Day 55

Friday, July 6 -

Everything that could have gone wrong today did. First, I woke up with an ear infection and since I was about to leave for Barcelona there really wasn't too much to do about it except stock up on pain medication.

Then, we had the toughest time trying to get on to our flight. We were only going away for a weekend, so we just wanted to carry our luggage on. My friend Jessica's suitcase was about a pound (or kilogram? whatever unit of measure they use over here) over, so we moved some of her stuff into our other friend Caitlin's bag, including all her toiletries. It made the weight requirement, but then the guy made her put it in the size-checker thing, and the wheels stuck out too much so he made her check it. The only good thing was it was free of charge. We didn't think about switching the toiletries back, though.

We get to security and we have to take the liquids out, so now Caitlin has two bags of liquids. Then Jessica's belly button ring set off the alarm so she had to be body searched. Our bags all went through and the security people told Caitlin she had too many liquids. We tried to explain the situation but they didn't care. So they had to test all of Jessica's liquids, starting with her unopened bottle of Clinique face wash, which is definitely not cheap stuff. The security lady watches Jessica open the seal on this bottle, she tests it on the little strip and it turns blue. Turns out there are actually explosives in Clinique products. They took that, along with a bunch of her other stuff before deciding we're not a security threat and finally let us go through.

Lesson learned from this experience: never fly Monarch Air.

Mysterious apple in the terminal

Barcelona from the plane! 

Although I hate Monarch Air now, they had a really smooth take off and landing. Better than any other flight I've ever been on (which is actually not very many). We had to land in the middle of the tarmac because the rest of the airport was too busy. They drove stairs out to us and a bus to shuttle us all over to the terminal. It was kind of cool.

On the shuttle to the terminal! That's our plane right outside the doors.

View from the taxi window on the way to the hostel

The cool building near our hostel

The Hostel was pretty nice! The rooms were small, but they locked and had a safe. We were supposed to be meeting another friend, Micah at the hostel. She booked her flight later than us so she ended up on a different one. She was supposed to land before us and get to the hostel before us. We get to the hostel and she wasn't there yet. We checked in and got settled in and she still wasn't there. We tried calling her so many times, but we either got no answer or the call just wouldn't go through. By this time the sun is starting to set and it's getting late. She should have been there already.

We keep calling, but with no luck, so we called our friends back in London to check her room and she if she left her phone behind. No one saw it in there, it was getting later, and we were getting very worried. We looked up her flight information and it said her flight had landed several hours ago. We didn't really know what to do at this point, because what do you do when your friend goes missing in a foreign country? We called the CAPA emergency number and gave the guy her flight information to see if he could do anything for us. We sat together and freaked out for awhile when finally, sometime around midnight, Micah shows up. It was SUCH a relief. We were beginning to think she got kidnapped somewhere in Spain.

After all that we went out to get food, and it turned into a pretty good night!