Talkin' Spanish Transportation Blues

This is long, boring, and you’ll hate it. Actually, if you’re Brittany Wilkey, this is a lot like a Bob Dylan song. Hence the title.

I hate to be one to bitch and moan in a blog, but I wrote this at a bus station in Sevilla before I had access to the internet, and I feel that it is absolutely necessary to post it. I hope -promise- that even if things go wrong for the rest of the trip that this is it for the whining. There’s humor spattered through intermittently through the rant, and I assure you it has a happy ending.

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Literally NOTHING has gone according to plan yet. Let’s start on Friday.
Friday was the last good thing that happened to me. Thanks to everyone who spent what I thought would be my last night in America with me. I had a really great time with all of you.

Saturday morning I arrived at BNA exactly on time, had a wonderfully cheerful lady help me at the baggage check-in for once, and practically walked straight through security because the airport was so dead. I didn’t even get frisked or randomly searched like usual! I stopped wearing Obama shirts to the airport, too. Maybe that helps. All the redneck Homeland Security officers aren’t staring me down like I’m some secret muslim. Or maybe it’s because they work for him now that they have to me nice to my granola-eating, hippie-dancing ass. Who knows.

Anyhow, The flight from Nashville to Dallas-Fort Worth was great! I sat next to a cute little old man who is a native Forth Worth-ian, so he pointed out the window at everything and basically gave me a window tour of the Lone Star State as we flew over.

My flight from DFW to Madrid changed gates twice and then was late to board. I pretty much forgot about all that once we got on the plane. I had planned a 3.5 hour layover in Madrid, so things like that wouldn’t throw kinks into my plan.
Except something went terribly awry. After just crossing the East Coast border into the Atlantic, we made a sharp turn northeast and the pilot alerted us that we would be making a pitstop at JFK before crossing the pond.

WTF.

Still okay, still thinking things would work out, I told myself that I’d rather be stuck in NYC for what turned out to be not a quick pit stop, but a FOUR HOUR DELAY, than finally getting a chance to utilize my seat cushion as a floatation device in the mid-Atlantic. We were told that some part of the plane was inoperable and would need to be switched out or we would need to find ourselves a new airbus. The folks in Nueva York gave us free food and booked a new connecting flight for me from Madrid to Sevilla. The bad news? The bad news is that we left JFK at the time we should have originally been arriving in Madrid, so my final flight was not due in until 9:10 PM Sunday (Spain time) in Sevilla. That’s an hour after the buses to Vejer de la Frontera stop running. Since I didn’t have access to internet that wouldn’t suck my bank account dry like airports do, I had to call mi madre in the middle of the night and have her research every other possible option (Cadiz, Jerez, Malaga, etc.) that could get me to town in time for class on Monday. Finally I realized that I would just have to miss my first day of class. Which sucks.
Furthermore, after finally re-boarding our Madrid flight at JFK at 3 AM, we were without a captain. We sat idly on the runway for an hour while the flight attendants tried to distract us with cheese and crackers. It wasn’t working. After our captain remembered that we existed and came to the rescue, the rest of the flight to Madrid wasn’t all that bad.

Madrid’s airport is really cool. It allows you to get a complete panoramic view of the area, which I did by walking the complete length of it while listening to the Talking Heads during my layover. Then I headed back to my gate where to my surprise I encountered two guys from the ill-fated DFW flight. One was a scraggly looking psuedo-Andrew Bird guy from Indiana that I’d had my eye on all day. The other was the guy I’d been sitting next to on the flight to Madrid and flight to Madrid Strikes Back. I’m pretty sure I drooled on him and probably snored. We hadn’t said more than two words to each other in the entire 20 hours that we’d essentially been sharing the same 5 foot space, until we stood in line for our flight to Sevilla while it was delayed not one, but two times. That sucked, but I got put in business class for the flight, which lasted all of fifty minutes, I guess as a “sorry we’ve been fucking you over” gesture.

Also, I feel it’s necessary to mention that “Hark the Herald Angels Sing” played by a tenor sax is what was playing on the plan as we boarded. I was really confused by that. Abort tangent.

When we finally landed in Sevilla, at 10 PM and during a breathtaking sunset, I felt as though the three of us, all students coming to Spain for language immersion in different schools, had really accomplished something. I felt that in the past 24 hours we had all conquered the odds and really made a good hustle at being slightly-perturbed-but-still-civil airline passengers. I was ready to give them both high fives and a round of “FELICIDADES!”

Then I noticed that we were the last people left at baggage claim. With no luggage.
Lucky for them, they were actually staying in Sevilla so they had a place to go last night, and their luggage won’t have as far to travel when it turns up (still hasn’t). I, on the other hand, had to spend the night in the Sevilla airport. It’s about as boring as Nashville. I felt very Tom Hanks-esque (and also got deja-vu from Lolla 07!) when I was washing up and changing clothes in the airport bathroom. I found a nice quiet place to study my spanish flashcards and maybe sleep, and when I got bored with that and started to wander around, taking pictures of privatization protest signs throughout the airport. An employee then caught me and told me that the airport closes at 1:30 AM and reopens at 4:30 AM. Whatever, I can sit on the bench right outside the door for 3 hours. No big deal. Everyone was doing it. I was going through my flashcards and minding my own business when they decided to shut off the lights.

Great.

Fast-forward to 5:45 AM when I hop on the first bus from the airport to downtown Sevilla, because anything would by more fun than sitting at that airport. I arrived in a beautiful part of the city at exactly 6 AM. It was still dark.
Let me digress about how if my experience thusfar has been any indication, Spain is totally my kind of country. The sun sets and 10 PM and the sky doesn’t even begin to hint at a chance of light until at least 6:30. This is perfect for a my lazy, nocturnal ass. Nothing was open at all and the only people roaming the streets were the ones still borracho from last night.

I wandered around and took pictures, bought a ticket for the first bus out of Sevilla to Vejer, and the wandered around and took more pictures until my buses departure time arrived. I watched and watched for my bus, but it never came. I kept thinking that maybe it was just late. I would expect such from a Mexican, but not a Spaniard. Thirty minutes after the scheduled departure time I went and asked about it, and the woman told me that I was supposed to be on the bus to Algeciras. Gee, thanks for telling me when I bought my ticket. Thanks for printing “Algeciras” on my ticket. Thanks. Now I’m stuck in Sevilla for another four hours until the next bus. I would sightsee, but I already did that for three horus. I have missed one day of class, lost my luggage, and have been running on no sleep, no food, and no shower. This is supposed to be Europe, not Bonnaroo. WTF. All I could do to not lock myself in the bathroom and cry was chant that I’m a strong independent woman while staring at Lindsey Lohan’s latest nip slip on the cover on some magazine at the stand across from where I was sitting. Luckily, it worked.

The shitty part is, even when I do get to Vejer, I will have no shampoo, no outlet adapter, no towel, no toothpaste, no underwear… (sings “Free Ballin” to the tune of “Free Falling”).

Bienvenidos a España, Kassi.