Happy Easter! I’ve never spent all day easter Sunday traveling before. Good thing I celebrated holy week pretty well. Because this was the day of traveling. Lots of traveling. I got up with barely enough time to get ready, lug my suitcase down the stairs, eat a quick breakfast, and then on to the goodbyes. Simple enough, but still a little sad sitting in the kitchen with R and J for the last time. They gave me their email and told me to let them know I got in ok which was sweet. And it was impossible to say any of the things I might have wanted to say. Thanks for everything, I’ll try to stay in touch. And then I was handing over my keys and walking out the door for the last time. It’s hard to believe I won’t be going back there. I’m going to miss them. And I wish I had said a real goodbye to the girls. We didn’t even realize it at the time whenever it was we had our last meal with all of us together. But there I was, leaving. Walking down gran poder for the last time. Then it was on to the duque to meet up with Emily and get a taxi.
Luckily there were taxis there, we weren’t sure there would be since one last procession had just gone through there. But there was and we made it to the station right on time to get our train to Madrid. On the train we watched unknown, which was very interesting and pretty intense at times. Just a quick 2.5 hour train ride and then we were at puerta atocha in Madrid. Then the real fun of getting to the airport began. We figured out the short distance train to the airport easy enough though. We did ask some people just to make sure we were getting on the right one, just taking advantage of our last opportunity to use our Spanish skills you know. We got to the airport alright, but then we had to get to our terminal. We needed to get to terminal 2 and we were in terminal 4. So we got on a shuttle that was supposed to take us to the other terminals. Well the stop that was announced as terminal two just looked like a parking lot and the bus doors never even opened so we didn’t get off there. We were pretty confused and then the next stop was terminal 1 and we didn’t know if we should get off there or keep riding the bus in hope of actually ending up at terminal two. We had all but decided on staying on when a lady starting talking about getting off at atocha which is the train station. At this point we were thinking oh no we can’t end up all the way back at the train station, where the heck is this bus going. So I asked a guy and he explained the bus route and that’s when we knew we had to get off right away. The bus was actually starting to pull away but we got the driver to open the door again so we could get off. All those people were probably thinking silly Americans the whole time.
Well, we didn’t know exactly what direction we were supposed to be walking to get to terminal two. We started walking in the direction that the bus came but it looked like we were just heading toward nowhere. So we walked back toward where the bus dropped us off and finally after walking a little ways through the airport got on the right track and saw signs that we could follow to terminal two. It was a bit of a hike but we made it and found the check in desk and it was all good. Got checked in and my back came up to exactly 23kg. That was kind of stressful but it all worked out. Then we made it through security without a problem and still made it to our gate with over an hour before our flight was scheduled to take off. It felt like forever waiting to board but we finally did. Except when we got through the gate we found not a plane but a bus to take us to our plane. Then when we got to the plane we were stuck waiting on the super hot bus packed full of people for what seemed like an excessive amount of time. But eventually we were set free and got to board the plane. It was a huge plane, like almost the same as the one we came over from the u.s. on. And there was plenty of room for my carry on with made me excited. There was plenty of room on the plane, it was nowhere near full so I don’t know why they gave Emily and I seats one behind the other when there were plenty of seats next to each other. But whatever. She slept, I wrote some blog stuff out. The descent of the plane was terrible. I’m still really congested and such so it just put so much pressure on my head and gave me a pretty bad headache.
But we did land and got off the plane and got our bags and then got tickets for the train that would take us into the city center. The train station is really close to the hotel and we found it easily. It’s certainly nothing fancy, the room is pretty tiny but it will do. Then we went out to find something to eat. The guy at the desk recommended this one restaurant but we tried to find something that might be a little faster and cheaper because we just wanted to eat real quick and then head back to the room to relax. We kind of got sucked into this one place by a worker standing out in front of it drawing people in. But it was probably just as well because otherwise we might not have ever decided on anywhere. We split a really cheesy pizza and I got some badly needed water even though we hoped to find some sort of little shop that sold water and little snacks or something. But we never got around to that because we just wanted to get back to the hotel after we finished eating after witnessing a little bit of the sketchiness of the neighborhood. I don’t know exactly what happened but I’m pretty sure a couple of guys got into some kind of fight. It was kind of scary but nothing happened and we were fine. We’ll just probably be getting meals and hanging out in other parts of the city before coming back to the hotel the rest of the time we’re here. The rest of the night was spent just chillin in the room before we start a string of early mornings the rest of the week in the hopes of beating crowds to all the tourist attractions and just to be able to fit in everything we want to do.
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