The biggest challenge yet of my year abroad: Swapping tapas for treadmills and rum for rice cakes

During the last few months of the run-up to my year abroad, I had so many worries and anxieties that I can’t even begin to count them. Now that I’ve been here for almost 6 months, I really don’t know what I was fussing about – it’s all been brilliant and hardly any of the hundreds of ‘what ifs’ I had pandered to have actually crossed the theoretical-to-reality boundary. 

The one negative side that I seem to have overlooked, however, is the amount of weight that can be gained while abroad. I had, somewhat naively, thought that living in Spain for 9 months would help me to shed pounds, with a typically healthy Mediterranean diet and the hot weather helping to suppress appetite. How wrong I was.

Firstly, for some reason all of the tapas bars in Spain feel the need to make everything into a sandwich, including tortilla, which is served in-between not just 2 normal-sized slices of bread, but 2 huge, thick slices of baguette. This is all well and good once or twice a week, but for students, who either can’t or won’t cook for themselves (and when one tapas serving and a drink adds up to just €2.50, who can resist), going out for tea constitutes a major part of each week, which can add up to a lot of extra calories. 

Secondly, being on a year abroad is very much like being back in first year, only with a bit more sun and a distinct lack of Fruity Fridays – other than going out for an inordinate amount of tapas (and the odd bit of studying here and there), all we do is drink, drink...and then drink some more. Although Malibu is my personal favourite, a bottle of wine can be bought for €2 (again, with such good prices, it is hard to resist so this has become my usual choice). We quite often go out 3 times a week and every time we usually drink a bottle of wine to ourselves. In the knowledge that alcohol is loaded with empty calories, the maths is not difficult – it all adds up, over time, to my favourite shorts feeling more than a little tight in certain areas.

And thirdly, Nutella. One of my flatmates introduced me to its chocolately-goodness back in October and ever since, I have been an absolute addict, no further explanation required.

It was only when we were informed that a beach holiday to Ibiza was being organised for all the Erasmus students in May that I seriously started thinking about all this – and in a desperate bid to work off all the extra blubber (which to be fair I feel I needed on my return to the UK over Christmas), I joined the local gym.

Ask any one of my friends and they will verify that I am the most unlikely person to join a gym, ever. Or more correctly, to go to the gym – I did actually join last year in Leeds, went for about 2 weeks and then gave up, having decided that exercise wasn’t my ‘thing’. When I informed one of my friends over Skype that I had joined the gym here, his eyebrows shot up and his mouth literally dropped open in astonishment. My brother didn’t even believe me. However, it has now been 3 weeks and I have been almost every day – to be fair, I have a lot to motivate me: Ibiza, a couple of other holidays planned for the summer and a wedding in September.

So far, it’s been going well – over the past 3 weeks I think I’ve done more exercise than I’ve ever done in my life. However, as with anything, there have been a few little blips: for example, having been away from a gym for so long I’d forgotten that you have to start pedalling on a cross-trainer before the display lights up. Baffled by the fact that none of the cross-trainers seemed to be working, I had to be told by an old man who was pedalling furiously on the machine next to me how to work it (the shame). Of course, I couldn’t understand his Spanish, so in the end one of the gym instructors had to come over and teach me how to use this very simple piece of equipment. He told me to start pedalling so that he could show me what all the buttons were for, but as he was leaning over to reach the display panel, he got dangerously close to the handles and consequently I managed to hit him in the face, not just once but twice. He then took his leave. I don’t know whether I went redder from the embarrassment or from the ensuing exercise.

Another humiliating aspect of the gym is the classes on offer. We go to GAP (Spain’s version of BLT – bums, legs and tums) twice a week. I’m fairly certain that I tone my abs more by laughing than by doing crunches in these classes: we never understand the instructions so we have to watch everyone else and copy them – one time the instructor had told us all to lie down about 5 times, but we, completely clueless as to what was going on, were just sitting on our mats wondering why the class was moving so slowly and awaiting for the next instruction. Last week, we started using exercise balls. The point of the exercise was to lie on your back opposite someone else and balance the ball on your feet while doing crunches, but for some reason the ball would not stay still and kept falling and rolling across the floor to the other side of the room – and then we got the giggles which threw any chance of being capable of balancing a giant ball on our feet (if there ever was any) completely out of the window. Now even just seeing the exercise balls make me laugh, especially as the first time we used them, we had to put them against the wall and lean against them while doing squats, and one of my flatmates was wearing a red stripy t-shirt and had picked a red ball, making her look a little bit like a snail (which, if you’ve already spent the whole class trying to suppress laughter, is all just too much). Another amusing exercise we are made to do involves sticking our bums up in the air while bending our knees to thrust ourselves backwards and forwards. This was fine (the class is made up of just females) until we remembered that the men’s weights area is just behind the class room and that the transparent window probably doesn’t do much to conceal how ridiculous 30 women thrusting in unison look.

Lastly, due to the absolute refusal of the people in charge to turn the ceiling fans on during the morning, as well as the fact that the fans on the treadmills themselves helpfully face outwards rather than towards the overheating (or in my case, dying) person, I leave the gym with a face the same colour as the emergency stop button, which attracts a lot of weird looks. Luckily, home is just a 5-minute walk away so this torture isn’t too long-lasting. I still have over 2 months to go until Ibiza and, despite the numerous embarrassing incidents that have been crammed into just 3 weeks, I am determined to keep going. Hasta luego tasty tapas and excess wine consumption, we shall meet again in May...