How people living without a ready-made foreign community find their way into local life
There is a version of this story you have heard before. A newcomer arrives somewhere with a decent-sized foreign contingent already in place, finds the Facebook group within a week, and is at a quiz night by the fortnight. It is not a bad way to begin. It is just not this story.
This one is about the people who chose, or ended up in, somewhere with no such scaffolding. A village of three hundred where the families have been there a thousand years. A working town on Lanzarote where the neighbors are Argentine and Colombian rather than British. A small Spanish fishing town where the tourists leave in September and take the small talk with them. I asked a number of people living exactly that version of expat life to tell me how they had managed it. Nine wrote back, from Spain and, in one case, a memory of Mexico from a Dubliner now settled in Spain, and one small corner of the Basque country that technically isn’t either. From what came back, something closer to a manual began to take shape than a set of anecdotes.
The first thing they agree on, more or less unanimously, is that the language has to come before the friendship, not alongside it. Ann Marie, six months into Santander when we spoke, arrived in Spain with what she calls being ‘FAAAAAR from conversational’, and could not bring herself to walk into a shop without rehearsing the sentence first. Her first real conversation, with the man who assembled her bicycle, ran on pointing at maps and pantomime. It was, she says, ‘super funny’, and it also set the tone: you are going to look ridiculous fairly often, and the ridiculous part is not optional.
Kate, seven years into a working town in Lanzarote where everyone she knows is Spanish-speaking, is blunter about it. Not a bit of Duolingo, she told me. Immersive courses, daily practice, private lessons with a university tutor even now, seven years in. She is fluent. Her husband, who arrived with no Spanish at all, still struggles. The friendships they have made have sorted themselves roughly along that line.
But fluency, it turns out, is only the entry fee. It does not buy you the friendship itself. One contributor, an American woman who has lived in the same small Spanish town for four years and speaks fluent Spanish, still describes the long, slow negotiation with her own building. On her first day, with her arms full of boxes, a neighbor’s opening line was not a welcome but a warning: ‘You have a dog? I hope it doesn’t make any noise.’ She left baked goods on doors. They came back. Years on, the neighbors greet her warmly enough in the street, and like the dog rather a lot, but there is still no real friendship there. ‘I tried to be friendly,’ she says, of that first week, with the flatness of someone who has stopped being surprised by it.
Where the friendships did take hold, they mostly began somewhere unglamorous. A bar. A dog walk. A queue. Silvia, on an olive farm outside a small Catalan village, met her first real friend standing in the street and the conversation simply drifted, over some unspecified interval, into a bar. The American contributor’s first friend appeared at what she calls ‘the local bar of toda la vida’ – the bar that has always been there, that everyone’s grandfather also drank at. Nobody in this set of nine found their first proper friendship at an organized event. They found it standing somewhere ordinary long enough for somebody to start talking to them.
The moment of acceptance, when it came, tended to be small and slightly absurd, which is presumably why they all remembered it so precisely. M. Pauli, fifteen years into a small town on Mallorca where she describes the local society as ‘very closed’ and new friendships as, essentially, not really formed, still names the exact day she knew she had got somewhere: the local baker addressed her as reina. Queen. A term of endearment she had done nothing in particular to earn, except turn up, for fifteen years, and volunteer.
Cat, in a Valencian village of some six hundred people, points to an elderly neighbor who tolerates her Spanish and supplies her with fruit and vegetables in exchange for the occasional cake. The American contributor points to the day, after an injury, when her friends simply appeared and ran her bureaucracy for her, sat with her in doctors’ waiting rooms, did the things that in England you would only ask family to do.
Nobody mentioned a club. Or rather, one person did, and it did not work. Ann Marie tried to start a Buy Nothing group, the kind that had thrived in her old Wisconsin neighborhood, first in Zaragoza and then, tentatively, in Santander. She posted regularly. She invited people. ‘It just didn’t take,’ she says, with the particular resignation of someone reporting on a plan that made perfect sense on paper. M. Pauli’s own attempt at organized sociability, a run of garden parties, met the same fate. Whatever this kind of friendship runs on, it is apparently not invitations.
If there is a genre of story that recurs here more than any other, it is the language mistake that turned out not to matter. Cat, mid-conversation with an elderly man at a friend’s house, understood him to be asking whether she wanted children – hijos – and was, in her sixties, briefly and thoroughly alarmed, before establishing that he had actually asked whether she wanted figs. Higos. He thought it was hilarious. So, eventually, did she. Jane went into a butcher’s in Logroño and asked for half a polla to make soup, a word one vowel away from the chicken she meant and considerably ruder, and the whole shop dissolved before anyone helped her order the right thing. Ann Marie’s husband, on a hiking trail near Santander, told the group in Spanish that his wife had ordered him to the summit rather than sent him, using a verb that carries rather more weight than the English implies, and the group has apparently not let either of them forget it since. Kate told a friend’s husband that she liked his skin, meaning to say hair, and got away with it because piel and pelo are close enough for laughter and not close enough for an actual scene.
None of these stories ended a friendship. Several of them appear to have started one. There is a version of integration that treats every mistake as a small failure to be minimized, and a different one, which these nine seem to have arrived at independently, in which the mistake is the friendship’s opening move. You cannot be laughed at in a language you have not attempted to speak.
Not every account was this warm. One contributor, further into her own version of this, describes friendship where she lives as harder to reach than in England, more formal, built on family lines she was never going to belong to by blood. Her deepest friendship came out of a crisis rather than a courtship: her husband hospitalized after a stroke, an evening in the village bar rather than an empty house, and a long conversation with the bar owner that neither of them had planned to have. It has held since, through the illness of the bar owner’s wife and her husband’s recovery, and it arrived by accident rather than effort, which may be the more honest account of how most of these friendships actually begin.
And M. Pauli’s answer to what she’d tell someone considering the same move was two words, offered without embellishment: ‘Don’t do it.’ Fifteen years in, she counts her acquaintances as many and her friendships as, essentially, none. It is worth sitting with that answer for a moment rather than editing it out for balance. Not every closed community opens, however long you stay, and however well you learn the verbs.
Where friendship did take root, keeping it turned out to need its own adjustment, mostly around the question of arranging things. Kate, who used to need to know exactly when someone was coming over, spent years unlearning it; her closest friends now manage a WhatsApp ten minutes before arrival rather than the full advance planning she would once have insisted on. Ann Marie found the opposite: everything in Santander gets arranged, even the offer of half a watermelon to the neighbor across the hall, which she notes was not so different from home after all. The same contributor who found the bar owner’s friendship says no one pops in where she lives at all; a dinner party is a considered, occasional thing, not a casual one.
What nobody described, in nine sets of answers, was the kind of friendship that arrives ready-made. Every one of them put in the months, the classes, the standing about in bars being not quite understood, before anything solid formed. The American contributor, who has now watched several expat acquaintances leave for somewhere with a bigger foreign community, or leave the country altogether, put it more plainly than most: local friends have ties to the place. They mostly stay. It took her a long time, and several returned batches of baking, to get there. She would still, on the evidence of everything else she told me, do it exactly the same way again.
This was written by our contributing writer, Amanda Judson.
Image Credit: Pexels, Joshua Ruanes
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