Murphy's Law

(Brief note: the first part of this post is the post before this one, although one does not necesarily need to be read to understand the other.)

Of course, I spoke too soon, and while that may have been the best story of the day, the best story of the weekend probably comes about when I was trying get home. I write this part as I sit here, 8 am in the morning, waiting in the Charmatin station in Madrid to take an 8:46 am train back to Salamanca which will arrive around 11:22, and my first class today starts at 10:40. I probably should have seen this coming yesterday when I got into the airport at Frankfurt (a little over an hour before my airplane was supposed to take off) and couldn’t find where the hell the Spanair check-in was. After looking up and realizing I was actually in Plaza C and had to be in Plaza A, things came together a little better but at this point I had spent a little bit of time walking around aimlessly trying to figure out the set up of Frankfurt airport (which is big, so shut up). After going through security, having the metal detector go off, and having my other bag quickly searched because I forgot I had an empty water bottle in there, I finally got to my terminal about ten minutes before check-in. The really fun part starts when I check my IPod during the flight and realize that we are not going to land in time, and the 45 minutes I had to get catch my bus after landing started to dwindle down, minute, by minute, by painstaking minute. We finally landed at 8:50, and I only had a vague idea where the bus station was, so this was going to be interesting. Until, that is, I realized we landed outside the airport and as we left the plane we were boarded onto a shuttle bus type of thing and then we were taken to the terminal – ipso facto, another 8 minutes of my life taken from me. So at this point when I got into Terminal 2, I had 2 minutes to find the bus station… in terminal 1. Madrid’s airport is extremely large also. And no, this isn’t some tale of how I miraculously made it to the bus station last minute and hopped through the door James-Bond style and everything was butterflies and rainbows. I finally arrived after rushing there about 10 minutes after 9 and well, there was no bus there. In fact, there wasn’t even a window or kiosk there to try and exchange my ticket for the next one. I know this because then I proceeded to walk around for a half an hour trying to find someone/something, and came up completely empty. So much for my 23,45 euro ticket, which is now completely useless. Moral of the story at this point? Stick with transportation that’s easily flexible. Of course, not even this may always work out, as you will see as my night continued to unfold in a manner consistent with Murphy’s Law. So, OK, at this point it’s 930 and I figure I’ll take the train home, but I have to leave now to catch the last train back to Salamanca. So, I take the metro to the Charmatin station, it’s about 10, and the next and final train to Salamanca doesn’t leave until 1038. Awesome, I’m home clear, right? Nope. I go up to by my ticket, and the lady tells me there aren’t any more tickets for the train back. The next train leaves the next morning around 830. And just like that, I became a 5 year old little boy who just went to buy ice-cream and found out the shop closed three seconds prior to my arrival, and I wasn’t getting any. So of course, at this point I’m completely screwed. I think if you recall from my previous post, I don’t even have a working cell phone to call anybody to tell them that I can’t get back. So, what else is there to do but start to wander and think about WTF I’m going to do. Luckily, there’s a hotel right next to the station. Of course, I knew that meant it was probably going to be a little on the expensive side but a) I do not know the area and have no internet therefore I don’t know anything close around here and b) I do NOT want anything to cause me to be late tomorrow morning. So, I head in and see how much it is for the night. 75 euro. Of course it is, why wouldn’t it be? So I reluctantly hand over my credit card, and what happens? It get’s rejected. For some unknown reason, it just won’t go through (thank you Murphy). At this point I had stammered on a word and the lady started talking to me in English I guess thinking that I wasn’t competent enough in Spanish to talk to her, but the problem with that was, Spanish people tend to word things weird in English, so I would have been able to understand her better in her own language. So after she says something about which I only vaguely caught, I begin to walk away, and she calls me back with a little bit of an attitude and asks if I have money to pay for the room. Money as in cash, which I had no idea you could even do in a hotel, but maybe she felt sorry for me or something, who knows. Actually, she probably knew there were other cheaper hotels right by, so I kind of wish she just let me go and I would have saved some money. But anyway, I paid, I had a room, bueno. At this point, I’m out of the money for my bus ticket, I’m out the 75 euro for the hotel room, and the next day I’d be out another 20 euro to get home. So, there goes one of the trips about Europe I was inevitably going to take in the future sometime. We still have one problem left though – no one knows I’m still here, and I desperately need to tell someone. I can’t even get into my phone to check my contacts because it has COMPLETELY locked me out of it. So, now I really need internet. And of course the hotel doesn’t provide it for free, the cheap bastards. So now I have to pay for an hour of internet. But, of course, my credit card doesn’t work. So, in a last ditch effort I use another card, which I wasn’t sure was going to work or not because I had never called to tell them I was going to be out of the country. But, thank God, it worked. So I hopped right onto Facebook to try and get into contact with my housemate, and let a couple of people know what was going on – aka, anyone in my group here that was online. So, I left a post on my housemate’s wall, another two people were trying to contact him for me, and another friend is going to let the professor know today that I’m going to be extremely late. If I’m lucky I can still catch the last hour, so we’ll see. After getting mildly settled I proceeded to go find food because I hadn’t eaten anything in the past 12 hours, and that never turns out well, and was definitely contributing to the fact that I was pretty out of it at this point. So, I got food. And as a way to get back at the overpricing bastards I took a decent long hot shower afterwards, which I can’t do when I’m home, so it was the first shower longer than 5 minutes I’ve had since I’ve been to Spain. So at least I’ve had one win in all of this. I also won’t lie and tell you that I was half tempted to take some of the towels just on principle.

So yeah, that’s been my eventful weekend as I turned into a prime example of Murphy’s Law. I almost had a mild heart-attack this morning when I went to buy my ticket and the machine took credit card but wasn’t doing anything and then froze. But it ended u giving it back to me, but was still frozen, so I moved to the machine next to it and tried to just pay with cash, and had another mild heart attack when that machine took my money and did the same thing as the other machine, finally spitting out my 20 euro bill five minutes later. At that point I just went to the ticket booth and bought one. But hey, at least I’m still alive, right? Moral of the story – never buy transportation that isn’t flexible, and never assume your transportation is going to be on time. Most people would say that I should have planned better; however, the fact that I had everything planned to a T (that expression looks really weird written out) was actually the reason why everything ended up the way it did, so I really just should  just swung it per usual. I say this as I sit here assuming this train will be on time and I’m still going to make it to class with an hour left. Maybe I’ll get lucky and it’ll be early, since I’m pretty sure the universe owes me some time and money back. But I’ll have to look into that later.

Well, apparently an hour was a little ambitious. I made it to my first class with 20 minutes left. But hey, I made it, and the professor was really cool with everything. Awesome.

On a final, brighter note – while in Germany, I obviously knew absolutely no German and thus couldn’t really communicate well. A lot of people spoke English in the main section of the town but I’m so used to almost no one speaking English in Salamanca I kind of reverted to same means of communication – hand motions, confused looks, and pointing. This brought me to the realization of how much Spanish I actually do know since everything I couldn’t do in Germany I knew I could do in Spain, and so I left there with a mild confidence boost when it comes to speaking in Spanish. Bueno.

I feel this following quote by Annie Besant (no I have no idea who she is either) rightfully sums up my adventure this weekend, and all the wins and losses that went along with it:

“Never forget that life can only be nobly inspired and rightly lived if you take it bravely and gallantly, as a splendid adventure in which you are setting out into an unknown country, to face many a danger, to meet many a joy, to find many a comrade, to win and lose many a battle.”