"Epic journey may 1999" a Madrid Travel Page by Jozzzef

In 1999, I was a student in the city of Ghent, Belgium. I lived in a house with five other students. We came along very well and had heaps of fun, water fights, drinking, egg fights, food fights,drinking, pratical jokes, drinking... the usual for a student. The next year one of my friends left for Madrid to study (yeah right) there for six months. As he was single at the time, our goodbye gift was a "bring back a babe" T-shirt we designed ourselves. As customary with these occasions everybody promised to visit him and as usual nobody made it over there... execpt me.
Being a student i didn't have much money to travel. My summers were spend doing the studying i should have done during the year. Asking mom and dad for money wasn't an option either let alone tell them what i was going to spend it on, studying is what I was supposed to do... After a couple of months of saving and some cash that came to me unexpectedly I was able to buy my ticket to Madrid. The tales I heard from my friend were awsome so it promised to be really really good. (their line of empty beer bottles was stretching to 15 meters at this point). This is when the first problem occured. The day before i was supposed to leave i went to the bank to buy spanish money. When they asked for my pasport i could find it.... It was nowhere to be found.. Isearched my clothes, my room everywhere.. I decided to go to my place where I last needed my pasport which was a week earlier at university. Then, on my way to the university, I realised I toke photocopies of it a few days before, it was 17u45 which left me 15 to reach the xerox-place before it closed! I made it just in time and sure enough, the good people of the store had kept it for me, after i left it there a few days earlier. Pfew.. close call, but it was just a sign of things to come...

So instead of waking up that day at 7 am to go to classes, I never went to sleep and toke the first train in the morning to the airport.... I had a backpack on my back and one on my belly full of stuff my home-sick friend had requested i'd bring. On top of that, some friends of mine had "aqcuired" a billboard-size underware-advertisement featuring Kylie Minogue and they wanted our friend to have it for his birthday, so I had to carry that as well. So i was packed as a mule and had to go 3 miles by bicycle to the train station as there were no buses yet. I made it to madrid fine.In the mean time, my friend in Madrid had some problems of his own. Apparently our communication hadn't been cristal clear and he figured out I was coming only the night before after buying tickets and arranging a trip to Salamanca that day... He was kind enough to cancel his trip. The night before they had a little party. Me and my friends are into whisky tasting and are always happy to introduce others to it. So that night my friend offered one of his appartment-mates a taste of his collection. The poor guy's stomac didn't take it too well and at 3 pm he was being sick on the balcony on the seventh floor. Luckily the guy on the sixth had his sunblind out so that caught all of it! So while i was on my flight, my friend was franticly trying to get his neighboors sunblind clean before he came out for some "fresh" air....

When I arrived my friend was waiting for my and was really happy with the kylie Minogue mega-poster. We decided not to waist any time and went straight to the centre to start exploring. We saw the royal palace, Plaza Mayor and the huge Prado Museum. We were in the museum for hours determined to see all of it and then when we were sure we saw everything we made our way to the exit going trough rooms we had not visited... but enough is enough Prado is simply too big!

We started in a Tapas place which tasted really good and then on to an Irish pub. We finished the night out by havind dinner in the Hard Rock Cafe were we ate some delicious cheese cake and i mistoke the artificial sugar for salt and poored it all over my french fries... sigh. Oh well, I brought a new bottle of whisky from the tax free shop so we decided to go home and sample that. After lounging in his appartement and sipping whisky i started to feel a little strange. Now, my trick is to start drinkig huge amounts of water and normally i start to feel better in about half an hour. Unfortunatly I toke the wrong bottle, the one with water for the hot iron... I was super tired so I went to sleep right away.

When I woke up I felt terrible. The combination of everything i had combined with the water for the hot iron turned out to be very very bad indeed. By noon I still felt sick as a dog. My friend had been telling me about a girl he met in the elevator and after some hesitation he went to see her. When he came back they had made plans for us to go out all toghether so I spended the rest of the day on the couch gaining strenght to go out in the evening.
My friend had been very vage about the girl and had indicated not to be sure about what to do next. When she entered the appartement she turned out to be a beautifull and lovely person. I sayed hi to her and turned to my friend and said to him in Dutch so she would understand it: "what are you whining about, she's great!". We had a grand night out and i tried not to drink too much alochol since I still felt a little sick. While I was silently concentrating not to look like a guy who was about to puke, my friend was talking to the girl all evening. We toke a night-service bus back to the apartment. We went right to sleep. We had 4 hours before his parents would arrive by car from Belgium expecting the "grand tour" of Madrid...

After we met his parents and he showed them around the appartment we went to the centre to have tapas for lunch (well breakfast actually). We had the awsome Mejilones (stuffed mussels, I'd love to have the recepy, anyone???) but I was a little less enthousiastic about the deep-fried pig-ear bits. From there it was of to the Bull fights by metro. When i was about to get on I signalled to some strange guy he could go first but he refused and when I got in we bumped and I apologized. When I was seated the guy started yelling and then got of before the doors closed. The experienced travellers among you have guessed it by now... the guy stole my wallet from my FRONT-pocket... I got of at the next stop and go back but off course he was gone. As we where with 10 people we decided to go to the bull fights and then go to the police afterwards. I loved the bull fights. We were supporting the bulls but when a bull trew a toreador up in the air it was a lot less funny and we felt really bad for the guy! That night it was hard to decide whether we would go out to party in one of Madrid's fabulous clubs or go to the police and sort out new paperwork so I could fly home. We went for the latter, luckily! Of course there isn't a single police officer in Madrid that speak more than one language so we had to re-enact the teft several times to make them understand. We filled in some paperwork and were told to go to the Belgian Embassy for temporary travel papers. To save money we went on foot. When we arrived at the adres we were looking at a large office building with giant "Deutsche Bank" signs. Left with no choice we stopped a taxi and asked for the Belgian Ambassy. The guy looked it up and oh yeah, it was the same adres. The guy tought we were pulling a joke and demande that we paid him for his time (!) we refused, got out and ran with him shouting. Some americans asked what happened and they wanted to help and sended us to the US ambassy. The guards wouldn't let us in... We decided to go for a coffee in a hotel nearby. There we got the idea to look up the phone number. We got the answering machine but it was great to hear some dutch after arm-waving all night. We decided to call them in the morning and ask for their adress. Now we decided we wouldn't let all this get in the way of having fun so we went to the appartment brew coffee and toke cookies, beer, whisky to the roof of the appartment. Cosy in our sleeping bag we discussed life while enjoying the view of Madrid by night and the hills.

At 6 a.m. we were disturbed by old ladies hanging out their laundry to dry on the roof. We decided it was time for action and went back to the city for breakfast. Afterwards we phoned the Embassy. Well guess what! It was the right adress all along, they apparently hire an appartment in the building. How nice of them not to put a sign on the outside... When we arrived we found this funny and wanted to take a picture of the sign "Belgian Embassy" in the Hall but we were stopped by the security. Inside the Embassy people were very friendly and helped us really quickly. My flight was in 6 hours. And then... just when everything seemed in order, my nose started bleeding inexplicably... really badly. They let me in the back of the embassy were I could use the bathroom. Nobody cared, apparently assuming I was robbed and beaten. The secretary ("let me help my son has that a lot too") nearly fainted though when she saw how bad it was ("Oh my god, call a doctor!"), very helpfull. After 15 minutes it stopped and I went back to my friend who was holding his stomac laughing, not believing what was happening either. Another "customer" of the embassy got kicked on the knee when he tried to prevent tiefs stealing his wife's purse. He told us they toke him to a hospital where they treated him really nice and free of charge. After some deliberation and just to make sure it wouldn’t happen again on the plane I decided to go to the hospital. The nurses were laughing when my friend told all that happened to me and they treated me really sweet and put about 2 meters of cotton ribbon in my nose. We didn't want to try our luck so the next 4 hours would be spend inside the appartment waiting for my flight home. I did risk a visit to the local supermarket to buy some typical stuff that we can't buy in Belgium (and lotsa oreos dipped in white chocolate, those are to die for!). I said goodbye to my friend who agreed it were three days to remember and toke a taxi to the airport. It had cost me 25 euros to go from the airport to the appartment so I saved that to get back. When we arrived the driver charged 5 euros... The first driver overcharged me five times! I spent the remainder on a tax-free bottle of vodka. You would think I was home safe but a few minor set backs awaited me. First my flight got delayed, then agian and then again. In all it was delayed 8 hours… sigh. This meant I arrived at the Zaventem airport at 1 am when the trains already stopped running. I didn't want to wake my parents and explain the situation and mobile phones weren't that common yet so I had to wait another 5 hours for the first train home. I am sure you won't believe me but just to be complete: I fell asleep on the train, missed the Ghent railwaystation and woke up in the railwaystation of a small village near the coast... I reached my room in Ghent by 9 am, my face white with red and blue areas. I skipped class that day too.

This trip teached me a lot about travelling! But above all it teached me that when things go wrong you need to do what needs to be done and you can’t let it put you down. My money, passport and credit card were stolen and that sucks big time but those can be replaced. In the end the stuff you really lose are the little personal things that have no value like pictures and so on… We didn’t allow my problems to get in the of fun. Being with a great friend also helped a lot, Thanks JdB!
About a week later my friend called me from Madrid to tell he and the girl were an item! Now that was good news. Off course we toke all the credit, our “bring back a babe”-T-shirt had clearly worked! When he had to come back to Belgium, they kept in contact and visited each other a few times a year. They managed to keep this long distance relation going and last year she moved to Belgium and they got married! Now that’s a happy ending!