Spain: Soul, Scenes, and Slurps | First Leg : Journey to Sitges

My journey to Spain from Bangalore started out on the face of Murphy’s Law. It was the month of March 2019, when I was supposed to give a talk at a conference in Sitges, a beach city, around 35-40 km from Barcelona. I booked a flight from Bangalore to Delhi, then via Frankfurt to Barcelona. Like the responsible citizen that I am (with all sarcasm), I reached the airport at 3:10 a.m. which was three hours before my flight was scheduled to take off. After an enquiry at the Air India counter, I was told that my flight was delayed and was now scheduled to take off at 10:20 a.m. The potential of a domino effect raced through my mind. My next flight from Delhi was supposed to take off at 1:35 p.m. A quick calculation revealed that even if the flight landed in Delhi at around 1 p.m, I had roughly thirty-five minutes in my hands for the next flight, which would probably close its boarding by then. The kind-hearted Air India accomplices assured the highly-worried me not to worry about it. Now just as every human on this earth has stopped worrying about being told not to, I did too, that is until the second domino fell. At the ticket counter, my boarding pass for Bangalore to Delhi got printed while that from Delhi to Frankfurt and Frankfurt to Barcelona couldn’t owing to some technical difficulties. The authorities phoned the Delhi counterparts and then went on to assure me that I would receive my next boarding pass at the Delhi airport itself. The phrase ‘a double whammy’ became quite clear to me as never before. My futile attempt to question my logistics in thirty-five minutes was again met with an ‘assurance’. The calmness training that Ph.D. bestows upon students was quite validly tested for me.

After completing my security check, I sat with drowsy eyes (not an early riser, if that hasn’t come across earlier). Just as I was about to take a dip into sleep, the kind-hearted Air India employees again came to me and asked me to take my complimentary breakfast which the corporation was providing because of the delay. Another bout of ‘assurance’ would have made me lose it, for the thought of actually missing my conference was jumping over my mind like those hippies in Panama. The idli-sambar offered for breakfast would do nothing to calm me down in that scenario.

In the four hours of me waiting, other passengers lost their part of the patience and started quarreling with the authorities that they would lose their connecting flight. There were several who had connecting flights from Delhi to Shanghai, Dehradun, and Tel Aviv, which they were positive that they would not be able to board given the time frame. So after much tenseness, we boarded the flight and I dropped my head over the tray table to get back to sleep. Let me tell you about sleep. It does solve problems no matter what everyone tells you otherwise. My long-awaited revisit to sleep was disturbed by the air hostess who asked me for breakfast. The look with which I conveyed my disgruntlement scared the poor lady and rest assured, she never came back during the flight. I did regret my reaction a little later though, it was not as if these people had the power over an operational glitch that Air India is quite known for. My mind played with other imaginative worries as well, for example, what if the flight faced air traffic in Delhi air space, and that caused a further delay in its landing? You put a guy in a closed space for three hours and the level of scenarios the mind makes to stress him out is paramount.

Fortunately, all these cooked-up scenarios never came to reality. As soon as the flight landed, at around 1 p.m, I turned to my neighbor and requested him to let me get out early as I had a connecting flight. The guy sensed my haste and proceeded to give me my space as well as the advice of taking a sprint. As soon as I got down, I saw an Air India staff announcing for Frankfurt connecting flight passengers. I raised my hand and ran towards him. The guy reassured me not to worry, (the word I had been hearing since morning) and told me that the flight was stalled for us. This time, his assurance brought my nerves to rest. He told us, there were four-five others along with me, that we were to run with him to the designated gate. And off we ran, through the boarding pass counter, immigration, security check, VIP area, all of those passed by in a blur! We made our way through an exclusive elevator reserved only for VIPs and member staffs, finally into the flight. In all the helter-skelter, I hadn’t noticed that my seat was the middle one at the very end of the row. But experience changes perception, and this time I was happy that I was at least able to board the flight. The flight took off at 2:25 pm, and off to Spain, it took me.

I remembered that the last time I had a meal was around 9'o'clock the previous night, and have had nothing since the past eighteen hours. With this realization, hunger came back in me. The air hostess brought in a packet of almonds and red wine, which I refused given my empty stomach. I finally had my lunch at the assigned hour and then unapologetically asked the hostess for another lunch packet. After filling my belly up, I sipped my glass of wine while conversing with the Turkish passenger sitting next to me, who wasn’t quite fluent in English. Another reminder of the many facets of colonization! My journey took place around the time the Balakot strike happened for which the entire Pakistan air space was restricted. Flights from Delhi to Europe were being re-directed to Dubai which caused my nine hour journey span to escalate to eleven hours. I reached Frankfurt just in time for boarding the flight to Barcelona. This was a connecting Lufthansa flight of around ninety minutes. After a small nap, I woke up to view the beautiful coastline of Barcelona. For a while, the purpose of my trip started seeming more predominant than all the hassles the previous day had brought in with itself.

I reached Barcelona’s El prat airport at around midnight. As I came out of the airport, the ubiquitous problem of language differences dawned on me. Not a lot of the Spanish populace speaks English and neither do I know of many words other than the few. Fortunately, one of the bus drivers I spoke to knew a little English and I explained my destination to him. In whatever broken words he could concoct, he told me that the bus would halt at a stop not more than 800 metres from my hostel and I could board off there. A fifteen min ride to the point named El prat de Llobregat cost me 2.5 Euros. Remember the Domino effect I was speaking of earlier? Yeah, it doesn’t even end here. So, I was elaborately convinced by a few people back in the institute that the need to recharge my phone was quite unnecessary because the city has WIFI services in every nook and corner. This theory fell short the first thing with there being no such promised service in the area where I got off the bus. I had installed an offline map, but as luck would have it, even that wasn’t functioning quite properly in the crisis. The good thing, however, was that, even though it was past midnight, the streets had quite a few people, almost all with their pet dogs tagged with them. Spanish people are a little like us in the fact that they sleep late and have a general knack of extensive trivial conversations with each other. So, off I went with my address asking around if anyone would show me the way to my hostel. After several minutes, a young girl who happened to know English showed me the way to my endpoint. Here, I must mention that this area of El Prat has numerous lanes and is very easy to get lost in one. Now, thankfully, I reached my location since I was way too tired to make mistakes at this hour. ‘Mucha masia – hostel rural urba’.

It was almost 1, by the time I reached. The caretaker of the hostel was a young Argentinian woman who loved to travel. She spent around four months in a particular city surviving on some menial jobs at each of these places. She showed me around the hostel and after completing our formalities, we talked about the culture of South America and India, and her wish to visit India once. Finally, I came to my room that I shared with two other guests, each of us in our separate bunk beds. I was supposed to spend just a night in there. It was a room with a capacity of eight people, and cost just 15 euros for the night. As I tried to open my bag to take my nightdress out, I saw that the lock had gotten stuck and the chain never opened no matter how many fights I put into it. So, the domino effect had managed to follow me until the end of the night. The caretaker finally came to the rescue with a plus and broke open the lock and asked me to take a new one from the counter the next morning. Finally I freshened up, recharged my phone with an international roaming plan, to avoid any further hassles along the way, and charged it up, switched the lights off, and off to bed I went. The encounters of Murphy’s law ended at around 2:30 at night.

I woke up the next day at 8 in the morning and sat at the lawn outside the hostel. It was a beautiful sunny Sunday morning. The breakfast served was complimentary. I had some cornflakes, fruits, juice, and tea while conversing with a fellow hosteler. This guy of almost my age came from Italy, and fortunately for me, spoke quite decent English.

After a few minutes, I came back to my room and took another nap, for the past two days had been beyond hectic. Waking up at around 11 a.m, I packed my bags and strolled around the area while walking towards the station for Sitges. What stood out was the beautifully colored walls, much of which had artistic graffitis. It was told to me later on that there was a beach around my hostel, and there lay my regret of missing out on that.

After I reached the station, I was again faced with the same issue of lack of a proper mode of communication. The boards were written with Spanish and not many people were there at the station, even less among them were the numbers who could speak English. Most of the services there were automated with little to no human interactions. Finally, I came across this middle-aged English-speaking guy (it has been brought to my senses that help is around the corner but only after my worries reach an optimum range). He translated my queries to another Spanish guy sitting at a bench next to him and translated his reply back to me saying that I should run to platform number two. The train arrived not a minute later than when I reached the platform. I got on and made myself comfortable for my journey to Sitges. The view outside was magnificent, with the mesmerizing sea flowing to the left and mountains on the right.

After four stations, I finally reached Sitges and followed the crowd out of the station. My first experience with the vibe was that of a heartily urbanized city, with people merrily swarming on the streets on Sunday noon. I started walking towards my hotel, and this time it was easy as I didn’t have to ask anyone about the direction as google map helped me to reach my destination. The one big takeaway from my experience up till now was the significance of an Internet recharge; much more so for those European cities that have a massive communication barrier.

Edited by :

Poulami Banerjee.

https://misszees.home.blog/