Somewhere around mid-June I decided I was being boring and should start saying yes to things. All things. Didn’t think it through, just did it. I thought I’d get a few coffee invitations, maybe a trip to the beach. I didn’t picture being in a stranger’s kitchen at 3 a.m. trying to explain in bad Spanish why I’d just drunk something bright green.
First “yes” was after a language exchange. We’d been talking about how British people panic if you make eye contact for more than two seconds, and then someone said “we’re getting drinks, you coming?” I said yes before remembering drinks in Valencia aren’t one or two and home by midnight. They’re three bars, endless cañas, the odd agua de Valencia (cava, gin, orange juice — sounds cute, drinks like a lawsuit). At some point I was explaining the 2008 financial crash to a man called Raúl who claimed he’d invented a better sandwich. Don’t ask.
The next yes was “beach day.” I turned up with SPF 50 and a sensible swimsuit. The others had a cooler full of beer and a speaker. The beer won. By the time the sun dipped we were on a train to a town I’d never heard of, eating bocadillos that belonged to other people, and I was mentally running through my kidnap survival plan. No kidnap — just someone’s cousin’s house, couches full of strangers, a dog that slept on my arm like it owned me.
Back in Valencia, still peeling from the sun, I got “come to a family thing.” I pictured six people around a table. It was a baptism. Catholic. Full suits. The kind where you don’t leave before midnight. I got put in the front row next to the grandmother, holding a candle, then holding the baby, then being handed a plate of jamón. Seven hours later I was the adopted foreigner of the day and being told by Marisol, an older woman with the authority of a general, that I was too thin and should come for dinner on Thursdays. I’ve been twice.
Somewhere in there I said yes to a paella competition, thinking it meant eating paella. I had wine in one hand and a cutting board in the other before I knew it. Valencia takes paella personally — strict rules about ingredients, techniques, the size of the paellera. Pilar, who I’d met twenty minutes earlier, told me she’d throw me in the Turia river if I stirred it wrong. There were judges. An entry fee. An argument about rabbit meat so intense I thought someone might call the police.
By week three I was sleeping at odd hours, saying yes to things before I knew what they were. A “quick drink” turned into dancing in a bar the size of a wardrobe in El Carmen, where I think the barman was also the DJ and maybe the landlord. A “walk” was actually a hike up to the Castillo de Sagunto in the middle of the day with no water and a lecture about Roman history from a man who may or may not work there.
I kept going. Because once you start, it’s hard to stop. And because somewhere between the beach dogs, the baptisms, and the threat of being arrested for culinary crimes, I started feeling like maybe this was the quickest way to actually belong here.
The last yes was to “help out at an event.” I thought they meant stacking chairs. I ended up on a microphone, introducing acts in Spanish I couldn’t fully pronounce, misnaming a band from Castellón in front of two hundred people. They cheered anyway.
I’ve taken a week off now. My phone’s full of messages I’m not answering yet. I can still smell smoke from the paella day on one of my jackets. And I think Marisol is serious about dinner this Thursday.
