Oh my goodness. I am almost there!
I feel like a right fool because I just spent a lot of money on a taxi and everyone thinks I should have taken the bus. Well, that's what I gather, they were all just yelling in Spanish. Everyone is allowed to make mistakes and yet I felt like such a fool. Right now I am in Velez rubio at a hotel waiting for Simon to pick me up. It has been such a long day I just want to cry.
After the hellish landing at Frankfurt the flight to madrid was really smooth and perfect. When I got to the airport in Madrid I had what could only be described as a foreign hypoglycemic meltdown, ( they are worse than the local variety, because there is the language barrier element.)
I felt so sick that I couldnt do the strap up on my pack without wanting to throw up. I knew I was hungry, which was making things worse but when I tried to eat I really nearly did throw up. You now when you are so tired that you feel ill from sheer tiredness.
So i had no choice but to pull myself together. I was by myself and nothing was going to get done if I didn't do it. I took baby steps. Firstly, get a taxi to the bus station- I did that but I'm fairly certain that I got ripped off, oh well. Then I got there and sat still for a good half an hour wallowing in self pity. Uh, I don't want to relive this. It was unpleasant the first time.
*the rest of the story after food and sleep*
...then I bought a ticket to murcia and had to find my way to the right bus, which involved walking up and down the bus station three times with my pack on and asking random people "habla ingles?" When they said no I would point to my ticket and then shrug my shoulders whilst looking terribly confused. They would say something in Spanish and I would Try and pick up as many non verbal cues as a hypoglycemic person can. Once I got on the bus i thought I was good. Ohhh no! You see, I sat right up the front because I was feeling so I'll but then a woman kicked me out because apparently it was here seat. So i slid into the front seat across the aisle. For awhile i thought I would get away with it but just before they bus left another woman demanded her seat. So i got sent to my assigned seat which was THE VERY BACK SEAT! Uhh! There was a nice old lady up there who would have been totally keen for a chat but the language difference meant that it was just too much for our mental capacities. So i slept. And slept. A slept. And by divine intervention I managed to not get sick.
Cool. So i made it to murcia. The next step was catching a taxi. I made the mistake of reading the travel fine print in Frankfurt instead of Australia and the fine print said that you should pre book the taxi. Oopsies. I was really nervous because I had already discovered that I was struggling to communicate. So i went- oh and, just for the record, bus stations at night are super fricken creepy- so i went into a cafe and held out some money and said agua and made bottle like motions until the lady procured a bottle of water for me. Then I went through my hundreds of travel papers and circled where on the Spanish map I wanted to go, what the address was and where it said how much it cost. Then I went to every taxi window except the hot taxi driver and asked "habla ingles?" None of them did. So i went back to the one that looked most like a grandpa and started to non verbally explain my request. Taxi driver decided to elicit the help of every single other driver and they all 6 of them stood around yelling at each other about the details of the job and passionately tapping my papers to make their point. The young hot taxi driver (my goodness I didn't know taxi drivers could be so Fiine!) Stood with his iPhone and text translated to me where I wanted to go and how much it would cost. We all agreed on a price and the other taxi drivers went back to the angry customers who were waiting on taxis while grandpa and I started our road trip to murcia.
When we got to Velez rubio we stopped at a hotel and the taxi driver asked how to get to cortijada los gaszquez (sp). The people in the hotel said that the road was too difficult and we would surely get lost so after much much much confusion they made me call Simon and ask to be picked up. I thought this would be huge inconvinience so i felt really bad but it turns out it was fine. Then I paid the taxi driver and he went on his merry way while I sat in the lobby waiting for Simon. Approximately three seconds after Simon picked me up all my muscles, which had been clenched since about Germany, began to relax. Then we walked into the house and were greeted by a bunch of tipsy Brits and I realised I had made it!
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