Dear English-speaking people of Barcelona,
We need to talk about making friends.
When you first move to Barcelona, you assume this will happen naturally. You will become a regular at a charming neighborhood café, where the waiter will learn your name and an attractive, internationally diverse group of people will eventually invite you to join them.
This does not happen.
The waiter probably will not care about you, his mind is on his next smoke break. The internationally diverse people already have plans. And the person who strikes up a conversation with you in the street is quite possibly distracting you while someone else takes your phone.
Eventually, someone tells you to join a WhatsApp group.
This sounds promising until you discover that many Barcelona WhatsApp groups consist primarily of people advertising rooms that do not legally have windows, selling mattresses of uncertain origin, and asking questions that could have been answered by typing four words into Google.
Fortunately, there is Keep Calm.
Keep Calm is a free, not-for-profit, volunteer-run community for English speakers in Barcelona. It has more than 20 sports and social groups covering padel, volleyball, hiking, tennis, running, football, badminton, ping pong, yoga, cycling, climbing, skiing, dance and other activities designed to expose how little exercise you have done since arriving in Spain.
The groups are organized through WhatsApp. They are large, active, and full of actual people making actual plans, which is a surprisingly high standard for an online community.
You choose an activity, join the appropriate group and wait for somebody to announce a meetup. Then you say you are coming.
The final step is important: you must go. Joining seven groups, muting all of them and reading the messages from bed does not count as developing a social life. I checked.
You Do Not Have to Be Good at Sports
This is good news for those of us who consider walking to the Metro a respectable cardiovascular achievement.
Many Keep Calm activities welcome beginners or divide events by ability. You do not need to pretend that you played competitive volleyball in university. You also do not need to understand padel before joining a padel group. Because really, nobody truly understands padel until a Spanish person explains that it is not tennis while describing something that sounds very much like tennis, but with walls.
The community itself is free to join. Some activities may have a small cost to cover things such as court hire or equipment, which seems reasonable. Barcelona may be magical, but apparently its padel courts still require money.
But Will I Have to Talk to Strangers?
Yes. That is, unfortunately, how meeting people works.
The advantage is that you will be doing something while talking to them. This is much easier than standing at an expat networking event clutching a warm beer while repeatedly answering the questions:
“Where are you from?”
“How long have you been here?”
“What do you do?”
And, inevitably, the question I roll my eyes back into the farthest point of my interior head at until my face hurts:
“What brought you here” (Not everyone hates this question, it’s just that for me, my response requres a lengthy back story and much talking, and that makes me tired. Sometimes I will reply, Chimpanzees, and other times, I wil get straight to the point that every really is asking, and reply ‘not for love’.)
At a Keep Calm activity, you already have a subject. You can discuss the hike, the game, the route, the weather or why you thought signing up for a Saturday morning run was a sensible decision when you agreed to it on Thursday night. Friendship can build from there.
Who Joins?
The crowd tends to be young-ish. Not 22-year-old Erasmus-student young, necessarily, but generally people in their 30s, with plenty in their 40s as well. Some folks arranging a meet up will specify an age range, which is much appreciated
And by “read the announcement,” I mean all of it. Do not ask the group what time the event starts when the time appears directly above your question. Every WhatsApp group has this person. Do not become this person.
The groups are open to English-speaking expats, internationals, newcomers and locals. You do not need to speak Spanish or Catalan to participate because the event organization and group conversations take place in English.
Of course, you should still learn some Spanish or Catalan. You live here. But your ability to conjugate haber does not need to improve before you are permitted to play badminton.
It Is Not Only for New Arrivals
Keep Calm is an obvious resource for somebody who has just arrived in Barcelona and currently knows only their estate agent, immigration lawyer and one overly friendly person from their Spanish class.
But it is equally useful if you have lived here for years.
Barcelona friendships can be transient. People arrive, fall in love with the city, complain about bureaucracy, buy a small collection of plants, and then suddenly announce that they are moving to Berlin, Lisbon or back to their home country “for a few months.”
They do not return.
Even established expats occasionally need to replenish the social circle.
Keep Calm makes that easier because you do not have to manufacture a reason to meet. The reason already exists. You are going hiking. You are playing tennis. You are attempting yoga. You are standing on a football pitch wondering whether “all levels welcome” was intended to include your particular level.
So, Join Something
Visit keepcalm.fit, choose a group and see what is happening.
You do not need a membership. You do not need to know anyone. You do not need to be particularly athletic. You only need WhatsApp, a minimal willingness to leave your flat, and perhaps shoes appropriate to the activity.
Join one group. Join five. Try padel. Go hiking. Play volleyball badly. Meet somebody for whom volleyball is also not going well. Have a drink afterward and discover that you live three streets apart.
This is more or less how adult friendship works.
Thanks, Keep Calm, for making it slightly less difficult.
Love,
Me
