Trip to Salamanca

Day 1 Arrival in Madrid

My flight from Baltimore to Madrid may be seen as a cost-benefit analysis of flying internationally

Good thing: Spending 8 weeks in Spain

Bad thing: extremely little sleep from finals

Good thing: finished with finals

Bad thing: have to pack for year in 24 hours plus find places for all of my stuff

Good thing: Mom was there to help (thank you mom)

Good thing: have bulkhead so plenty of leg room for 7 hour flight to Heathrow

Bad thing: worst passage ever sits down for 7 hour flight combining terrible body odor and little kid. The passage on her other side expressed surprise that a two year didn’t have to have her own seat. The women replied she was turning two in a month (the child was big)= me being clobbered by mother and child trying to fit in seat. The child also keeps coughing so hopefully I don’t get sick ( I should note the women was very nice so I feel bad about this)

WORST THING: 25 minutes into the flight, the child proceeds to projectile vomit onto me (luckily I had a blanket to cover me). However, I was going to smell like puke for the rest of my 26 hour journey.

Better thing: I got upgraded to economy plus and got to listen some interesting stories from a former special forces guy (who had dinner with a mafia don in Sicily!)

Bad thing: London flight delayed arriving at Heathrow so I had 40 minutes to completely change terminals. Sprinting across Heathrow with a heavy bay+ having to re go through security=not fun.

Good thing: I made it to my flight on time

Bad thing: the plane leaving Heathrow was delayed so the rush wasn’t necessary

Good thing: landing to 70 degrees and sunny

Bad thing: waiting for my bag; not seeing it and assuming it had been stolen

Good thing: it hadn’t

Bad thing: apparently I raced for the plane to Spain, my bag didn’t and so remained in London. ARGH meanwhile this took about an hour to determine this.

Good thing: However they agreed to bring it to Salamanca so I guess that saved me porting it through Madrid on the next leg of my adventure.

Bad thing: I had assumed I could simply buy a bus ticket to Salamanca. WRONG Apparently I could have if I had arrived 20 minutes earlier (hence all of the delays and if even one hadn’t happened I would have been fine). However now that the bus ticket counter was closed the only way I could do this was online and print the ticket or take the metro across the city and go to the one counter that stayed open. However, I called the program in Salamanca, who knew (unlike the tourist information booth at the airport) that the bus company was on strike. The ONLY bus company that goes to Salamanca. So I decided to take the train. Of course the train terminal closed at four, the same as the bus. So I took the metro to the train station and bought a ticket for 9 pm, getting in at eleven. This will definitely made a good impression on my host family.

On the bright side: I’m on a train watching the sun set over Madrid...

7 pm May 16, 2010