The metro in Barcelona starts at 5:00 each morning, so we got to the metro station nearest to our hostel at 5:00 am on Friday. Our plane to Mallorca left at 7:00, so we knew that we would be pressed for time. We had a plan: To arrive at Station Gracia and change subways to one headed towards the airport. Once we got to Gracia, though, we were told that we needed to go up the street to the other Gracia station. There are 3 stations on Gracia street. Oh. So we quickly walked a few blocks north, only to find that the next line to the airport was scheduled to leave this station at 6:02. We were frustrated, but what could we do? There wasn’t time to change our route. We waited half an hour and then willed the train to go faster as we slugged along town. The tram between the airport bus stop and our terminal seemed to last a lifetime too. We wound around the whole airport, and there were crying babies, and it was crowded, and… it was exactly like all of those nightmares I have where I’m trying SO HARD to get somewhere and I just CAN’T.
We missed check-in by five minutes. We paid a fee larger than the original price of our tickets to get on the next plane to Mallorca a couple of hours later. Our largest anxiety was that our host was that our Mallorcan host was surely waiting for us at the airport wondering why we weren’t getting off the plane that matched the flight number and time that we had given her months ago.
The thing about the metro in Barcelona is that there are several different companies that use the rails (hence the several different stations of the same name). The basic metro seems to be pretty straightforward. But for the train company - which you must take to Girona and to the airport - I still have no idea how one knows where to go after purchasing a ticket. Sometimes there are screens and/or that tell you where the next bus is headed, and sometimes there aren’t. But can’t be assumed that if you are told to board the train that goes to Platform Two at 9:16 that you should board the train at Platform Two at 9:16, because sometimes the trains can be running a couple of minutes late, like ours was to Girona, and you just have to recognize that the unlabeled train in front of you is incorrect.
The metro was not a major concern of mine when we were planning this trip. Alan’s a pretty good navigator and I know Spanish. I was expecting to have troubles with Spanish because I haven’t used it for a year and because I learned it in Mexico, but so far the biggest problem hasn’t been Spanish, but Catalan. I had been warned that all of the signs in Barcelona would be in Catalan, but I had expected everyone to know Spanish so that it wouldn’t really be a problem. In Girona, our friendly server at a restaurant spoke to us about the U.S. and Obama (!) almost completely in Catalan, and when I asked for directions in a panic on our way to the airport on Friday morning, the woman behind the help desk was confused by the word aeropuerto until someone else overheard and corrected me, saying the Catalan word aerport. Reading Catalan is difficult but usually possible for me to do, drawing from some Spanish and my long-ago French classes, but that doesn’t get me far when I don’t know where a sign I need is.
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