Plaza is to Seat as Vegetable is to Hamburger

Early Monday morning, the alarm went off indicating that it was time for Becca and I to move on. She had a get on a flight to SF and I had to catch a bus to Salamanca.

Monday night, I arrived in the gorgeous university city of Salamanca, but not before learning some important travel lessons:

1) trust my instincts

2) under no circumstances, should I trust my Spanish language instincts.

As it turns out, I don´t have any. I understand like 1% as much Spanish as I thought I did. Which explains how I missed my bus, even though I was sitting 100 feet from it.

I arrived early to get my ticket for the 8 am bus. Ticket said Bus 1, Plaza 30. I grabbed some food and went to sit underneath the number 30 sign in the plaza where the buses parked. 7:45 no bus. I wandered around, checking for the correct bus line. There was an Alsa bus sitting beneath 21. But it had something about groups on its sign and was clearly in the wrong place. I figured my bus was late.

At 8:02 I asked the girl next to me if she was waiting for the same bus as me. The confused look told me she wasn´t even though I didn´t understand her. At the same time, I saw the Alsa bus make a right out of the parking lot. I headed up to the ticket guy. Lacking the words to explain anything, I handed him my ticket. He shook his head, put me on the 11 am bus, changed the plaza to 33 and in LARGE letters wrote: Anden 20 o 21.

Anden didn´t map to the faint memory of Spanish class. But the large sign above my head made it clear that Anden meant Gate/ plaza type thing. And after staring at my ticket, the sign, and the dictionary, I determined Plaza meant Seat. The Spanish in my head tells me Siento or some such word means Seat, but it is NOT TO BE TRUSTED. Since the 11 am bus clearly left from Plaza 21, my ticket clearly had the word Grupo on it, and and I clearly was assigned seat 33.

Ah language barriers. After figuring out what I did, I found this incident hilarious.

The 7-hour bus ride was through gorgeous rolling Spanish countryside. It may have started late, but was beautiful nonetheless. I listened to sad music and stared out the window almost the whole time and it suited me just fine.

Monday was a tough day. I was tired. I was alone. And I constantly struggled to communicate about the smallest things (except ordering food and drinks. I´ve got that down) After a short walk around, a shower, some dinner and a couple of glasses of wine, I went to sleep.

Tuesday, I woke up refreshed and ready to embrace not communicating very much. I´m working on the mysterious girl with the book image, interspersed with entertaining conversations with lots of hand gestures.

And while mysterious and entertaining are fun, so are friends and bizarre sounding events. I changed my return flight home to leave Madrid a few days early and head to London to go to EUROVISION with Kristen. It´s a big party that sprouted ABBA back in the day. Kristen made no promises about royal attendance, but did say that said that a "multitude of queens" will be there. I´ll take that over the real queen any day.