“We’re sorry for the inconvenience.”
The most hated words to hear at the airport. They changed my direct flight to Geneva into a flight that connected in Madrid.
At twenty-years-old, I was traveling by myself internationally for the first time. Thank goodness my parents had never seen Taken. I charged into the adventure with abandon. “Don’t worry Mom. I’ll be fine. It’s just airports. I’ll contact you when I get there.” So from Newark to Spain I went.
Here’s what I can tell you about the culture and food in Spain from first hand experience: nothing.
But what I can tell you is about the Madrid airport.
When I arrived, I already had my ticket for my connection in hand. I just needed to find the gate. No big deal right? Let me insert here that I speak no Spanish. ZERO. Okay… except for important words like: baño (bathroom), casa, queso, taco, enchilada, pintura (paint), and Dios (God). None of which will help you find your gate. And to my great fortune, all the signs were in Spanish. Why at an international airport in Europe would the signs only be in Spanish?!? I’ve never prayed so hard for the gift of tongues than in that moment.
So I made my way to a desk that had a flag from every country on it. Seemed like the people guarding that desk should be multi-lingual. “Do you speak English?”
I received a look that I now understand is the “what-the-heck-did-you-just-say?” look. Finally a guy who spoke English came over and I showed him my ticket. And when I say “spoke English” I mean he understood English but didn’t speak it. He babbled in Spanish and made hand gestures while I tried valiantly to fill in English words for him and he’d nod. Here’s what I understood.
“Get on the bus OUTSIDE of the airport and it will take you to the terminal where your gate is.”
Wait. So you are telling me, I need to leave the airport and get on that bus right there that could very well be confused with the buses headed to downtown Madrid and hope and pray that the bus I get on takes me to my terminal???? The gamble of a lifetime.
So I did it. If I was going to head to Madrid accidentally, I wanted to have my camera out to document the whole thing. Here’s a couple of photos I took during the bus trip.
Miraculously, I arrived at the terminal and I found my gate. I inserted a couple of Euros into the beautiful blue machine you see below so I could get a half hour to email my mom that I had indeed arrived safely and she could quit checking the news for transatlantic flights that went down in the ocean. Thirty minutes should have been plenty of time. Nope. Those things are robbery. The machine ate almost 5 euros and I still barely got an email off because it moved sooooo slllooowwwwlllyyyy.
Here’s are lessons learned:
1. Take a pocket translator that has multiple languages on it.
2. Always be armed with the currency you need.
3. Never leave your sense of humor behind. It is your best friend when traveling.
4. Never be at the mercy of horrible, slow airport computers. (Also, be warned that the keyboards are different over there. Very possibly because they have different letters in their alphabet than we do.) Take your own device that receives wireless. It’ll be worth it.
