I was sitting in the train station half asleep when a disheveled looking man in his late thirties and a young girl of about sixteen sat next to me. The man proceeded to talk at me in French (he probably spoke English) whilst his daughter/sister/girlfriend (I could not tell) translated poorly. “Where are you from” the man asked in French. “I’m from the USA, I live in Florida” I replied. “Oh California, very nice” the man replied. He then made the astounding intellectual leap of “you look really tired.” “Yes I am. I have been travelling for three days without a place to sleep and have had very little to eat.” He gazed at me with a bemused knowing look on his face. He made some gestures pointing at me with a frown and then pointed at himself making the “I am strong” gesture while still speaking in French. “He says that you are an American so you are weak and he is French so he is strong. He also has been travelling for three days” the girl translated. I nodded my head and tried to figure out how to get out of this conversation. “I am Arab” the man said. “What is your name” the man asked (still in French). “Ryan” I said. “And yours?” “Je ma pal Osama Bin Laden” he said, which seemed to cause him no end of amusement. After taking my snus and running his grubby fingers through it and then dropping several pieces I politely bared my adieux.
After the next train got into the station I was in a bit of a panic knowing that I had just ten minutes to make my train and no reservation. While looking for the train I bumped into two Finnish girls who were also looking for the same train and as it turned out we had been to all the exact same places at the exact same times and had not run into each other until this point. We did make the train and I sat in a seat that I probably had no right to sit in and struck up a conversation with the girls. Their names were Mari and Kati. They were sisters who had taken the summer off from school to do the classic rite of passage of interrailing across Europe. I was happy to meet more Finns as I had made a good friend who was Finnish whilst in Australia and now able to learn even more about this unique nation. They were quite shocked and sympathetic when I related to them all that had brought me to this point. [Okay so I am definitely not over everything that happened to me but even I have to admit that it makes for one hell of a story]
And so after impressing them (at least this was what I believe I did) by knowing all their references to British television and knowing a fair amount about Finnish culture. We went out about Barcelona together and found that it is a real bitch to locate a hostel in Barcelona. They exist but they are few and far between and many of them are actually run down hotels that are far too expensive to ever be considered a hostel. We spent two hours being lost and dragging our worldly possessions across the city and eventually we found a hostel and they went to stay at their friend’s house. We met up later and went to a special effects exhibit featuring original pieces by *Blank* movies. And then we went to the Sagrada Familia Temple. We sat outside the temple and I purchased for 4.50 Euros what was advertised as a delicious Spanish dish bat was instead heated potatoes drizzled with hot sauce. As it turned out the Kati and Mari would be in Amsterdam about the same time as me and we decided that if things worked out we should meet up there.
Barcelona’s main attraction is the work of Gaudi, which the owners charge a premium for tours thereof. The streets are littered with examples his work, each one with its own tour. I found his work captivating though I noticed a running theme. It appeared to me that Gaudi built the models of these buildings out of wax, left them in a warm room for slightly to long, and then said “oh well, let’s just build it like that then.”
I left the next morning to Madrid. I actually got to the train station an hour early so with quite literally one minute to spare I convinced the train attendant to change my reservation and let me hop on the earlier train. I got into Madrid and immediately liked the place. This was like when I went to Killarny in Ireland, I felt as though I had finally arrived in Spain. I got to my hostel with relative ease and went on my mission of tracking down “La Violetta.” La Violetta is a candy store in Madrid that makes all its candies with violets. My mother fell in love with the store when she went to Madrid at the age of sixteen and I was instructed by my father to procure said candies. This actually turned out to be a great place to be sent to because La Violetta is located at the heart of Madrid and by all the major landmarks. So I was more than happy to run such an errand. I spent the rest of the day touring all over the city and sitting in little café’s with warm atmospheres eating reasonably priced meals of which I found delectable. I also went into several guitar shops (no purchases were made) and heard real Spaniards playing real Flamenco music.
That night, while sitting in the hostel lounge, I struck up a conversation with a Swiss guy named Caspar who, when not in school, is a juggler/ magician who had gone to the world juggling championships in Canada. Finally my misspent youth of magic books and apparatus came into use in an intelligent adult conversation. We discussed things that to anyone else would seem nonsense and went on youtube where I showed him Steve Martin’s obnoxiously bad magic performances and he showed me a man eating lit cigarettes.
And yes more travelling. The next morning I headed out six hours to Algeciras to catch a bus to Gibraltar.
You know things are not good when the woman behind the tourist information booth speaks no English. As I had been travelling I had noticed less and less people accustomed with the English language, and it appeared I had hit the high point of this in Algeciras. I was actually initially delighted when stepping out of the train station. I looked around and said to myself “ah this is exactly like Mexico, I have only fond memories of Mexico.” This is true, Algeciras is remarkably similar to Mexico. And being slightly naïve, and having gotten all my sparse information from internet posts I set about walking through Algeciras. I thought it would be just like Mexico and I could find some nifty little street corner restaurant offering delectable home cooking for tuppence. I would then find some hostel (because according to the internet there is only one hostel in Gibraltar and it is a... “not very nice place”) and catch a bus for five minutes into downtown Gibraltar.
Looking back I take great amusement in the innocence begotten in me. Walking up the main street I started to notice no places to eat or at least none that posted any prices, only greasy bars. I also noticed that the state of the architecture was in a state of disrepair past the point that anyone could honestly call “quaint and charming.” In essence I realized that I was in a slum and had no idea where I was and nobody spoke English. This was not the Mexico I loved when I was a child travelling with my parents, this was the Mexico that is the reason it is known as a third world country. But I was too hungry to turn back. I needed to find food. Walking three miles uphill, I eventually came across a grocery store and had a fine meal of a bottle of pineapple juice and sliced ham. I walked back the three miles to the train station and located a train which took me twenty five minutes to a town just outside of Gibraltar. I did not know this. My only big clue that this was not the former English outpost I was seeking was the fact that the signs were still written in Spanish.
I went up to a woman who luckily spoke English. “Okay” I said “this is going to sound like a really stupid question but am I in Gibraltar?” “No. This is the town just outside of Gibraltar. You need to walk down that road a little bit and you get there.” So I walked. I like Gibraltar. I particularly like its laughable customs agency. Walking through they asked to see my passport. I began to pull it out and without looking at it they waved me through. I was carrying a bag of Spanish candy past the “items to declare area” and no one paid me any mind. One thing I will say as a negative of Gibraltar is that is geography does not lend itself to maps. Receiving a map from the Gibraltar Information Center I was comforted that everything I needed was close by and next to each other. The problem with this is that the country has an inherent rising and falling nature to its landscape. And the roads are of a spiralling intertwining sort which, when combined with the fact that one of the roads is basically above the other, means that what one sees on a map bares no correspondence with what is there in reality.
So I walked for an hour getting to the city center and trying to find the only real hostel in Gibraltar. The hostel itself, while devoid of most human comforts, was reasonably priced and liveable. I was now on a mission to meet my long lost cousins. At this point I didn’t even know if they actually wanted to visit me or had known of my arrival based on the odd conversations I had been having with my cousin Jennifer over the past two days. Jennifer is a sweet and charming girl of thirteen and we had chatted quite often over the internet over the past several months. *I just realized that this was my second time this trip meeting people I had only known before on the internet... eerie* Anyway, being short-sighted I neglected to inform her father (also a cousin technically- got to love genealogy) assuming the information would be passed along. I found an internet cafe, contacted Jennifer, and was told that her Dad (Barry) was on the way. The Whenlocks are good people. Despite the fact that up until midnight the evening before Barry was only dimly aware of my existence, they did everything they could to introduce me to their rather unique country and to connect to their distant relative. We hit things off pretty well. The next day they planned to show me around and I was to take it easy. As they said, I had been travel a lot and now that I was in Gibraltar I should enjoy myself. I heartily agreed.
Barry is a really great guy. We spent the night talking about British cultare and the interesting linguistic differences between our two cultures. Really it was the first relaxing night I had had since Vienna and I was grateful.
Gibraltar is a really really weird place. It is a beachside tropical country with a population (known as Gibraltarians) whose official language appears to be Spanglish. The country is very difficult to get to but is a tourist haven for the rich and up until ten years ago it had been a major military base for whoever at any particular moment occupied it for the last several hundred years. Technically Gibraltar is its own sovereign country and the locals identify themselves with other former colonial countries such as Australia and Canada, yet the national currency is the “Gibraltar Pound” which looks exactly like the British pound (with the addition of the word “Gibraltar”) and is worth exactly the same amount as the British pound. It is an incredibly surreal experience to travel six hours by train to an area that appears to be a Mexican ghetto, only to take a train for twenty minutes to an Anglo/Spaniard beachside paradise.
Another unique aspect of the country is that the government seems reluctant to dispose of anything. Most of the buildings have been there in some form or another for several hundred years, and many of the military sites are still present. A great example of this is Casemate. Casemate is where I met the Whenlocks on my first day in Gibraltar. Today Casemate is a trendy two story building used as a shopping center in the center of town. But, up until ten years ago it was a haven for illegal Moroccan immigrants, and was where the ghetto of Gibraltar began. I really could not believe a place like this could exist and I was unaware of it.
I had an amazingly good time in Gibraltar. The Whenlocks really did everything they could to make me feel at home and to show me their fair country. On my second day in Gibraltar they took me all over the country (which can be traversed from beginning to end in an hour or two) and took me to the Rock of Gibraltar. The rock is in fact where Gibraltar gets its name. The name “Gibraltar” comes from the Arabic word for rock. The rock is seriously fun to go up, partially for its view of all of the southern tip of Spain and the northern tip of Morocco, but mostly for the monkeys. These creatures roam all over the rock in packs entertaining tourists for fruit and Doritos. I liked the monkeys. Gibraltarians hate the monkeys. They tend to equate them with rats. “They are vicious and will bite you without warning” Jennifer and Mellissa had informed me. I would have none of this. I was determined to see the monkeys. Like the tourist I am, I went over with Barry, while the rest of the family stayed in the car watching their insane American cousin, and coaxed a baby monkey to climb my back. I was lucky that I did not hack off the parents. Another American tourist got annoyed that one of the baby monkeys would not climb on her back so she grabbed at it, in front of its rather large parents. The parents leapt on the girl to the great sadistic amusement of the rest of us.
That evening we went to a Mexican restaurant run by a Canadian, whose accent sounded Californian to me except for the constant use of “eh.” Jennifer and Mellissa are my two charming young cousins aged thirteen and twelve respectively. I am the oldest of three, two of whom are girls, eight and seven. Eating with Jennifer and Mellissa and answering constant questions of the sort “do they have KFC in America” made me feel like I was back home. I had a good time, but that night I realized that, despite its allure, I should not stay another day. If I were to stay another day it would most likely kill another two days of travel time and as is I was already looking at cutting another country out of the trip. I asked Barry and Deborah what they thought and they agreed. So the next morning (with my alarm clock being twenty minutes slow and leading us to get there with one minute to spare) they drove me to the train station and I bed my farewell.
I have come to hate the European railways system. It was my understanding that the EU was meant to standardize most European public utilities. Obviously trains were not part of it. In some stations, say the Vienna station, I could buy a reservation from Berlin to Poland, but then in the Atocha Madrid station I would need to go to the Chamartin Madrid station to procure a reservation from Chamartin and would not be allowed to buy any from outside of Spain. This is exactly what happened to me. Though, it took me several hours of standing in line to learn this. I was left with the choice of paying eight Euros to get a train from Madrid to Hyden, with ten minutes to get on a train to Paris (being unable to buy the tickets until I got there) and then get in at eleven pm, OR, pay forty seven Euros for a reservation in first class (the only available space) at seven the next night in a superfast sleeper train, get there at eight in the morning, and have another day in Madrid. I chose the supertrain.
I located a hostel in Madrid and rested. I finally had a good night’s sleep without the need to wake up at any particular hour. The next morning I met two Quebecois girls named Christine and Katherine. They asked if I would like to join them on a free tour guide trip through Madrid. At the word “free” I said yes. When we got there we found our tour guide standing alone and looking a little bugged. His name was Juan and he was from Chile, he had about six different accents which he dispersed randomly over sentences, and he looked like a cross between Douglas Adams and Elvis Costello.
“Where did you get your brochures” Juan asked us. “The Musa Hostel” we replied. “Yeah they still have the old one. The tour has been canceled but I am still allowed to give you recommendations of where to go, so I’ll wait for others to show up and give you a rundown of what you should do.” As we learned Spain, who would have thought it, is often very corrupt. The tour guide industry is run by a cartel who makes it, in the words of Juan, statistically easier to become a surgeon than a tour guide in Spain. The franchise known as “New Europe,” was founded on a business concept I found ingenious. They offered free in depth tours of major cities all over the world receiving all their pay in tips. And judging by Juan, they hired charismatic entertaining young people to give the tours. The Spanish government was pressured by the cartel to crack down on the company even though they technically did nothing illegal, and so “New Europe” in Madrid now makes all its money in bar crawls and Tapas tours.
Our group was joined by two Americans who had just finished studying in Sweden. They were first people on my trip who were travelling with kamikaze intent like me, and we compared notes. So, on our own and with the map drawn by Juan, we toured Madrid and made what was supposed to be a thee hour tour last only an hour and a half. I still really liked the idea of the New Europe tours, and as they are set up in almost all my next counties, I will try to go to as many of them as I can.
So this now lead us to me now sitting in the Madrid Chamartin train station waiting for my train at 6 pm on June 8th. I am at the half way point of my train adventure and then will have a week and a half left of the rest of my trip. Take care everybody.
Yours truly,
Ryan Messer
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