For me, it was a whirlwind two hours of translating. I think, at one point, I began speaking to Mom and Mama in Spanish and to my host family in English. But it was so much fun having everyone together. My host mother made paella and lots of other seafood dishes.
I'm in Cádiz now and I'm finally feeling slightly at ease. Last night was NOT good. I felt homesick and was super tired from the trek to Spain. Today has been better. It is 10:40 now and I am waiting until 11:30, when we're going "out" for someone's birthday. I'll probably fall asleep because I'm still exhausted.
Random story. When I get stressed, I feel nauseated and can't really get much food down. Needless to say, I've been feeling stressed lately. But my host family is throwing food at me left and right. And not light food. We're talking fried fish, tortilla española, french fries, bread, etc. But today for lunch, we had something different: caracoles (sea snails). Not so good. It literally took all I had to not projectile vomit across the table. Yuck.
Hello! It is 12:00 noon here, 3:00 am there (PST), and approximately 10:00 pm according to my body. I am currently sitting on a train in Sevilla, ready to head to Cadiz at any moment now. This was not in the plans. I’ll explain.
Since I left Seattle on Wednesday morning, I’ve been to hell and back. Excuse me if I sound dramatic, but I feel it’s true. You can talk to my mom or Shelly. They’ve now had the pleasure of telephone conversations with me at my very worst (although probably not for the first time). Or talk to one of the many Spaniards who consoled me through the desastre.
There’s nothing really notable about my three flights, except for the unavoidable pain that ultimately ensues from sitting for hours and hours, enduring three take-offs and three landings, and becoming more and more irritable during the layovers in between. Also, the London-Heathrow airport is quite possibly the most convoluted in the entire world, especially when I had to go from terminal to terminal (via London’s metro), trying to find the Iberia customer service counter. I had to find somebody to print a boarding pass for the last leg of my itinerary, which both the Seattle and Chicago airports had failed to do. But I will say one thing positive about my longest flight: we were on the newest Boeing plane, fresh off the production line as of a week ago. It was nice, seemed cleaner, and had hundreds and hundreds of movies to choose from.
But the story really picks up when I land in Madrid, and I suppose I must be fair and preface these events. When I travel, I often take the free form approach, figuring that all will turn out in the end. I did not listen to my parents, deciding instead to “wing it” from Madrid to Cadiz (a 6-7 hour drive, mind you). My plan was to catch a train or a bus and hope to the heavens that they were not full. My options were 4:10, 5:00, 6:00, 7:00 and 7:30, all which would allow me to transfer trains in time to get me to Cadiz by 11:45 at the very latest.
Oops.
I knew that the 4:10 wasn’t an option when my flight got in late. I knew that the 5:00 wasn’t an option when the 3 connections on the Madrid metro took forever. I said screw it after two and took a cab. I knew that the 6:00 wasn’t an option when the cab got stuck in traffic. And I knew that the 7:00 and 7:30 weren’t options when the ticket salesperson told me they were both full. I cried. One woman offered me a Kleenex and another offered me a cell phone to use, since mine was dead. A man patted my head and told me that, well, it was a good thing I brought a pillow; another man told me that everything was great because I was still alive and that’s all that matters.
Thinking that a bus was still an option, I called, finding out that there were 3 seats left on a bus leaving at 11:30 straight to Cadiz, but that they couldn’t do reservations over the phone. So I left my bags at the train station (I had to return anyway) and ran to the metro. I waited on what one person told me was the right platform, only to be told by another that it’d take me to an entirely different part of the city. So I bagged that idea, hiked back to the trains and booked one for Sevilla at 9:00.
I owe my mom for booking a last-minute hotel in Sevilla and for not even reminding me of the fact that my plans failed so miserably. I owe Shelly for being the first to hear my meltdown. I owe the nice WSU student (he’d hoped for the 6:00 train) for peeling me off the ground, catching the same 9:00 train, and walking me to my hotel in the middle of the night. And I owe all of you for reading this dreadful, long-winded story.
P.S. Since when are calls via payphone $39 a minute? Yeah…that was quite possibly the all-time low.
