Arrival in Spain

And we're off! I have officially landed in Spain, and am on my way up to the start of the Camino. I've got some time on the train, so I figured I'd write this blog post a bit early today, and talk about the flight, my arrival, and my first impressions of Spain.

My flight was extremely uneventful. It was a red-eye, leaving around 10:00 PM New York time and getting to Spain seven hours later at around 11:00 AM Madrid time. (The mathematically inclined among you may have already calculated the time difference between NYC and Madrid from this, but for those who don't want to do the calculations, it was a six hour time difference.)

We were served a meal about a little over an hour into the flight, meaning that we had dinner at either 11:30 PM New York time, or 5:30 AM Madrid time — neither of those make a ton of sense, but the food was good! Some surprisingly well-cooked chicken over fried rice. Certainly better than I'd expected, given that I chose a somewhat budget airline.

The rest of the flight was just me trying to sleep, and having to fight my seatmates who did not seem to understand that even us poor saps in the middle row do in fact have arms and need somewhere to put them. There was a bit of drama early on when the seatmate to my left was airsick repeatedly, but they got bags ahead of time and so I simply decided not to notice, as it was the politest option I could think of while half-asleep.

Upon arriving at the airport, I was greeted with a surprising amount of Chinese, both on the tarmac and in the airport. Probably half of the planes we passed on the way in bore Chinese carrier names, and I amused myself while the bus carrying us from the plane to the terminal waited by seeing how many characters I could recognize (not many) or enter into my dictionary app with the correct stroke order (more than expected).

(I took this picture because I couldn't figure out what the character for "horse" was doing on that banner, since it wasn't a compound I recognized. Turns out it's just a part of the Chinese spelling of "Madrid".)

Going through customs was extremely easy once I announced I was an American. They had separate lines for the EU and the rest of the world, as you might expect, but halfway down the "rest of the world" pathway an employee checked our passports, and if they were American we got to skip, well, basically everything. They took my photo, an immigration agent asked me where I was coming from, and once I said I was from the United States, I was let in. Overall an extremely quick and painless process! Though I do feel a little bad for the folks from Latin America who can speak the language far better than me, but who have to go through (I'm assuming) proof of means and onward travel and all that. Amusingly, when I later asked if sealed food was allowed or needed to be declared, rather than being asked what items, I was once again asked if I was American, and then told I was good. Apparently they trust the FDA. Or they wanted me to stop trying to speak terrible Spanish.

On that topic, I have been attempting to use Spanish as much as possible so far this trip, only falling back on English when I can't get something done in Spanish. This has been an unexpectedly large amount of fun, and it's been nice to realize I've actually retained some of what I learned back in the day. However, it did utterly fail me when attempting to buy a ticket for the Metro; I had to ask someone in English, and even after that I'm not entirely certain how I would have bought a ticket if it wasn't included with my train fare later in the day. (I'm excluding most of this saga, I spent a substantial amount of time trying several different machines in an attempt to figure out how to buy an IC card for the Madrid subway before realizing I could just buy my high speed rail ticket and dodge the problem entirely.)

I will make one note, on the unlikely chance Google indexes this: Every site I found that tells you how to use the free metro access included with a rail ticket (the "Combinado Cercanías") tells you that you have to enter the numbers from your ticket into a machine to get a separate metro ticket; this is no longer the case, and you can now simply scan the barcode on your rail ticket directly to get into the metro.

Once I'd solved the metro ticketing puzzle, I headed to the city center, and had about an hour to wander around before I needed to go catch my train. I chose to wander around El Retiro Park, a large, lovely park in the center of town. Normally there's a replica of London's Crystal Palace as its centerpiece, but sadly it is undergoing repairs for the next few years. Still, the park was gorgeous, and a lovely introduction to Spain!

Madrid felt like it announced itself less aggressively right out of the gate than other cities I've been to. London, Paris, and Tokyo were all very quick to present their distinctive vibes as you left the station, but with Madrid I had to walk a little way for it. I didn't mind that, as without the distance I don't know that the park would have felt as peaceful. I'm looking forward to seeing more of Madrid at the end of my trip if I have time!

As of now, I'm on a train to Pamplona, where I'm planning to spend the night before taking a bus to Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port tomorrow to finalize my preparations and officially start on the Camino.

(Pictured: Two views of the Spanish countryside from the train. So far most of it has looked like one of these two images.)