It just wouldn’t be a European vacation without a mad rush
to meet a departing train. Or at least
that’s what I’ve been led to believe, thanks to the Griswold’s and others like
them – or their creators.
After more than a week in exceptionally large cities (both
Madrid and the greater metropolitan area of Barcelona have a population of over
3 million), it feels great to get out into the country. But we almost missed our train.
The story started last night, and it was interesting enough
to warrant a bit of background information to fully appreciate what happened
this morning. Actually, it began the day
before when we booked our tickets: all 20 trains leaving today from Madrid to
Cordoba were sold out, with the exception of the 8:00 am departure. Not a problem in and of itself – a bit of an
earlier arrival to cordoba than we would have liked, and we now have to squeeze
El Centro de Arte Reina Sofia (Picasso’s Guernica)
into the end of our trip – but we were missing one essential device: the travel
alarm clock. So we end up in a Bazaar in
Lavapies, the neighborhood in Madrid that we were staying in, and haggle over
the price of a 3 Euro alarm clock. Or at
least I thought we were haggling. The
price agreed upon, I reach to the side of the counter for a pack of
batteries. 7 euros I am told. The ones next to them, 6.75. And the gal reaches for another brand and
says, “(kim’s rough translation) These are only 1.50” Except we were the only ones aware of what
the problem was. She had grabbed the
AAA’s, we needed AA’s, and she was convinced that they were the same size. No, we told her, we need los grandes, no las
pequenas. So the gal calls over the
store manager, he corroborates her side of the story and then Kim gets nasty,
like she does when she hasn’t had her morning coffee (and she’s not drinking
coffee these days [just kidding, I love you, kim]) Needless to say, by the end of the
transaction the gal and her store manager were well aware of the difference in
battery size.
My last involvement in the saga was last night, right before
leaving the bazaar, I wanted to check to make sure the clock AND alarm
worked. Sure enough, they did.
And so this morning, enter Kim’s voice into my dream about
our cousin Andy Marrone’s decision to leave BGI (he doesn’t go to school with
me, and I never wear a skirt and sandals to school), asking me what time it
is. 7:30, I reply. Seven-bleeping-thirty?, she says. Yup.
What are we going to do? Well, we could try to make it.
Maybe there was a 2 second pause, maybe not. But by 7:40 we had packed up our belongings
and were out the door. Found a taxi on
the street and he rushed us to the station.
Miraculously, we made it.
(Update: 2 hours later after we reach Cordoba and recreate
the morning’s events for each other, Kim now tells me that the alarm did in
fact go off, I turned it off, and we both fell back asleep. Likely story.)
