My Flight to Spain

I was planning on writing in here and putting personal thoughts and whatever was on my mind, but that kind of faded. I had actually completely forgotten about this blog, but now that I am in Spain (it worked) I figured I should write stuff down. Not necessarily for other people, though they may be interested in my travels in Spain more than my musings at Tulane, but more for me. It's interesting to go back and read in the future. So without further ado......here I go. I plan on adding pictures in the future, intersplit once I have internet.

It was an interesting buildup to my flight to Spain, it was nonstop busy; the night before was Teo's 21^st birthday, and as such, I was legally obliged to go out with him. I was a bit hungover the next day, which made packing a bit irritating. Moreover, my stomach decided to take an off-day, so I was feeling pretty awful all day. I think it was nerves getting to me.



I left Rachacha around 5pm, arriving in Detroit around 630 in the midst of a bit of a snowstorm. I had about 3 hours to kill, so I got some food and looked around the airport. I had never flown Northwest (or Northworst as my dad calls them) so I'd never been in Detroit's airport. It's pretty big, not surprising considering it's the home of a major airline. But they have a freaking train in the airport. A TRAIN. The moving walkways are not sufficient anymore.



I flew on KLM, or Dutch Royal Airways, who has a codesharing agreement with Northwest. The flight to Amsterdam was pretty uneventful; there was little turbulence. Unfortunately I was sitting right in front of the bulkhead, so I didn't have that much space. Didn't have anyone sitting in front of me though, which was a plus. The woman sitting next to me was an old British lady, who was getting pretty drunk. 4 Bloody Mary's, and a tiny bottle of Chardonay for dinner, she looked like she was about 100 lbs. Needless to say, she passed out pretty quickly. Rather than play the in-flight movie, the TV in front of me was showing details about the flight, like where we were, how fast we were going, etc. Pretty neat stuff. It didn't bother me it wasn't playing the movie though, I bought an eeePc a bit before leaving for Spain, it gets 7 hours of battery life pretty easily. (40gb SSD, a 24gb upgrade for no fee for choosing Linux over Windows. :) ) I had copied some movies and such over to the hard drive beforehand, so I watched Die Hard 2. Perhaps not the best choice of movies, as anyone familiar with the plot might agree, but a good movie nonetheless. There were a few raised eyebrows around me when one of the planes in the movie crashes and burns, with lots of explosions.

My original iterinary gave me about 45 minutes to make a connection in Detroit and Amsterdam. Thankfully, it changed, in Amsterdam I had about 1h30. I coulda made it in Detroit, but certainly not in Schipol, Amstedam's airport. (which is massive, by the way) It was pretty smart, each of the signs to the terminal showed the estimated walking time. I have no idea how their customs is situated, I randomly went through it while crossing terminals. Had I stayed in the same terminal (or the ajacent one) I don't know when I would have went through. Had my flight to Madrid left ontime, I would have barely made it. The flight crew took a while to make it through the airport as well, so we left about 30 minutes late.

I got into Madrid around 4pm local time. There was a pretty big mixup in communication on what I was supposed to do when I got there, I wasn't sure whether they, the host family or the program director, were picking me up or if I was supposed to go straight there. I assumed the first (wrongly) and didn't have the address with me. I had to pay like 5 euros or so to use the internet, so I grabbed the address from my email, and took a cab there. I got to the house around 6:30/7ish, I paid about 20 euros for the cab, which is pretty cheap compared to the US.