In the first few days of this year, I did something I’ve never done before. I travelled alone to another country, and stayed there for two weeks. I’ve been away by myself before, but only ever within the UK, and for a day or two at a time. Never this far or this long.

In the early days of January, the country still battered from storms, floods and freezing temperatures, with my local airport the subject of sensational headlines about snow-related pandemonium, my flight somehow still made it into the sky only a couple of hours after its scheduled departure.

In Madrid, I scrambled across the city at breakneck speed for my connecting train, whizzing through misty dusk and then dark, ending my day weaving with my suitcase through the masses assembled in downtown Valencia for the annual Three Kings parade, a procession of giant floats, music, gigantic puppets, fireworks and flung sweets.

I stayed in a tiny apartment near the cathedral, soundtracked by the pure chimes of church bells every fifteen minutes from dawn until midnight. On some nights, choirs serenaded me to sleep. On others, more fireworks. One night, I ventured out to a rock club across the ‘river’ (a miles-long park in a former riverbed) to see an all-femme Mötley Crüe cover band. With their infinite list of absolutely storming rock’n’roll anthems, aggressively sexual flamboyant aesthetic and terrible, terrible personal histories, Mötley Crüe are a long-beloved fixture in my personal problematic fave pantheon, so when I stumbled across Motley Queens in the Valencia live music listings, my fate was sealed.

Even in other countries, rock clubs are always home. Faces full of metal are comfortingly safe. I settled in front of a dark stage lit with glowing neon pentagrams, the band emerging from a cloud of dry ice to Toccata and Fugue, that iconic ominous organ music featured in so many early horror films. Young and gorgeous, clad in rock’n’roll uniforms of leather, studs and harnesses, the band banged out every Crüe hit on their setlist with absolute dedication and joy.

Vince Neil’s vocals are a tall order to emulate, but the Queens’ singer did it with ease, between writhing on the floor, clambering into the crowd, squirting mystery liquid from a giant plastic syringe into audience members’ mouths and scaling the bar in a way that reminded me of punk legend Pussycat Johnson. Pure fun, with that delicious Crüe combo of undeniable technical skill and give-no-fucks chaos.

Mooching home afterwards, I passed crowds gathered in the moonlit plaza by the cathedral, ethereal music coming from unseen speakers as a circus performer moved in dizzying, acrobatic feats inside a spinning silver hoop, the metal sphere whirling through low flickering flames on the pale plaza tiles. I sat on a step and watched until the hoop finally slowed, spiralling to the floor and falling as the performer dismounted with a bow. I emptied the change in my pockets into a hat and continued my way back.

Other highlights: wild oranges everywhere; a day in the cool dark of the biggest aquarium in Europe, Norse metal pumping through my headphones I got hypnotised by the pulsing pink alien magic of jellyfish and the pure muscled menace of sharks; yoga in the park with the sun beating down, in January, and walking back past people having picnics, shadow-boxing, doing aerial silks twisted in long swathes of fabric suspended from an overhead bridge.

I went to several more classes by the same yoga teacher, including an evening session on the dusty stone floor of a gallery, surrounded by wildly vivid abstract paintings and small framed poems about loss. In the final few silent minutes of class, I felt tears sliding down my cheeks, scrubbed them away with my fists walked home under a fat yellow full moon.

To give my trip some structure, I signed up for daily lessons at a nearby language school, which meant cold sunrise walks past the Torres del Sorrans, a Gothic city gate and former prison for aristocrats that dates back to 1392. Throughout the fortnight, I continually got muddled between Spanish and English, with the garbled not-quite sentences I ended up speaking reliably coming out as a nonsensical mish-mash of the two (although I ironically had my longest Spanish conversation yet at an English-language spoken word night). I was too nesh to swim at the beach, but I did paddle, then spent a glorious couple of hours on the sand reading my book and listening to a nearby musician recording himself playing the same heart-breaking song on repeat on a melodic steel drum.

Took the train back to Madrid and spent my penultimate night in a hotel next to the airport, leaving in the still-dark early hours in a sleek silent shuttle bus that took me to the terminal with its underground train from security to the departure gates for my dawn flight home to Manchester. Although I had some uncertainties beforehand about being alone for that long, I am infinitely grateful I gave myself that chance.