The Day Before the Embassy Meet

This post will be very short and sweet, as I would still like to document the meet and the outfit, though I don’t have that much to say.

Some time before It was time to depart for Madrid and the Grand Embassy, someone suggested a meetup the evening before. This was mainly to get to know each other, whether you were coming to the event on your own, like myself, or simply wanted to meet new people. It’s a lovely idea, so I was determined to go and make some friends.

The necklace is not supposed to open like this, but I didn't have anything to fix it with.

A flatlay so you can sort of see what the bottom half looked like.

The meetup took place in the evening, so it was too dark to take outfit shots (at least on my camera) and I couldn’t get more than this in my hotel room, hence I’m supplementing this with a flatlay. I was travelling with only a small suitcase and didn’t have much room, so I tried to bring things that would multitask. As it turned out, this was to be my ouji debut – both because I could roll the shorts really tight and because they worked with my event shoes. The rest just sort of happened. Everyone was very surprised when I said that was my first time wearing ouji and I think it’s because I approached coording it as I would a lolita skirt. Things like colour balance and accessorizing are transferable, so all I did was pick a theme (here it was something more schoolboy-ish) and went with whatever worked best for it (and that could also pack tight and wouldn’t need ironing).

The meetup was set at the Retiro Park, the biggest and most famous one in Madrid. As I got off the metro, so did two other lolitas and when we got to the actual meeting point, we joined an already big group of others. The people that evening were predominantly Spanish and Russian, with only a handful of attendants from elsewhere.

Both fortunately and unfortunately, we were a big group. It was great to meet so many people in a relaxed setting and try to remember their faces as much as possible because people look different with wigs, makeup and OTT outfits. But it also meant that we were too big a group to go to pretty much any of the bars or restaurants. At first we just strolled around the park and chatted (I haven’t had a chance to return there during daytime, so can only presume that it’s even more beautiful), then proceeded to find someplace that would accommodate us.

By that point some people started going back to their hotels. Beauty sleep is important before a big event, but also many had arrived earlier that same day and simply needed rest from the travelling. I ended up breaking away with a couple of the very lovely Spanish lolitas I had met, who stayed in the same area as I did. We ended up in Subway and then walked back to our respective hotels. It’s nothing exciting to write about, but it was an incredibly fun evening – even if I did feel a little guilty how I was the only one who doesn’t speak a lick of Spanish and my presence forced others to use English. But the conversation was fun, never a quiet or dull moment, and we covered everything, from typical lolita topics like brands and releases to drag queens and Brexit.

Let me end this post with a quick selfie that we took – the only other photo from that night.