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.
Chaotic read, 10/10
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