Treking through hell to find Paradise... my first adventure in spain

paradise.
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This be a true adventure... one where you come home memories that will follow you for a lifetime and as a changed person, different from the one that left.

I am truly convinced that you meet people at certain times in your life for a reason... it has been a while since i have laughed with girls, really laughed like the laughter that has you bowled over in stomach pain. it seems like all the people i share moments like that in life are scattered all over the place with lives winding in different directions. They are still the people that are my home and my comfort but is incredible to have people to ground my now as i run as fast as i can into what i don't know...

took my breathe away
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so the four of us pile in a taxi at an ungodly hour in the morning on a saturday and head for the BUS STATION. already, im sure you can imagine where this is going... a 6.5 hour trip on a BUS to the south of spain. let me tell you about this bus folks:

we had reserved tickets online for the outgoing trip and left the time slot open for the return trip on sunday. when we arrived at the bus station with a little under 40 minutes to spare for locating the bus and loading onto the bus. We of course decided that was plenty of time- bad call numero uno. we get out of the cab at the bus station that very closely resembles an oversized snack bar at a high school football game. The color was a pastel blue which should never be painted onto objects of that size. It was like a mecca for travelers of all shapes and sizes that had one thing in common: a budget. so we drag our bags that are strung over as if we'd been hiking Kilmanjaro for 2 days into the station and drop them immediately upon seeing the mile-long line of people i hope to never encounter again in this lifetime or the next. So we scramble around trying to validate our notion that this was surely impossible since we had purchased our tickets earlier... wrong again. so we waited, waited, and waited some more plugging our noses and chanting, "i just want to be on the bus..." well the bus we got to and let me tell ya, that line was a cake walk.

put a face to the name... that's marie.
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So we FINALLY get the ticket situation under control and now we are racing to the bus. The lady in the window basically told us in a loosley translated version: "yea your bus is number 3, there will be a sign in the window with your destination. you have 10 minutes, it is somewhere down on the lower level- good luck." well thank you customer service representative number 5397010 that has been oh-so-helpful in this country. imagine that scene in Home Alone where the entire family is running full speed through the airport to catch their plane as the gates are closing.... now multiply that by 12. we looked like gypsies with our beach-bound ensembles, oversized sunglasses, hats and head-scarves running with bags bouncing all over the place. half of us asking random people if they knew where the hell we were supposed to be and half of us trying to navigate using signs posted in every language but english. it was quite a spectacle. Alas we got to the lower level and saw buses in all directions, the sigh of relief was short-lived however. So we see the buses and we first look for the word AVILA which was the name of our bus company. We look and look and there in the distance is a bus with AVILA written in big letters on the side of the bus... so we run over there and of course all around it are buses with AVILA on it. so next we split up and look at each bus because the incompetant lady at the window said there would be a sign. the sign... yea it was the size of a post-it note in the corner of a windshield the size of madrid. and it wasnt as if it were this big clear window with a small sign in the corner, no there were maps, papers, tickets, all kinds of things resting in the dash making the signs even more impossible to see. well finally we asked a smelly italian bus driver that could possibly be tony danza's twin give or take a few pounds and a shower. so anyway, we get on the bus.  DA DA DA....

wasn't kidding about this part...
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if any of you have seen the movie BABEL... this was what my first impression of this bus was. i walk up the stairs after the scary bus man took my bags and threw them under the bus ( i swindled back the backpack with the wine in it and it may have been the best decision i've made in my life) and the seats are filled with about 4 spaniards, 20 arabs, and a million sorority girls from Vanderbuilt University in Tennessee. I looked over at my girlfriend and go, " take my money and my bags, im going to jump in traffic." even if you speak multiple languages it will always be very easy to tune out languages that are not your own. At that point all i wanted to do was tune out the planet and sleep those 7 hours away... that was not happening with Kappa Kappa Blonde all around me.

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so our little group of 4 had to split into 2 and 2, a pair up towards the front and a pair towards the back. So i sit down towards the front with my girlfriend Marie and we are just silent. Luckily the valley girls were congrigated in the back. So the bus ride starts and we're finally moving. about 20 minutes in i realize he took all of our bags away and so we don't have anything to read or really do at all. so as i'm thinking this the driver turns on the tv- ah some luck, finally! ha... yea right. the tv was broken. but not broken in an acceptable "ah shux" way... no it was scramble vision with the sound coming in and out and in and out for hours on end. i thought my head was going to combust and all the bad things i wanted to say would come flooding out all at once. well at this point i cracked open the bottle of $1.45 wine i had bought the night before and grabbed a straw. well time is certainly beginning to pass and so is that wine through my body! there is no bathroom on the bus and marie and i are 2 bottles deep with 4 hours to go... trouble. so for those of you that know me well, this next part won't come as a suprise to you but it sure did for the rest of the bus.

Marie, Me, Jacq, Nicole- LA FORTULEZA
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I had to do what i had to do- i pulled a Dumb and Dumber and used the empty wine bottle as my banyo. i know i know, i can hear you all now... "oh that is just foul" or "oh gross kristen" and the typical gasps for air as if you have never peed in an akward place! well anway, i guess word got to the sisters that i pissed in a bottle and it was like somebody put calories in their rice cakes- they flipped out. it was amusing for a few minutes, afterall the tv was broken.

so after 7 hours we FINALLY get to Valencia and it isn't as late as we thought but after that guided tour through hell we thought for sure anything else we attempted that day would do horribly wrong. So we hopped in a taxi and headed for the hostel.

the hostel was beautiful, after the ride in it was like a gleaming oasis in a land of smelly, unhelpful, hairy people. we go in and the man at the desk, as you may of anticipated did not have our reservations.  well at that point we could have walked into the ritz-carlton and they would have let me stay. so after a small quarrel and my insisten attitude we were give two seperate rooms. we just randomly divided ourselves, thinking the rooms were going to be the same. well of course, OF COURSE, i end up (with Marie) in a small room with 2 beds. the room itself was great, totally what we expected and more. Nice views, clean, etc. well we went upstairs to meet the girls and we walked into Trump's suite. Wide open terrace, canary-yellow walls, full length mirror, the works. sigh.

the beach the next day was incredible... i will write another blog about the beach and more serious stuff.

i know this is getting long but sparing you any details will really deprive you of quite the image.

So after the beach the next day we had decided it had been a rough trip and we hadn't eaten anything ALL day.. (the complimentary breakfast at the hostel... yea that was the four of us sharing a croissant with cold coffee. bastards.) so we we're FAMISHED by the time we left the beach. we spent a good 8 hours out there... so as we're walking back we decide we deserve a good meal, a nice juicy steak or some shrimp. It has been pretty much our host-mother's food and cafe snakcy type stuff for 2 weeks now. it was time, we were on vacation, i needed a steak. well remember how i told you we had left the returning trip time slot open for the bus- well when we tried to call that day and choose a bus time the helpful lady on the other end couldn't tell us anything we wanted to know and informed us that we must go to the bus station in person to reserve the tickets. so we had to go back out to the bus station and do that but we had figured we would do that quickly and find a restaurant over there because it was a lot more populated that our area. so all of us being from DC thought it would be real easy to just walk to a main street and hail a cab. bad call numero 100. 40 minutes later we are walking up and down streets throwing ourselves into the street trying to signal a taxi and it was a lost cause. so then we stared at each other in disgust and starved. i took one look around and knew it was going to be at least, at LEAST another hour and a half before i was even thinking about a steak. so the girls walked into a grocery store and bought me a block of cheese before i clubbed someone with my shoe and hijacked their car. so we found a metro that went to the bus station. yea another very helpful civilian: the metro was about a 20 minute walk the the god-forsaken station. so i am walking like i'm on a mission from God to get to this station and dragging these girls behind me. We get to the station, take care of the tickets, and i go on the HUNT for food. the next part of the story is easily the biggest disaster of the whole trip....

everything around us is little american cafes (the city of the bus station is a huge tourist attraction). i would have been fine with american food but we're pretty convinced their idea of american food is Mcdonalds and TGIF type of places that serve portions that feed small families here, twice. well we searched and searched and i thought my eyes were going to start welling up in tears when i finally saw it- calling my name across the bay of yachts and sailboats was a group of neon-lit signs that looked like sort of up-scale nice restaurants. they were right next to the Rigatta Club of Spain... i figured we couldn't go wrong... bad call numero 30971087

it was called "fosters american grill". i wanted to jump into the bay. but at that point everyone was so hungry that we just sat down, against our will and sighed aloud. i opened the menu and the appetizers were called "opening acts." come on. throw me a bone! so i put my head on the table and tell the girls to order me a pitcher of sangria. i lift my head up moments later to see a man in a sombrero with a fake bicycle mustache glued to his face. AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

we order the appetizer and the drinks... the app comes out first. of course. we order dinner, i begrudgingly ordered my "crazy cajun alfredo" and almost choked up. the girls ordered 3 well done burgers. WELL DONE... the food came out in 7 minutes. it took the bitch 20 minutes to get me a water and a sangria and 7 for the food to come out. so we all start to inhale because we are so famished when i hear a "oh come on you have to be f***ing kidding me" i look up and marie's burger has a BITE taken out of it... a bite. the food is FREEZING and the 8 euro burgers are about the size of my left toe. so i flag down (literally) a manager and start to tell him the problem. I tell him i dont want any of this food, we haven't eaten just take it off the menu. i told him the service was ridiculous-she just stood there and ignored us when we tried to get her attention, sent other servers to us... it was a nightmare. so the man, all of about 6'2 starts to tell me he refuses to take the food off our check and we will have to get new dinners. so despite what i wanted to say the girls were hungry and i was too so i just told him to bring us new food, piping hot and another server. well 2 minutes later the same bitch brings us the same food on cold plates. i LOST it. i told poncho villa to bring me his big boss right away. he comes out and the four of us just start yelling at him. (keep in mind this is all in spanish). so we tell him that he's dealing with 4 waitresses and he proceeds to tell us that it is OUR FAULT we sat outside and the food got cold, it was OUR FAULT that we got new food, and basically our fault that everything went wrong. so we told him to bring us the bill for the appetizer and he could take everything else and shove it ... where the sun don't shine.

so it could have only gotten better after that, we never got our steak but we found some cafe and got pasta and went back to the hotel. I put on my bathing suit and dragged my tired, irritated body down to the CLOSED jacuzzi and sat there for a while. the next day was incredible and the bus ride home just to sum it all up was as equally horrible and the adventure out there!

we all laughed about it all and have stored it in our memories forever so i hope you have enjoyed my first adventure in spain.