Padel, Paint and Beer Pong: How We Spent One Very Different Weekend
Five people on the padel court Friday afternoon, fourteen painting tote bags that same evening, sixteen more at a beer pong tournament on Saturday — three completely different nights, the same simple idea behind all of them. Here's how the weekend actually went.
Three events, two days, and almost nobody who showed up to all of them — which is sort of the point. Friday started on an indoor padel court in Patraix at 15:45, moved to paintbrushes and sangría in the centre by 19:00, and Saturday night turned into a full beer pong bracket with medals on the line. If you'd asked anyone at any one of these what the weekend looked like, you'd have gotten three completely different answers.
Friday, 15:45: Padel, indoors, five people and two courts
The weekly padel session has been playing indoors since a rained-off Friday back in early October, and it's settled into its own small rhythm — two courts, four players each, rotating enough through the ninety minutes that you end up playing against everyone there, not just the person across the net. Five people came for this edition, split naturally across both courts, and the ninety minutes did what padel always seems to do: it's hard to stay a stranger to someone after you've both scrambled for the same impossible shot and missed.
Friday, 19:00: Tote bags, a professional artist, and fourteen people who'd never met
A few hours later and a short ride across town, a completely different kind of Friday started at Crudo 22. Fourteen women sat down with blank cotton tote bags, a professional artist leading a quick technique class, and more sangría than anyone finished — courtesy of Copa y Corte, who kept it flowing all night. No two bags came out the same — some followed the artist's stencils exactly, some went fully freehand, several were clearly going to end up as someone's actual everyday bag rather than a souvenir shoved in a drawer. By the final bag parade at 21:15, the room had gone from fourteen strangers finding seats to fourteen people genuinely curious what was on the table next to them.
Saturday, 19:00: Beer pong, twelve teams, and a bracket on the wall all night
Then Saturday turned the volume up. Sixteen people filled out the brackets for the beer pong tournament — teams of two, three tables running matches back to back, the whole knockout projected live on the wall so everyone always knew who was up next. Nobody got knocked out after one bad game; the consolation round meant even the first team eliminated got at least two matches in. By the final, the room had the kind of noise that only happens when strangers from three hours earlier are now openly rooting for each other's teams. One pair walked away with medals and a free ticket to the next Nexo event — everyone else walked away having met most of the room.
Three nights, one actual pattern
Put side by side, these don't look like the same event at all — a sports court, an art table, a beer pong bracket. But strip away the format and the pattern repeats exactly: people who didn't know each other arriving to something concrete to actually do with their hands or their body, and enough structure that nobody has to carry a conversation out of nothing. Thirty-five people came through across the three nights, almost none of them knowing each other going in.
That's deliberate, not incidental. Not everyone wants to sweat on a court, and not everyone wants a beer pong bracket at full volume — so there isn't just one format, there are several, running most weeks, so whichever one actually sounds like you has a date on the calendar. Padel runs again this Friday, same courts, same 15:45 start — there's almost always a seat for one more.
