(Revisiting unpublished posts from 2011) Awkward start in Madrid

Edit: I wrote this post almost 5 years ago and just found it in the drafts. I had completely forgotten every event in it, but that made it all the more fun to revisit, and I figured I'd share.

There are no pictures with this story, just a series of events that made me wonder if we were actually going to have a moment's reprieve from the awkwardness that characterized the inauguration of our short stay in Madrid.

The bus from Seville to Madrid was easy peasy, giving us no indication of what was to come. We had snacks: delicious smoked salmon paté, goat cheese, and baguettes. Such delicacies make any bus ride seem luxurious despite every other indication that it was not.

It was when we actually arrived in the Madrid bus station and had to transfer to the metro that oddities started cropping up. A sign indicated that we needed to go down from the bus platform where we were dropped off with all of our things to get to the metro (no surprise given the subterranean nature of the metro). Since I was dragging a load of stuff balanced on my wheeled backpack and additionally weighed down by my other backpack and purse, we took the nearest elevator down to a small closet-like room with one obvious exit and one limited access door as indicated by its adjacent key card reader. The obvious exit, I soon found, was to stairs going back up from where we had come. I tried the limited access door, with Jessie warning me that it wouldn't open. It did open, though. It led to a parking lot, but I only saw this for the briefest of moments before shutting the door again, followed by a conspiratorial look at Jess. Seeing the parking lot, I should have become more confident that this was, indeed, an appropriate exit at least and potentially the way out to the metro. Instead, I had been so prepared to see something intended for personnel eyes only that I, in an oddly delayed reaction, continued to treat the parking lot as an off-limits zone,  ducking slightly behind the door as I shut it, giggling a low, mischievous "heeheehee", confusing poor Jess further. Once it registered that going through the unlocked limited access door was our only option forward, we giggled our way through the parking lot, but I don't know if we were laughing at the situation, at the debunked conspiracy, or the fact that I was so wrong in my sense of being sly.

In the metro, there were no helpful big maps of metro system where we bought tickets, so Jess and I went through the ticket gates confident that a map would exist on the other side. No such luck. We were trapped on the side of the gates we were on unless we wanted to exit and buy more tickets to get back in. Luckily, to make up for a complete lack of helpful, pretty metro maps were the helpful, pretty metro guards who, in addition to serving as eye candy, can (and did) aid painfully oblivious metro patrons by providing a printout of the otherwise elusive metro map and specific directions to their final stop.

At each metro station, we found only stairs (no escalators or elevators) up and down. Normally, I'd have no problem with obliging riders to work their legs, but my bags were pretty unwieldy, so I was no fan of having to run up and down these to catch our trains.

Then, the day which had started promisingly cool got disgustingly hot, and the walk to the hostel was oppressive. Well, we thought it was the walk to the hostel, but no. The numbering of buildings on one side of the street and the other did not correspond as we expected, to we had been following the wrong set of numbers to a building of no interest to us, and we had to retrace our steps back to a place where we finally did see a sign for our hostel that indicated it was on the third floor of the building. Fortunately, this building did have a teensy tiny elevator, so Jess and I sardined ourselves into it, got to the third floor --- and were greeted by a sign indicating that reception was on the first floor, and sorry for the inconvenience. Sigh.

Jess kindly took our passports downstairs to check in so that I could use the bathroom without delaying us further. While I was peeing, I learned that the light was on a timed switch, and I was an insufficiently efficient urinator. Thanks to years of muscle memory development and adequate carrot consumption, I made it through the rest of my bathroom session in a hygienically acceptable fashion, but I can't say that the event left me with the best impression.

Jess returned with the hostel manager. Our room, it turned out, was in a different building. Throw in a montage of me and Jess lugging everything back into the mobile sardine can, out to and across the street, down another street, more elevator sardining to go up the new building, entering the wrong room (as indicated by the pants strewn across the bed), and finally to our own room -- where the electricity only worked while our shared keycard was lodged in its keycard cradle. It didn't seem like a problem until, you know, it was.

And that, folks, is all I wrote in 2011. Too bad, because I bet that there was more worth writing.