Day 14 (and a bit of 15): In Which Time Has No Meaning Any More, Have I Always Been In Torrellano? Will I Always Be Here? (no, and its only been 12 hours)
Today marked the last full day of, honestly, a reasonably sedate and okay trip. My plans were, by necessity, to take it easy and do very, very little of any significant blogworthy interest.
I begun the day by clinging as hard as I could do my private room, which I had use of until noon and which, also, I had really begun to despise. It was cramped, hot and someone had etched a little cartoon monster into one of the blacked out windows, which the hostel had elected to simply cover with a piece of cardboard, haphazardly taped over the frame. It was, though, also the only place I knew where it would be permissable to walk around in just some pants for the next little while, so I stayed.
12 rolled around as it usually does and with it, I bid goodbye to the cleaner whom I had been awkwardly bumping into in the corridor about six times a day, since I arrived and made the relatively brief jaunt to Alicante’s big nice train station. I had booked myself a room in a very expensive yet not even that good looking hotel near the airport, in the nearby town of Torrellano and so, needed to navigate one last bit of Spanish public transport and let me tell ya, this was the most baffling of all.
I had thought that because Alicante is 97% English expats named Terry that it would be a piece of piss, though thisnwpild prove to be my undoing. Or not my undoing - I did do it, but it was annoying, is what I'm getting at.
I approached a ticket machine and pretty swiftly punched in my intended destination. Torrellano is about 15 minutes and two stops away from Alicante and I knew there were like three trains and hour that went there, so you can imagine my surprise when the machine proudly told me, like a child that had painted a nice picture of a horse, that I had missed the only train of the day that was scheduled to visit.
That couldn't be right - Google was telling me an entirely different story and I trust Google with my life, so jog on, machine, actually. I reasoned that it was probably just the train line that owned these particular machines that only ran one journey a day there and tried a different set of machines.
These machines did not operate in English. They said they did - I could pretty the ‘change language’ button, however all that did was change the language of the language select screen and absolutely nothing else, so that was cool.
I stood there, dumfounded, phone in hand, slowly Google translating everything on the screen to figure out what I was missing as a queue of mildly irritated Spaniards formed behind me and eventually figured out, by some - if I may say absolutely incredibly stroke of luck and vagrant’s intuition that the option I needed to press was “simple”, although the process has been anything but. I found my destination, selected my fare,scanned my card and…waited. For ages. Before the machine told me my transaction was cancelled. Well shit. I'd have to try the neighbouring machine. This was my last option before I had to speak to a person, which essentially meant this was my last option before I walked.
I realised, upon using the second machine that what I had been doing wrong was that not only did I have to tap my card on the contactless reader, I also had to put my pin code in, making it a two step verification and security process to buy a train ticket for two euros fifty, which, I will be honest, did seem a little like overkill.
Regardless, I had my ticket in hand and so I sat for a bit, until my gate was announced, then quite easily found Mt correct train and sat on it for a bit until it was time to get off.
Torrellano, I have to say, is a bit horrid. It looks a bit like a nuclear bomb had gone off in it thirty years ago and was only just getting round to recovering.
We don't take kindly to yer types, roun' here.
I sat on a park bench eating a pretty terrible lunch, writing my blog and watching the freaks pass until three o'clock rolled around and I could finally check in to my - and I do have to stress this - very expensive but not even that nice hostel, which, to gain access to, you had to walk through the back room of a neighbouring restaurant in a brazen attempt to cross-advertise and which, surely, is an immediate sign of quality for both establishments.
I dealt, curtly with my first and only unpleasant receptionist of the trip - of course it was the one in the proper hotel - and immediately locked myself in my very expensive but honestly not even that nice room, which has a very expensive and begrudgingly quite pleasant en suite bathroom. It was only Three-ish, but I decided to just hunker down for the night rather than explore the local area and risking all the associated radiation burns that go with such an endeavor. I sat then, until around 10ish, at which point I decided to go to sleep, in preparation for my ludicrous 3am wake up the next day.
I may well have decided to go to sleep, however the occupants of the neighbouring room weren't going to make that easy, staying up, as they did, until 1 in the morning, shouting, banging (doors, not genitals) and generally being as loud and distracting as they possibly could without physically being in my room. It's fine. I would probably only need two hours of sleep anyway.
I awoke two hours and fifteen minutes later in a nightmarish haze of hair, limbs and dry mouth, in a panic, as my phone's alarm went off at the maximum volume I could set, in an attempt not to sleep through it. I peeled myself off of my now very sweaty sheets, hoisted my bag onto my back and, grumbling more deeply and intensely than I have, possibly ever before in my life, set out into the night/early morning.
There were no buses to the airport at this time so I had decided to walk. It was only a 50 minute journey and I'm sure my bag wouldn't hurt me too badly in the process, so whatever. It was fine. Who needs shoulders anyway? Not me.
The walk, I have to say, was the single most terrifying point of this trip. Only the first ten or so minutes of it were furnished by street lights and upon crossing the train tracks leading out of time, I realized I would have to make the rest of the substantial walk in pretty close to complete darkness
…and without a discernable pavement. Excellent.
I took my earphones out, and cautiously, slowly, began trudging along the muddy, grassy verge beside the motorway; a vagrant classic.
Ultimately though, while harrowing, it was fine and not even that bad and frankly, a big fuss over nothing - I have to say that so I don't get shouted at by people who inexplicably care if I get hit by a car - and soon found the departure lounge of the airport.
I had been warned by my ticket to be there no later than 4:30am because “the airport was likley to be very busy”, so obviously it was entirely empty and I breezed through security in literal seconds, with effing she's to spare. That was fine, though. Better early and bored than late and panicking, I suppose.
I sat, then, early and bored, for what actually only ended up being a few minutes, by my gate as the airline (Ryanair again, who can, and this is true, get fucked) began loading us onboard at around five to five, with our estimated departure time being 6am. Or, I say boarded! What they actually did was make us all get out of our seats so we could stand up instead, holding heavy, unpleasant bags instead of laying them on the floor and waiting for nearly 45 minutes until the queue actually began to move. Superb, as ever, O’Leary.
Once - finally - on board, I took my seat next to an okay woman and a terrible man who snored when awake, had warts all over his fingers and rested his arms in his tummy in such a way that when he breathed, the expending fat would push his elbows out over the edge of the arm rests and into my ribs. It's a good thing this flight was only…/Three and a half hours?!/…/delayed to four hours!?/
Four and a bit hours of disjointed uncomfortable micro-sleep and barely cognisant awake bits later and with genuinely slightly sore ribs from fatty wart man's inexplicably respiratory arms, I was in my final destination of the trip, dropping 26 degrees of temperature in the space of half a day in the process.
I'm writing this bit on the flygbuss to Göteborg city, with less than three hours of sleep and a missed dinner and breakfast under my belt, so I feel like this is as good a place as any to curtail the blog for this year - save, perhaps, a small epilogue about the people who annoyed me on the flight home - as the rest would, and I cannot stress this enough, just be a list of the incredibly unhealthy food I would have eaten over the next four days.
The moral, then, of this trip - and each trip *does* have a moral, is quite simply that Ryanair truly can get absolutely fucked in all holes, while trapped in a bin.
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