the one where I walk down the aisle in a 6 euro primark dress

 

You know how it is. The end of the month. Your cupboards have seen better days and for the past three nights you’ve been eating some questionable concoctions of instant noodles, fish fingers and whatever else you can ‘borrow’ from your flatmates until payday comes. As expected, this is exactly the position I found myself in at the end of my first month in Spain after overindulging in café con leches and one too many one euro tequila shots. Before moving to Spain, I knew that I would eventually need to find extra work to supplement my part-time teaching hours and it seemed as though that time had arrived. Therefore, one evening, after another dinner of instant noodles gone wrong, I wrote a post on Facebook detailing my job experiences and posted it into multiple different Facebook groups; ‘Expats in Alicante,’ ‘Irish in Alicante,’ ‘Work in Alicante,’

A day later, I found my phone flooded with messages; an old Irish lady from the group, ‘Irish in Alicante’ wishing me well and telling me to keep safe, an old man advising me to look for work in Benidorm, a couple asking me to teach their 2 year old child English and finally, a Swedish woman who had moved to Spain with her partner and needed a babysitter for their son. She told me they were getting married soon and needed someone to look after her son at the wedding. The next thing I knew I was on my way to their house situated in a town not far from Alicante. Over the next few weeks I visited often, getting to know their son before the big day. His name was Lucas and he was four years old, with beautiful big blue eyes and a mop of blonde hair. We played chase, built Playmobil houses and made playdough pizzas together, although I have a sneaking suspicion that I enjoyed the playdough pizzas more than him.

The wedding itself was taking place outside Alicante in a beach town called Oliva, a four hour bus journey away. I would spend two nights in a hotel and look after Lucas when I was needed. When I called my granny to tell her what I was doing she just laughed, ‘How do you get yourself in these situations?’ she asked. I thought the same. A month ago I was living in my parents’ house and working in the clothes section of Tesco’s, rearranging underwear displays and here I was, a month or so later, on my way to a wedding in a random town in Spain to look after the child of a couple I had met only weeks prior. ‘Living la vida loca,’ I thought in attempt to reassure myself as the bus sped on past Benidorm.

I arrived at the bus station, nauseous, after eating a whole packet of chocolate biscuits out of boredom. The groom picked me up and on the way to the hotel we went over the plan for the wedding. ‘So after that, you and Lucas will walk down the aisle together,’ he told me calmly. ‘What? You want me to walk down the aisle?’ I said, surprised. ‘Yes, did you not know that was the plan?’ he replied. I could only laugh, ‘Okay, I’ll walk down the aisle then.’ I said.

I was supposed to be at the hotel at 2pm the next day to look after Lucas. It was only a 30 minute walk from the apartment complex where I was staying, however, knowing myself and my horrendous sense of direction, I left at 12:30. Unsurprisingly, I got lost instantly. I had no data to look up the directions on Google Maps and there was no around that I could ask. I had asked the man at reception for directions, but of course I didn’t understand anything apart from a few hand gestures. I decided to walk in what I thought was the general direction of the hotel until I met two ladies who told me I was going the wrong way (as I had expected). I told them that I needed to get to the hotel in (very) broken Spanish. ‘Come with us, we’re going that way,’ they said.

As I followed them down the boardwalk onto the beach, they explained that they were sisters. One of the ladies was thin with bright orange hair that almost camouflaged into her skin which had obviously been exposed to quite a few Spanish summers. She wore thick black eyeliner all around her eyes and silver hooped earrings. Her sister was the opposite; small, pale with short dark hair and a heavier frame. ‘She’s the old one,’ the red haired lady said to me in Spanish, ‘She’s sixty, I’m only fifty eight.’

As we walked, I struggled to converse with the two ladies who couldn’t speak any English at all. I attempted to explain to them that I was going to babysit at a wedding at the hotel by humming, ‘Here Comes the Bride,’ and they nodded furiously to show me that they understood. After about ten minutes, the older sister began to struggle to keep up. The red haired lady turned to say something to her and then told me, ‘My sister is too old and slow, we need to run.’ I turned to thank the older sister and say goodbye and when I turned back around the red haired lady was already jogging metres ahead of me.

Obviously, coming from Ireland, I didn’t have a lot of summer clothes and I definitely didn’t have a wedding outfit, but my mum and I had been shopping in Dublin before I left for Spain and I had picked up a long black dress from Penny’s (Primark) for 6 euro, ‘What a bargain!’ I thought at the time, ‘But I wonder if I’ll ever actually wear it.’ Little did I know that a month later I would be sprinting along the beach in this skin tight black dress with my sandals in my hand, a rucksack on my back and another small bag crossed over my body attempting to keep up with this fifty something year old Spanish lady. As I jogged I attempted to hide how much I was struggling to breath but my chest was heaving. I could feel the sweat beads forming on my forehead and I wondered how I was going to hide the sweat patches on my back when I finally arrived at the hotel… and walked down the aisle.

Out of nowhere, the lady stopped running, ‘Oh thank God,’ I thought, as I attempted to get my breath back. ‘Look,’ she told me, pointing at a seagull that was flying with a fish in its mouth, ‘He’s going to drop it.’ And he did, about two metres in front of us. All of a sudden she took her sandal and started pushing the fish back to sea, ‘Venga, venga, venga!’ she exclaimed at the fish as she pushed it. Once she had successfully rescued the fish she turned to me and said, ‘Sometimes life puts you on a path so you can help others.’ ‘Like me,’ I thought. ‘Like that fish,’ she said, as she began to start running again. As I ran behind her I thought, ‘This just can’t be real.'

After another 15 minutes of jogging in full sun we finally arrived at the hotel. She kissed me and wished me luck and I thanked her profusely. What would I have done without her? Then, as quickly as she had appeared, she was gone, running back towards her sister. ‘How did you get yourself into this situation?’ I asked myself as I walked towards the reception of the hotel. But I didn’t have time to think about it. I had a job to do. I had to walk down the aisle.

At the hotel I got Lucas ready for the wedding, I was so grateful for how well-behaved he was amongst the busyness of the bridal party. When it was time to go, we walked down to the beach where the ceremony would be taking place. As we waited for our cue, I looked around at the flowery, flowy dresses that the other women at the wedding were wearing. ‘If I had known I was going to walk down the aisle, I would have worn something nicer!’ I told the mother of the bride. I tried to remind myself that no one was looking at me but inside I couldn’t believe that I was there, walking down the aisle in a 6 euro Primark dress, on some random beach on the Costa Blanca a month after I had arrived in Spain. Life is so crazy.

The ceremony was beautiful and luckily, Lucas was an angel. He crashed after the dinner and as I put him to bed I thought about my day which felt like it a fever dream. I couldn’t wait to get home to Alicante the next day and tell my flatmates all about what had happened. ‘Living la vida loca,’ I thought.