Adjusting to Life in Spain: How I Meet New People (Language Exchange)

Click here to read the previous post, Adjusting to Life in Spain: How I Meet New People (Cafés)

I’ve heard it said that meeting new people is harder as you get older (and by older they seem to mean 30+ for christ’s sake). I mostly disagree with this, and here’s why.

When we’re younger, we go to school, go to summer camp, get (and quit/are fired from) a bunch of jobs as we put ourselves through school and then later as we try to work our way to the career we want. We join yoga classes and laser tag competitions and don’t hesitate to say yes when people we barely know invite us and our friends to a random party.

But as we get older, we tend to stop doing new things, stop putting ourselves out there, stop going outside of our familiar little bubble that includes the same people, places and hobbies. So I’d say it’s not so much that meeting people is harder when you’re older, it’s that meeting new people is harder when you stop doing new things.

Which is why I moved to Spain. Kidding. But now that I’m in Spain and no longer in any kind of familiar little bubble with the same friends or family, I am forced to do new things and, thus, meet new people.

Which brings me to the second way (the first way being cafés and tabernas) I have been meeting new people here….

Language Exchange Meetup

I RSVP for a reunión de intercambio de idiomas (language exchange meetup) in a barrio (neighborhood) that I’m unfamiliar with: Pacífico. Although “pacífico” means “peaceful” in Spanish, this area is described as “buzzy streets [that] are packed with bars, global restaurants, and cozy cafes serving popular chocolate and churros.” The highlight, apparently, is that it is ”home to a former power plant and a preserved 1919 metro station.”

Ooh, that tidbit of info calls for a….

metro Sidebar

Madrid’s metro system was, indeed, built in 1919 and the “preserved” station mentioned above is the Chamberí stop. The walls, archways, ceramic advertising panels, furniture and platform have been fully restored.

When built, Madrid’s metro had one metro line with just eight stops. Today, “this vast subterranean labyrinth is the seventh-longest underground system in the world and hosts around two million journeys every day.”

There is a lot going on underneath the city:

The ruins of a 15th-century church were discovered under the Cercanías station.
Ruins of a 16th-century fountain were discovered under the Opera station.
The remains of 200 people (friars, to be exact) were found under the Tirso de Molina station. Apparently, you can hear the ghosts….

Also, I’d noticed that when standing on the platform waiting for a metro train, it comes from the right as opposed to from the left, like in left-side-driving countries such as England. Why? Because “It was only in 1924 – five years after the metro opened – that Spain made the official switch from left to right. The metro decided to stick with the old rules, serving as yet another curious relic from Madrid’s fascinating past.”

Back to the Meetup

Because I’m unfamiliar with the metro system in Madrid (read: nervous to take it for the first time), I walk the 45 minutes to the bar in which this meetup is held, arriving slightly damp of forehead.

By the way, for anyone not familiar with a language exchange meetup, this is simply a scheduled (often on, surprise, surprise, Meetup.com) social gathering where people who speak different languages get together to practice a new language by engaging in conversation or playing simple word games.

*Me at my first language exchange meetup….*

There are about ten of us seated around two tables pushed together off in the corner of a casual neighborhood bar. Besides the organizer, I’m the only native English speaker wanting to practice Spanish, while everyone else (from Spain, Africa, Latin America, China) is there to practice English.

Everyone is very nice and chatting with one another, but I already feel a little nervous about my Spanish-speaking skills – or, more to the point, my Spanish-listening skills. Talking one-on-one, I can generally understand what the other person is saying, but in a group situation, I lose the thread of conversation very quickly.

There’s a two-drink minimum for this meeting (since it’s three hours long), so before we “officially” get started, I jump up to get a caña (small glass of courage, I mean beer). By the way, this Spanish beer graphic has been very helpful for me:

We play simple word games that are designed to give everyone a chance to A) practice Spanish or English, and B) get to know one another. For instance, you pick a word out of a hat and then try to describe it to everyone without using that word – in the language you are practicing. I know what mosca is (“fly”) but describing it en español is a little more challenging. Or the organizer asks a random question — where would you like to travel to and why? what’s the last movie you walked out of? — and everyone answers in turn.

After several hours of this, we revert back to just conversing, generally with our immediate neighbor. The thing about language exchange meetups that I love is that everyone who attends is well-traveled (both visiting and living in various countries), and well-traveled people tend to be pretty interesting and open-minded.

Soon people start to leave. The six of us who are left decide to go out for dinner — or rather, they decide in their native (fast) Spanish to go out for dinner and I look at them blank-faced until they translate for me and I happily agree to go.

The restaurant we’ve they’ve decided on is in another barrio so we head out to the nearest metro station. Everyone already has a red Tarjeta Multi (“multi card,” which makes me want to say “Leeloo Dallas, multipass”), Madrid’s public transportation card, but I must purchase one in the station. I stare at the numerous metro vending machines which seem overly confusing, but that may just have been the non-native language and the two beers I’d had. One of the guys in the group notices my deer in the headlights stare and helps me purchase a card and load it with ten trips.

The whole trip from Pacífico to Lavapiés takes about 20-25 minutes and I wind up chatting with one of the guys who happens to be a reader and recommends a great used bookstore. I immediately whip out my phone and pin it on Maps for future reference.

As the train pulls into a station, the book guy tells me that this is our stop. I step up to the doors and wait. We’re stopped, but the doors don’t open. Before I can give book guy my deer-in-the-headlights look again, he reaches past me and manually opens the doors. Who knew the subway doors didn’t open automatically?? Had I been alone, I probably would’ve missed my stop!

The restaurant, Mandela, is Senegalese and very colorful on the inside, and the six of us eat delicious new foods and chat about all sorts of things, most of which I don’t understand because they’re back to rapid-fire Spanish. But still, I have a great time. And I can’t help but stare at the Nelson Mandela quote on the front of the menu and agree whole-heartedly.

I like this language exchange meetup, and all the participants, so much that I plan to attend next week. I don’t know if any of these people will become actual friends or anything like that, but I do know that it’s nice to have a comfortable group to go to every Saturday and see some familiar faces.

More about where I meet new people in Madrid in the next post….

CLICK HERE TO READ the next post, ADJUSTING TO LIFE IN SPAIN:How I Meet New People (Wine Tasting)

Note: All photos taken or created (using DALL-E) by Selena Templeton, unless otherwise noted.

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