España!

This is another solo journey for me, but not for long! I left Paris this morning at 9:45AM on a TGV that took me all the way to Irun, a Spanish town just past the French border. So I’m now on a Spanish train from Irun to Madrid, where I will spend the night in a hostel by myself because I won’t arrive until around 10:30pm. But tomorrow morning I’m headed to Toledo, where I will be greeted with open arms by two of my friends from Walsh: Stephanie Makar and Sarah Skillen!

As usual, I’m fairly nervous about the 24 hours or so that I’ll be spending alone in Spain. But of that time, like 80% of it should be spent either on a train or sleeping in my hostel so there aren’t too many opportunities for disaster. Really all I need to do is navigate Madrid’s metro to get to my hostel tonight and again to get to the bus station tomorrow morning and figure out how to buy the correct bus ticket to get me to Toledo and then I will have Spanish-speaking friends to guide me.

Notes on today’s travels: I understand why Spanish trains have what I thought were unreasonably high reservation fees even with the rail pass (ok, so 6E50 isn’t that unreasonable, but when compared to the free trains in Germany, Austria and Switzerland and the 3E TGV reservation fees in France, I think it’s reasonable that I was put off by the Spanish fees). But anyway, the long and the short of it is: this is a nice train. There’s at least 50% more legroom than on the TGV I was just on, it’s impeccably clean, there’s plenty of luggage space (the overhead racks are actually wide enough to fit a normal piece of luggage), I just received a free set of earphones so I can listen to the radio or hear the audio of a movie that I presume will soon start playing on the TVs in the middle of the car. Once they add electrical outlets, this train will be perfect.

My only other complaints with the Spanish train system so far are: 1. The station in Irun had absolutely no food whatsoever 2. The woman across from me keeps talking to her dog in Spanish and the dog is now looking at me somewhat askance (if a dog’s look can be interpreted as askance). To solve issue number 1, I think I will soon go in search of a food car and hope it’s not too expensive. Unfortunately I got off to kind of a late start this morning, mostly because I was familiar with the Paris train station I was leaving out of, which meant I didn’t have anywhere near my normal dose of pre-travel anxiety. Anyhow, this meant that I was not able to stop at a grocery store/bakery for a baguette and cheese, so I was relatively unprepared food-wise with only a half-full jar of peanut butter and nothing to spread it on. Not that that last part stopped me from eating my peanut butter – I enjoyed several spoonfuls on my TGV ride, which served as my lunch until we made a 10 minute stop in Bordeaux, so I was able to hop off and grab some food from a vending machine. Needless to say, this still did not make for a very filling or nutritious lunch. So I was really looking forward to grabbing a sandwich during my 20 minute layover in Irun, but no such luck.

Well I have a window seat, so I’m going to take advantage of the last half hour or so of daylight to try to soak in as much of the Spanish countryside as I can!

Hasta luego!

Update: the woman with the dog is not the strangest of my fellow passengers. Her seatmate, another middle-aged Spanish woman clearly takes the cake in the “weird but awesome” category. Weird: she’s been singing along with the train radio station. Well, singing might be a bit too generous of a term actually. I mean she hasn’t been belting out Spanish lyrics or anything – she’s mostly been halfway between humming and singing and it hasn’t been too loud – except for one song which I guess she knew particularly was just really feeling, and that was fairly loud and distracting. Also in the category of slightly weird, but not socially unacceptable, she came and sat next to me and tried to have me help her with her computer, even after I think I had fairly clearly conveyed that I do not speak Spanish. So I really had no idea what she wanted me to do with her laptop, which she had clearly just bought – it still had all the protective stickers and advertising stickers on it. Anyway, I think she was trying to connect to a wireless network, but it was impossible for me to explain anything useful to her, so she just got frustrated and gave up while it was trying to connect. So then she was trying to shut the computer down and couldn’t figure that out, so I was at least semi-helpful on that score, though I still wasn’t sure if she really wanted to turn it off or just hibernate it or what. And then like an hour later, she gave me grapes, thus officially making her awesome as well as weird. Fun times with cultural exchanges.

Also, they did in fact show a movie on the train “Mi Vida en Ruinas,” which I’m fairly confident I translated correctly as “My Life in Ruins” – it’s an American movie (with the actress from My Big Fat Greek Wedding) but of course they were showing it dubbed in Spanish, with Catalan subtitles. Even so, I’m pretty sure I only missed minor plot points by watching without audio while piecing together some English and French cognates in the subtitles.

Oh and I did find the food car and got a tortilla bocadilla – a fantastic kind of sandwich that I was exposed to when I went to Barcelona during first semester. Basically a bocadilla is just a grilled sandwich (apparently distinct from a Panini, at least according to this train menu) and when the Spanish talk about “tortilla” it is not the same as a “tortilla” in Mexican or “Tex-Mex” cuisine – here tortilla is sort of an omelet with potatoes as far as I can tell. At any rate, they’re delicious - especially when all one has eaten all day is straight peanut butter and some oreos….

Final update: I made it to my hostel, which is… lively. I think most of my roommates are out on a pub crawl right now, so we’ll see how much sleep I get…