el tren es demorado

Another fiasco with the spanish rail system.
Yesterday me & Lisa decided to go see some actual historical sights in madrid. Mainly the Prado and Thyssen museums.

The prado was ´nice´. Lots of old paintings, never seen so many depictions of christ, the nativity, the virgin mary, the crucifiction, or the lamentation in one day before!!! ChRIST! After a while i kinda got sick of seeing just the same scenes over and over again. There was this one painting by some dude (i suck at remembering actualy names of stuff), but it was a three piece painting depicting the garden of eden, earthly pleasures, and hell. It had lots of fantastical animals, and scenes, kinda like an ancient where´s wally where you look for the man eating tree on two legs, or the two people making out in a bubble, that kinda thing. Unfortunately there were no cameras allowed, so i can´t really explain what it looked like.

The thyssen was laid out chronologically, but we didn´t realise, and kinda went backwards. Oh well. Otherwise it was heaps smaller than the prado, and there were a few too many landscapes for my liking.

We had planned to catch the 5pm train from Madrid to granada, and get there at 11:50pm. Got to the station around 4:20 so we wouldn´t be late. AS i said before, there´s there´s three train systems. The middle one is called the ´cercanias´. Turns out this train was a cercanias train, not a Renfe train as i had originally thought. So we spent about 20 mins figuring out exactly where we should be boarding the train. Unfortunately, when we tried to show people our tickets they just kept pointing us in the direction of the information office (where no-one spoke english), and the guys at information just kept just made hand guestures for us to stay there and saying ´no mobil´. With 5 mins to our train we were getting kinda worried we´d miss it. Some random chinese girl came up to us and started talking in chinese. Her train to some other city was delayed since 4pm, and she was hoping we would help her out. We have no idea!!! do we look like we know what we´re doing??? Stupid woman! We don´t even speak spanish!

Eventually a kindly old man who spoke english informed us that a truck had fallen on the railway tracks. Okay... so that means???? The train is delayed? cancelled? People kept telling us ´el tren es demorado´, which wasn´t in my spanish phrase book and we eventually found out it means ´the train is delayed´.

So we were just waiting around the station with no idea what was going on. We found two other english speaking backpackers who looked just as lost as we were who were also going to granada. We all sat around looking lost together. Strenght in numbers and what not. Alex (from melbourne) who can speak french, and Leslie from Canada. Eventually the nice old man told us that we could catch a train to chamartin (another station), catch a bus from chamartin to the station after where the accident happened, and then catch the train the rest of the way. yay, we could actually get there tonight!!!!

When we got to chamartin we found lots of spanish people looking just as lost as we were. I found the whole thing kinda funny, but i think lisa was freaking out just a little. Her 35Kg´s of luggage meant that it was kinda hard to move around from one station to another. So i just started going up to people and saying ´granada?´. If i got a ´si´, i would follow them. Sounds stupid i know, but it kinda worked! There was a cranky businessman who helped us out and spoke a little english. We also found two more canandian backpackers from quebec who were also heading to granada. We all just sat around waiting for the bus together. Lisa wasn´t being very social, which i figure is her way of coping with being stressed out. But the other guys were pretty fun.

In the end the bus eventually came, and we left madrid around 7ish. On the way to granda the quebec girls taught me how to say ´du e la station du tren´, (where is the train station) in french. Sweet, now i know how to get around in paris!

Eventually got to granada at 3am. Whoa! what a long day!