On September 14th (I'm showing how far behind I am) I got up bright and early to catch my flight to Madrid. I gave myself a ridiculously long amount of time to get to the airport, since we all know my tendency to get very, very lost. And this day was no exception. I caught the bus into town, and I was supposed to go to the train station to catch the shuttle that runs to the airport. At some point, for whatever reason, I became convinced that I had missed my stop. So I just got off the bus and started walking. Of course, this was much too early. It ended up taking me about 45 minutes to get to the train station, about twice as long as it should have. But I caught the shuttle, and made it to the airport with plenty of time. I actually ended up sitting at the gate for at least an hour.
My flight was with Ryanair. For those unfamiliar with Ryanair, they are a discount airline that flies throughout Europe (and maybe other places, I'm not sure). They are very, very cheap (my flight was 25€, including the fee for a checked bag). But I've heard that they can be pretty sketchy, I suppose because they're so cheap. I noticed two things that really struck me as funny. The first was how they had people board. Maybe its this way all over Europe, I don't know. But instead of having boarding sections, or at least an orderly line, everyone just sort of swarmed the gate. They would wave their boarding passes at the ticket agent, hoping to be picked next to board. It was very odd. The other thing I noticed, that I've never seen before, was how much stuff they tried to sell during the flight. Some of it was normal, like food and drinks, but they had random stuff too. About every 10 minutes thoughout the flight, they would come over the loudspeakers and announce something else in Spanish. I saw them come around at one point with smokeless cigarettes that people could smoke on the plane. I guess that's how they stay so cheap, squeezing every last dollar out of people during the flight.
The flight was uneventful, and once I had collected my backpack, I did my usual mental preparation to do battle with a new public transit system. The place I've been have all had quite good transit systems, but it usually takes a while to get the hang of it. Not so in Madrid. They have a wonderful, top of the line Metro system that runs all over the city. It was very easy to figure out where I needed to go and which trains to take to get there. I was very impressed.
Now for the eventful part of my trip... As you may have seen in my Twitter feed, my wallet was stollen. Here's how it happened. While on my second train (of three that I took to get to the hostel), it got very crowded, very quickly. So, I decided to be polite and take off my backpack to make more room. With my backpack off, I had to keep one hand on the pack, and the other was holding my purse and the pole to keep my balance. At the time I knew it was a bad situation to be in, but there wasn't much I could do about it. Besides, my purse was zippered, so I figured I'd feel someone unzipping it. I was wrong. I looked away, and when I looked back a couple minutes later my purse was open. When I got off at my stop, I checked and sure enough, my wallet was gone. I wasn't too upset, as it only had about 15€ in it. All my cards were in my money belt, thankfully. I was almost just impressed by how smooth they were. So, I carried on and got to my hostel in one piece.
The new hostel was very nice. It was called Cat's Hostel, and was in some sort of 18th century palace. The common room had a skylight made of beautiful stained glass. I could also already tell that this was a party hostel. It was big, everyone was young and social, and there was a bar in the lobby. I assumed this meant that I wouldn't meet anyone interesting, just the usual vapid "I came to Europe to drink myself stupid" types. But about 20 minutes after arriving, I had met two really cool girls. I couldn't get my door to open, and enlisted their help.
The three of us went out for tapas that night, and it was quite nice, because one of the girls (Erica) had previously lived in Madrid for a year. So she took us to a nice place. This place was a sort of self serve tapas place. Everything is in glass cases, and you pick out the items you want. The waiters know what you took based upon the number of toothpicks you have leftover. Pretty cool huh?
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