Hola Spain! (AKA Please Open the Bag Maam)
Tuesday, July 3rd, 2007I left Shannon airport on a Tuesday afternoon and arrived in Madrid on Tuesday evening. Is it not bizarre that a person can be in a completely different country in just a couple of hours? Perhaps if I’d been forced to spend a week on a boat, or a month sitting on a donkey, I might have found some time to learn a little Spanish. As it was, I arrived in Madrid with little more than the few words I’d learnt from watching Dora the Explorer – and even those I couldn’t quite be sure of, as Irish Dora speaks Gaelic and Spanish, and I, speaking neither languages could really only guess at the difference. So my ability to communicate with the natives was limited to ‘Hola’ ‘Adios’ and ‘Una beera por favor’ (the last phrase courtesy of a friend of legal drinking age, and not my little friend Dora). Add this limited vocabulary to my decision not to bring a guidebook (for its brick-like weight and space was already allocated to far more important things such as soon to be purchased clothes), and some might say I was somewhat unprepared. But I figured I’d get by this time round with making good use of my pointing finger combined with a few select grunts and snorts, and resigned myself to the idea that I might have to play the dumb tourist for a few days – and I was obviously doing a darn good job of it too as the first lucky Spanish person I pointed and grunted at, the guy at the airport metro information desk, warned me I should hold on to my bags on the subway (which as we all know is code for ‘you could only look more like a prime target if you had a hundred euro note stuck to your bum’)…..
[read on]
Em