So, we’ve been learning a lot about how to travel in Europe by gallivanting around and getting it wrong.

For example, we spent all week trying to buy train tickets to Barcelona for the weekend.  We USED to be able to buy these online with our credit card.  This time, we kept getting an error that our transaction could not go through.  Calls to our credit card company indicated that the transaction had never even been submitted to them.  Combine this with the fact that a normal experience on the Renfe website is a minor nightmare: it can’t remember what language it is using, and it constantly forgets your search results.

After a lot of growling and gnashing of teeth, we did some searching around to figure out what might be wrong.  And we found some enlightening and colorful descriptions of the Renfe website.

Trip Advisor says: “The website is a bit surreal. It is like Alice in Wonderland, where nothing seems to be what it really is.”

Other sites indicate that things will work and fail to work apparently randomly, so don’t take it too seriously.

Additionally, it turns out that Spanish credit cards actually have more security features than American ones.  Sites may just blindly try to communicate the Spanish protocol to your American credit card company and get confused.

New solution?  Just walk down the street to a travel agent and pay a 2€ fee to have them buy and print the tickets for you.  Yes, a travel agent.  You remember those.

So here are a few more Mirror World tidbits about Madrid:

Almost all the doors to businesses open inward, like a house.  This would be against fire code in the US, I think, because if there were a stampede out of the building, everyone would be trapped against a door they can’t open.  However, a FEW doors open outward.  The door to International House, where we take our Spanish class, opens outward.  Common visual signals are also wrong, since there are often decorative pull-handles on the push side.  So we’re pretty much guaranteed to try to open every door the wrong way first.

In the US, if you’re in a car planning to turn left or right, and the crosswalk over your destination street has pedestrians on it, you generally don’t turn until the path is clear.  In Madrid, cars turn anyway, then stop with their bumper just into the crosswalk, and sit there half in the intersection until you get out of their way.  When I see this happening, I always think the car is going to hit me.

Most grocery stores don’t have pushcarts.  Instead, they have little plastic baskets on wheels that you tug behind you like a rollerbag.  A lot of people also have light canvass rollerbags that they use to carry larger purchases home on foot.  You usually can’t take these rollerbags into stores, so there are places just inside the door for people to lock them up with bike locks.

Fewer things are self-serve.  One of the grocery stores we use employs a full-time grocer to bag, weigh, and put prices on your produce choices.  A lot of stores are small, with the majority of their stock in the back, and you’re expected to request what you want from the shopkeeper.  This is a bit of a challenge for the language-impaired.  Our experience buying a litter box and supplies for our soon-to-arrive cats with no Spanish was pretty amusing.

Visa/Mastercard is definitely not everywhere you want to be.  The economy is almost entirely cash.  In the US, we generally carry around a small amount of cash and expect to use our credit card for most purchases.  Here, most places don’t take credit cards, and some that do won’t take an International one.  This probably contributes to Madrid’s high rate of petty crime, since people carry around so much more cash.  When Terran’s pocket was picked, we were carrying at least 3x the cash we would have expected to carry in the US.

The order of operations for the ATM is different than we expect.  After you finish making your request, the machine spits out your card first, then whirs for a bit, then finally spits out your cash, followed by your receipt.  This was very disconcerting the first couple of times but, you have to admit, it seems like a reasonable protocol.  Probably reduces the number of times that cards get left behind by accident.

A common kitchen implement in cooking stores is a special slicing rack for ham legs.  This should not have been a surprise, but it was.

Just back from a massive touristing weekend to Granada (to see the Alhambra and many other wonderful things) and Córdoba (to see the Mosque/Cathedral).  It was an amazing time — we will have much to say and many pix for these presently.  But first, a quick note:

One of the wonderful things about living in a city with awesome public transit is being able to walk out of your apartment at 4:35 PM for a 5:05 PM inter-city train and make it with 5 minutes to spare.

One of the suck things about being disorganized is waiting until 4:05 to start packing.

In our Bilbo Baggins-like haste to zip out of the apartment, we managed to take everything that was really important (train tix, passports, clean clothes, etc.)  But, of course, some things were missed (hostel cards, charger for the Kindle, etc.)  But the thing that we really missed, in the end, was towels.

Yes, we are not hoopy froods.

See, I sort-of remembered that most hostels don’t actually provide towels with the rooms.  But, I hadn’t really thought about it deeply and, in the flurry of packing, it dropped out of my head altogether.

Well, we made it through the weekend ok.  The hostels were really lovely (especially in Córdoba!) and a great deal, so I have no complaints.  We made do with some spare tee shirts that we had with us as towel-substitutes, which worked fine.  But a definite addition to the “never leave home without” for the next trip.

More news later!

So we’re back from a trip to Segovia yesterday.  More of a trip report later, but first a small “mirror world” observation.

(For those who haven’t read William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition, the reference is to an observation by the book’s main character to the effect that travel often takes you to a “mirror world”, where things are almost, but not quite the way you expect them to be.)

One of the things we love about Europe is the well developed public transit system.  Large cities all have subway and/or light rail systems that (with the exception of Rome) can take you nearly anywhere you want to go around the city with minimal fuss or hassle.  For longer distances, there are national and international rail systems.  Overall, you can be very mobile for cheap and easy.  As short-term residents/tourists, the system is fabulous for us.  And the locals seem to love it too — some of my colleagues were highly complimentary of the local metro as well, and many people seem to live car-free.  (Not to mention, based on returning home about 11:00 PM on Saturday night, it’s a great system to avoid needing an inconvenient designated driver.  ;-)

But in the few days we’ve spent touristing, we’ve encountered some inconvenient “mirror world”-style differences.  Specifically, there are many fewer public restrooms, drinking fountains, and public seats.

For example, the Charmatin metro station in Madrid, which is the intersection between the city subway system and the country-wide rail system, is a huge, beautiful, modern station.  It’s actually two stations — the rail station (above ground) and the subway station (below ground).  The subway station is immense, spacious, elegant looking, clean, modern, and decorated.  Polished stone floors, gleaming steel, glass, a maze of fast escalators, bright light, and a fascinating two-story tall digital waterfall art piece.  But no seats.  Anywhere.  Not in the huge halls, not near the train tracks, nowhere.

Why?  I can only assume that the designers don’t expect anyone to be lounging around for long.  Which is a reasonable assumption, I guess.  But you can stand around 10 min waiting for trains at some points, or, say, if you’re meeting people.  Not to mention people who may have physical difficulty getting around.  I’ve seen plenty of older folk and even a few people on crutches using the metro.  Surely they would enjoy some seats?

Similarly, the lack of bathrooms is…  Almost painfully inconvenient.  I guess that many Europe travel guides written for US consumption mention this, but it, um, presses home when you’re actually here.

(To be fair, the Chamartin train station itself does actually have both seats and bathrooms.  The bathrooms are tucked in the back and hidden down flights of stairs, which makes me wonder how anybody with physical disabilities gets to them.)

What doesn’t get talked about as much is the lack of drinking fountains.  So far, we’ve been to two museums, a palace, and a castle.  I have been in to the Polytecnica’s department of Information Sciences a few times now, and we have done a bunch of shopping in local department stores and grocery stores.  We have trekked through numerous metro stations and wandered confused, looking for kitties, through half of the Barajas airport.

No drinking fountains.  None.

Compounded with the fact that you pay for water in restaurants and it typically comes in 0.5 l (~2 cups) units, plus the generally dry climate, I have felt constant low-level dehydration.  The only thing that saved us yesterday is that the town of Segovia has a number of free-flowing public drinking fountains.  But Madrid does not seem to have anything like that.

I guess this all just brings home to me some differences in world views.  Spain is clearly interested in spending large amounts of tax money on having really first-rate modern public transit systems.  But it appears that things that US folk would consider to be necessary in any public space — seats, restrooms, drinking fountains — just don’t rise to the level of consideration here.  I assume that it’s a historical trend — there were, I guess, no public bathrooms in the sixteenth century, so no expectation of them was built.  But it makes me wonder how it came to be a deep-set social expectation in the US.

Yours, in dehydration, Terran.

Cried all the Whos in Whoville

So, we´re here, and we´re not dead. But we ARE using Internet kiosks to communicate. Fortunately, they´re WAY cheaper than their equivalents in the US.

Getting here and closing on the apartment was an adventure, but it ended well. I had all sorts of nightmares about worst case scenarios when we got here because there were so many unknowns. The biggest ones were that the apartment agent we were working with might turn out to be dishonest and we would either not have an apartment or have an unlivable one. Mercifully, none of that came to pass. The apartment is very small, but that´s exactly what we signed up for. Since apartment prices are very expensive here (thought not as bad as they will be in London) and we weren´t even sure we´d have any rent income for the house when we put a deposit down, we opted to go for as low a rent as we could get while still being in a convenient location where we could live without a car. That meant the apartment would be very small.

So, size aside, it´s a nice, ground floor apartment that looks out over the courtyard. Most Spanish apartment buildings are built around a courtyard, so you have a choice of street facing or courtyard facing. Courtyard facing is much quieter, and that´s a big deal when you have a city apartment in a city that REALLY never sleeps. The courtyard view really makes the place feel Spanish. The kitchen and bathroom look to have been updated recently. Everything works well. The bed is comfy. I´ve adjusted surprisingly quickly to the time change, and I´m sleeping really well.

The flight over was incredibly relaxing. Business class on American Airlines was even fancier than Terran remembered from being bumped to business on KLM once. We felt like we were in the lap of luxury. But when we hit the ground in Madrid, we hit more “adventures”. The airline lost our luggage. We met up with the driver that the apartment agent had sent an hour late after filing a claim with American Airlines. He got lost on the way to the apartment and seemed to be very confused about the fact that we needed to stop at a bank to get our traveler´s checks exchanged for cash. Then exchanging the traveler´s checks turned out to be a nightmare. Almost no banks would deal with us because we were not customers. Terran´s dealt with traveler´s checks in a few countries on business travel before, and he´d always been able to walk into the first bank he saw to exchange them. Not so here. Eventually, the apartment agent had to intervene and found us a place that would cash them out. THEN we were able to close on the apartment. It made for an even more stressful first day than we expected, and I personally had expected the first day to be an ordeal.

Oh, and our luggage was delivered midmorning the next day. It actually turned out to be a blessing in disguise, since otherwise we´d´ve had to manage it while we ran from bank to bank, trying to get cash.

So, really, the only outstanding problem is that Internet wasn´t hooked up in the apartment after all. There´s always one thing that you should have followed up on one more time. I´d actually intended to double check this with the agent before we left, but it fell into the small handful of things we just couldn´t get done. When the apartment agent and I negotiated this place, I told him that I absolutely had to have broadband internet in the apartment for my job. He replied that it came with the apartment and quoted me a price. It sounded so smooth and he´d been so helpful that I assumed that was true. Apparently, a lot more actually has to be done to hook up Internet, and that was one the one thing in everything we negotiated that he forgot to do. This puts us in a weird emotional place. This guy has been absolutely wonderful in all other areas, but I´m burning leave time right now, and I can´t even file a timesheet to get the leave time without being able to connect to the internet from my own computer. We´re talking to the agent about using his cell phone internet as a stopgap, and we plan to hold it hostage until the Internet is dealt with. Watch this space for more information.

Other tidbits — almost nobody in this area speaks English at all. We didn´t expect everyone to speak English, but Terran´s associate at Universidad Polytechnica assured him that our ignorance of Spanish was no issue at all. He said he had a grad student who had been here two years and had never bothered to learn a word of Spanish. That matched our experience in Germany, and France is legendary for answering in English if you try to speak in French. So we figured we´d sign up for Spanish as a Second Language classes here. Well… apparently there are lots of English speakers SOMEWHERE in Madrid, but we´ve been lucky to find a single bank teller and one person in an electronics store who could speak enough English to take our money. Plus the apartment agent, who is British and has been invaluable as a translator. So communication has been a real adventure.

On the bright side, we ran into a young woman in the electronics store who spoke English — very quickly your ears perk up whenever you hear it. She is here for a post-undergrad exchange program. When we struck up a conversation, she said, “They told me everyone spoke English here! This has been really intimidating!” It was like finding a kindred spirit, and we immediately exchanged contact info. So maybe we´ll have a little bit of social contact after all.

I think that´s everything for now. Hopefully, I´ll be posting next from the comfort of our apartment. The city itself is delightful. We´ve been having a wonderful time exploring. Tomorrow (Sunday), we plan to go to the Prado art museum, supposedly one of the premier art museums in the world. Admission is free on Sunday! Heh.