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.