Five girls from Spain come to Meramec to play soccer
NOTE TO READERS: This story originally appeared in The Montage’s December 2025 issue.
BY: HIBA OBEED
Art and Life Editor
In 2025, five Spanish girls came to St. Louis to play soccer, attend college and live together. With no car, no family and living in an unfamiliar city, they became instant friends.
“When we arrived, one of the young men from the Men’s soccer team came to take us from the airport. We don’t remember the exact moment we said ‘we are friends;’ when we first met we felt like immediate friends,” Alba Pino Martin said.
But how did they get here to begin with?
“An agency spoke to my parents about my soccer, offering me an opportunity to come and play in the United States. So I started speaking with the agency, and accepted this offer to come to St. Louis. Later they revealed that I actually had more offers, but I had already picked this one so it was too late,” Elena Miron Santos said before laughing.
Although Santos felt misinformed, Martin had a slightly different experience. “I was considering my other offers, but our current coach called us and he tried to convince us,” Martin said. “I preferred to speak with someone from the college and the others were only on paper. It made me more comfortable with this offer because at least I knew who my coach would be.”
After coming to St. Louis, the girls experienced culture shock. “Relationships between people, schedules for when to eat and sleep are different,” Nahia Moreno Munos said. “We eat dinner at 9 p.m. or 10 p.m. and sleep at 11 p.m. or midnight. In Spain we eat lunch at 2 p.m., and here it’s 12 p.m.”
It isn’t simply scheduling issues the girls had trouble with, they’ve also encountered discourteous treatment from their American peers, according to the players. “Here in America, they think Spain is in Mexico but no, it’s in Europe. Sometimes I feel like they think we are Spanish so we’re dumb because we don’t speak the same language. In Spanish I may even be smarter than people here. We’re not dumb,” Munos said as the other girls nodded in agreement.
Martin feels similarly.
“Sometimes I don’t know how to say certain words or I’m nervous at the moment, but I understand when I’m spoken to; they think because I don’t know what to say that I can’t understand,” Martin said. “If they were speaking Spanish and they said something imperfectly, I would still understand. I feel like here they don’t try to understand you– they are very specific about pronunciation.”
The girls sometimes receive uneducated questions. “One of our teammates once told us ‘Don’t think I’m stupid because of this question but can you go from Spain to Africa by walking?’ She also thought Spain was a city and Europe was a country. They have no clue about geography here. In Spain geography is mandatory,” Santos said before chuckling.
The girls reflected on the differences between their cities in Spain compared to St. Louis.
“They told us in Spain that here you need a car for almost everything, but only after coming here did I realize how bad it is. I thought, well there must be some places to walk and get food. In Spain you walk for five minutes and there’s plenty of food vendors. Also fast food; people here eat a lot of fast food,” Munos said.
Although according to Santos, it’s not all bad.
“I thought it would be uglier, like the landscapes. The nature is nice here. I thought it would be dirty with less nature,” Santos said.
Martin was also pleasantly surprised in some ways. “I was worried about food because in Spain they told us people here only ate hamburgers and fast food. I thought Americans wouldn’t have lentils or vegetables, but the supermarkets have the same stuff, just way more expensive,” Martin said.
There are many things the girls wish people in the United States knew about Spain.
“We have good health insurance in Spain,” Munos said. “There is a lot of help that the government offers for teenagers in Spain– they give hundreds of euros to teens, 18-year-olds receive around 400 euros just because, free trips around Europe just because and a lot of cheap or free things just because. It’s easier for young people to live comfortably in Spain,” Santos said.
In hindsight, there are a lot of things they now appreciate after living outside of Spain.
“For me, I miss the food the most. Public transport as well. I told them we needed a car here but they didn’t listen. I was talking with my roommates recently and I said that I love my parents more now; they talk to me everyday,” Santos said.
FEATURED PHOTO FROM LEFT TO RIGHT: Elena Miron Santos, Eva Santiago Parro, Nahia Moreno Munos, Judit Carulla Fabregat, and Alba Pino Martin. Photo by Hiba Obeed.
