Viva el dragón

When you live in the wrong place, you end up in ridiculous situations; sometimes they're hilarious, but other times they're just unfortunate. When this guy I barely know and who I'm not dating and am not going to start dating invited me to have dinner with some friends of his at a Chinese place way across town, I was definitely tempted to say no. In my real life I would have said no. But this isn't my real life and Barcelona is still kind of the wrong place, hopefully not for long but for now anyway, and maybe I would meet interesting people and at least I'd be speaking some Spanish, so I went.

What my sort-of friend didn't tell me was that what we were really going to was a Chinese New Year's dinner organized on Facebook by a friend of a friend of his friend and attended by 30ish motley strangers. A better man than I would have made friends with everyone, etc., but crowds like that either intimidate or annoy the hell out of me even in the right language, and even my sort-of friend who invited me wasn't being very social, and the people on my left were speaking Catalan. And then it all got very loud and very stereotypically Spanish and sometimes I don't want to eat dinner until midnight, especially on a Sunday night when I'm only barely even with friends and the metro is about to stop running and I'm way the fuck over on the wrong side of town. And I definitely didn't want to be held hostage waiting to find out how much I owed while everyone ordered coffee and everything moved at a pace several times slower than necessary. Who the hell were these people, and why didn't they care about getting home before the metro stopped running? The motley group of some-random-girl's Facebook friends couldn't all live within walking distance of the Plaza stupid España, could they? Joder.

In the end, the food was solidly ok and not that expensive and I did make it home on the metro, if later and tired-er and grumpier than planned. And if some motley Facebook friends of a friend of a friend of my sort-of friend think I'm a lame uptight American, I'm mostly ok with that. They all thought my name was Amanda, so I've still got some anonymity.