desperate economic situation and arrived here with almost nothing and had to build their life from scratch. We're the lucky ones, arriving here with a job, with money enough to buy a flat, with no legal difficulties. Also, their stories with the Spanish bureaucracy made my complains feel petty. We get on like the proverbial house on fire and couldn't stop chatting even when we had to live the cafe as they were closing down.

It's nice to meet nice people and we arranged to go play paddle one of this weekends. On my way home I felt good, although latter on I payed the price of the tension of being on my best behaviour all the time, and I was sick. It always happens to me after I've been in a tense situation, whatever they are, exams, meting new people, signing the mortgage papers, whatever... I'm fine and usually sparkling during the ordeal and then, as soon as I'm safe at home I go sick for hours.