6/16/16 — finally, surreally in europe
Sleep on the plane, as usual, did not happen for me, and Eliza is today exploring the undiscovered country of semi-conscious tourism. I can tell she is kind of fascinated by the unfamiliar desire to sleep. We intentionally did this the hard way: instead of simply getting a cab from the airport to our AirBNB, we took a train, to another train, and walked around town much longer than was comfortable for me to find our place.
The point, for me at least, was to surface problems with my configuration early in the trip by stress testing. My bag is about 50lbs, I have minimalist sandals, so my feet are coming apart a little bit. The shoulder straps hurt, I’m learning to put it on more gracefully, but its awkward in crowded places. The metro was one such place. It got more and more crowded up to our stop and I wasn’t sure we would all be able to push our way out when the doors opened.
There was hill climbing, back down, much navigation, too much thinking. We have no internet, no phone, so this was done with paper and social skills. It took us about an hour to find the place after getting off the train, and the gentleman is not at home. Message via aribnb said meet him at his home to get the keys. He knows when we land… its 1:30, I suppose it’s siesta time. I noticed back in Miami that TSA seemed more relaxed than any I had seen before. We caught the morning commute in Madrid, and those people seemed sleepy and uptight, but I wonder about a sleeping giant of idleness lurking in the hearts of spaniards. It makes more sense in less developed countries where not much gets done, but, say what you will about the spanish empire, they got a lot done.
We borrowed the maintenance guy’s phone to call “Simon” and got some kind of number does not work message.
So its a hard day, so far. A bit harder than Id have liked, but it hasn’t turned ugly. If we push Eliza too far it could turn, but she has been resilient and I think we are good unless we are unable to secure a place to sleep until late. So far, it feels like ok, we got a curve ball we can roll with it. I am camped in the apartment building lobby with Eliza, who is playing minecraft while Laura goes to find an internet cafe or wifi network she can use to send this gentleman an email, a move with marginal chances of success, and then find a place to buy a cheap phone to use for Europe. It’s hard to say when this will resolve but I have to pee so that uncertainty seems like a bad thing.
Laura gets back with answers: we have no phone because T-mobile mistakenly deactivated our account. We have no airbnb apartment because this guy, Simon thought it was tomorrow. He is an hour and a half away and will try to get someone else to let us in.
In the meantime, we go down the road to a tapas bar and I suspect our troubles are over, for now. The first thing I do in there is head for the bathroom where, no sooner do I find relief than I see the trap ve fallen into. There is no toilet paper in this small closet and no graceful solution. For a moment, I wished I was a woman so I could flush a tampon down the toilet. Friends, I won’t get into exactly how I extricated myself, except to say that it involved creativity and a lowering of certain standards.
Once installed in our modest room, we wandered around Madrid in the evening, missing a day’s sleep but curious nonetheless. There was a nice sidewalk dinner, a protest I didn’t understand in the Plaza Mayor, and a great pedestrian layout. Ive noticed medieval towns seem engineered for a night of drinking, or maybe its just that bars have replaced the more practical trades that once occupied the ground floor. At any rate, that’s not what we had planned. A dose of melatonin to recalibrate our zietgebers, and a solid 9 hours of sleep for us.
