Why do I dislike my Dad's region of Spain so much?

• WIP, unfinished, written whilst waiting for a tram in Spain
• Fri 2025-08-15
• I’ve just arrived in Spain to visit my Dad, who’s in the hospital (all under control now)
• It’s a part of Spain that we visited a few times when I was a kid/teenager, as my dad co-owned a small holiday villa here
• I never liked it here, for various reasons

1. Why do I dislike it here so much?

Very boring, as a kid

• The sea is fun, but I think we also spent a fair amount of times in bars, sitting around
• This is a key childhood memory of England too - my sister and me would visit my dad at the weekend, and we’d sit in the local pub with him. Wildly boring, and we made for a very awkward trio
• So, awkward relational dynamics, but transplanted in a different country

No culture (discernible to a child who didn’t speak the language, at least)

• A city break is great because there’s loads to do, lots to see. E.g., sticking to Spain - I love Barcelona. My mum visited me in Barcelona ~1 year ago and it was a great few days, lots of stuff to see, walkable and also via public transport, restaurants, hikes etc
• Vs when you visit a small Spanish village in the hills near Benidorm… it’s a much different speed

Strong (almost phobic) dislike of the sun

• If you love the sun, it’s great to be in the sun
• If you have an almost phobic fear of the sun, you’ll hate being in the sun
• I’ll write a section about this below

2. Why the hell do people like it here?

• It’s easy for me to occupy a cynical, pissed off teenage part which is like “it’s awful here, it’s sun-blasted, arid, culture-less”, etc. But that’s just one framing
• So, why do people like it?
• English ex-pats and working class people love this area - “Benidorm” is a short-hand for a trashy, beer-fueled holiday and a demographic of working class overweight sub-burnt “Ingerland” carling-guzzling “English pub” attending “just want ham eggs and chips, fish and chips, tikka masala” types. Ok so I’m not doing a good job of empathetically getting into their shoes yet…

People love the sun

• It has never made sense to me, for reasons I’ll explore below, but it’s true - people chase the sun, they really enjoy it, it must feel really good to them

Purchasing power

• I assume that this is a relatively poor part of Spain and one that relies on tourism and the service sector. Things are noticeably cheaper here - I’m currently in the Benidorm bus station waiting for a tram, and my Americano (I did say “un cafe negro, por favor”, thanks to Google Translate) was £1.40 - you’d be lucky to find one (from a real espresso machine, as this one was) for <£3 in England. Presumably food and alcohol are similarly cheaper (although, are meals and pints here ≥50% cheaper?? That is mad if so)

Sun and >50% cheaper → fair enough!

• This kind of answers it for me, in large part (the “why the hell do people flock here?” thing.

Something something Simone Weil affliction agency

• I’m aware that this might sound snobish. I have this weird kind of “intersection between working class and middle class” theme in my life that kind of makes me uncomfortable in either demographic. Working class = boring, base concerns (football, gossip, social media), middle class = snobbish and unaware of their priviledge. But anyway:
• I think there’s very plausibly something here re:, if you’re working class and have a kind of mindless, dispiriting job (like the supermarket cashier in DFW’s “This is Water”), then you live with what Simone Weil would call “malheur”, which apparently poorly translates (losing a lot of its richness and depth) into “affilction”
  • How modern life keeps us unconscious and un-agentic
• So, you’re low agency, exhausted, Kegan 3, etc, and actually a holiday of cheap food and drink in a hot country where you get lie on a deck chair and get a sun tan and hang out with your friends, is actually really great
• Vs a city break or a cross-country road trip or something → logistically complex, stressful, requires abundant/excess executive function to plan. Downstream of abundance both financially and mentally/energetically, basically

People who like it here choose to be here

• Survivorship bias → you don’t see people here who’d hate to be here, because they therefore don’t choose to come here
• People here (I’m talking about English people/tourists here) all chose to be here, and are adults
• Vs as a kid, you’re ferried around, and mostly dragged along to adult activities. My main associations of this place are of sitting in bars and being bored

3. Why do I hate the sun so much?

• This is the real crux here. My Dad claims to (I partly don’t believe him) love the sun. I really dislike the sun. So his experience here is “it’s so great, it’s so hot” and my experience is “this is fucking awful, I’m so hot”

My body

• Sun-related facts about my body:
  1. I am very pale, and burn very easily
     • (E.g., once I went on a walk with my girlfriend-at-the-time’s family, and I got a really sunburnt neck and arms, and none of them were burnt at all)
  2. I can be very sweaty
     • I think I might have hyperhydrosis → I sweat much more than the average person. Not like, in a normal English temperature range, like, I can go months without being super sweaty. But, as soon as I exercise, or as soon as it’s hot, I sweat a huge amount from my head. I think my body is very quick to sound the “let’s sweat loads!” alarm

Sunburn memories

• I’ve been pretty badly sunburnt a few times, including one time as a kid during one of these Spanish holidays, where I got super burnt and also had jellyfish stings on the burns, lol. A childhood memory of me absolutely wailing in the hotel room and my mum and Dad having a big argument about it, my mum blaming my dad for not putting enough suncream on me

When sweatiness is vs isn’t a problem

• E.g., don’t care at all in the gym
• Mortified at CharliXCX concern, a people stared as I walked past, drenched
• It’s ok when it’s expected (working out → even if I’m sweatier than everyone else, e.g. Taipei park workouts, don’t care). It’s not ok when it’s not expected, when no one else is remotely sweaty (first time this even happened was science class? Many other examples… actually even being a kid and getting picked up from laser tag and my uncle being like “haha, is it hot in there?” in a good natured way)

Sweat memories

• In Asia, the Philippines especially, I was wildly sweaty if I was outside for >5 mins, and it made me miserable

Treating suncream like gold dust

• As such, I have this phobic thing of “what if I missed a spot”, so I can never relax and feel safe

Uncoupled layer 1 and layer 2

• Layer 1, what’s the worst that could happen → I get pretty damn sunburned, and am red and painful for a few days
• Layer 2, the amount that I’ve worried about it and the amount of “unsafe” I feel when in the sun, is wildly out of proportion with the realistic worst case scenario.

Solutions

• Just accept a high “suncream per day” budget. Like, what if I was like “it’s ok for me to use an entire bottle a day”, £5-£10/day on suncream, and that’s just part of being me, just one quirk?
• Sweatiness - ~stream entry has helped a lot here. Self-consciousness massively reduced, “who cares”, etc. It’s a little embarrassing and sweating and being wet and hot/cold feels kinda gross, but it’s not a big deal
  • I think sweatiness is a case where the layer 1/layer 2 gap has reduced a lot. Whereas fear of sunburn still has remained as this “the layer 2 fear is so big (uneccessarily so)” place

Appendix

• Rough quick notes from phone
• There is also, for me, something shameful about putting sun cream on. “Don’t you want to get tanned?”, and admission of weakness - similar to shame at sweating - “you’re clearly hot/tired. Not trusting that sun cream works, like 30 mins later, has it faded away? Have I rubbed it off by mistake? Also, rubbing it on your clothes - sleeves, neck, trousers when you lean fissures. How much transfers?