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Well, I actually didn't want to participate in this study trip to Salamanca. It was quite expensive, £300 for everything but flights, and it takes about 1 week out of my pre-exam revision time. But then I thought, I will be living with a host family, like an exchange student (something I have always wanted to experience) and as everything will be in Spanish, I can absorb Spanish like a sponge and hopefully not do too badly in my Spanish exams. Killing 2 birds in 1 stone right? So yeh, that's how I ended up participating in this journey of my life.
Day 1 (Saturday)
My flight is 8am on Sunday, but having spent so much money BEFORE my trip starts, I figured I should save on the cab right and take the last bus at 0020 to Coventry before taking the 2am bus from Cov to London Stansted Airport. Not the wisest choice. By the time I reached London, I was absolutely knackered but as I was on my own, there was no way I could fall asleep with so (surprisingly) many travellers waiting for their flights in the airport.
Day 2 (Sunday)
Finally boarded the plane at about 830. I didn't know then, but my future housemate in Salamance was sitting two rows in front of me in the flight, and was apparently very noisy all through. Of course, not knowing where they were going, we remained strangers.
I arrived at about noon. With my heavy suitcases and the crazy lack of lifts/escalators, I decided to just stay around in the airport and wait for the meeting time with the rest of the group. OK, I shamefully admit that the first meal I had in Madrid was... Mcdonalds! And it was good! Haha
By 5pm I took the shuttle bus to the 'meeting point' and met up the the rest. My first impression of the group wasn't great. Oh god they are playing cards... it's gonna be a boring week. Needless to say, my feelings changed after all we went through during this trip.
Later the day, we took the bus from Madrid to Salamanca and was hastily allocated into our host family by pairs, and our journey in Salamanca began...
Day 3 (Monday)- Day 6 (Thursday)
Spaniards have crazy meal times. Breakfast at 830, Lunch at 330 and Dinner at 930pm! The first day there was the worst. we kept eating at the 'wrong' time and basically I was usually full at meal times and hungry in between.
On Monday morning we were put into a test. To be graded into classes. I have to say I felt a huge sense of relief when I was placed into the same class as everyone else on my level from Warwick. I didn't understand the questions at all as I didn't really speak Spanish (I still don't by the way).
The lessons were great. We shared a class with a group from Belgium, and had plenty of opportunities to practice our very limited Spanish vocabulary. With many hand gestures, sound effects, drawings and Spanglish involved, our Spanish teachers seem to be able to understand what we were trying to say.
We went out every single night. The first night was the worst. We stayed at a restaurant to have 'tapas' and Sangria until they started raising the price significantly after every rounds we ordered to chase us out of the place. It was the first time I played poker without an 'alliance', and I won so many hands that none of them believe I am a beginner! (Hey!) The night went downhill after that. Maybe it was the fact that we were such a mixed group of people. Doing different courses, different age, from different ethnicity... what follows was a loooooong wander around the city of Salamanca, many attempts in choosing a bar... and 3 hours later, frustration arose and we all sort of headed home without going anywhere.
It almost seem like no one wanted to repeat the tragic history of Monday night. From Tuesday onwards, we went into every single bar we saw, and on Thursday, we did a bar crawl around the town and ended up having a bit too many drinks that night. (Hey, 12 shots for 5 euros, where else in the world can you get that!)
Glowing Gin and Tonic!
Not exactly sure what we were trying to do
They have I macs in the college!! Lots of them!
Day 7 (Friday)
On this fateful day, we received our first bad news. A volcano erupted. In Iceland. At first we were going, 'so what?' The wave of ashed have started to drift into the UK, and flights on Fridays were cancelled. No one knew how long it will last, and as the day move on, more flights were cancelled and that was when we started to panic.
At night, I took my laptop to Mcdonalds (I know, again!) and we spent 2 hours looking through every piece of volcanic news and checking the websites of every British airlines. By midnight most of our flights are cancelled and we started scrambling around fanatically looking for alternative routes home. All of us went on our mobile phones and called for emergency help from friends in UK. By that time, most of the flights are fully re-booked until the Saturday the following week, trains and ferries are all booked up as well. The only alternative we found then was a bus from Madrid to London, which will take 24 hours costing 141 Euros. The site was in Spanish completely, and when we tried to buy the tickets, it crashed on us! And then McDonalds started closing down. To make things worse, my laptop ran out of battery and so we decided to just go home and get our own friends from UK to buy the tickets for us.
It was a looong night. When I finally managed to buy my ticket, it was already 5am in the morning. My bus from Salamance to Madrid will leave at 7am and hence the 'wise' me decided to sleep in and take my friend's later bus to Madrid.
I really did slept in. (To be fair that was the only night I managed to get more than 3 hours sleep for that week) I woke up at 1pm and started rushing to get ready. After several more rounds of miscommunication between me and my host family, I managed to get to the bus just in time for departure.
Day 8 (Saturday)- Day 9 (Sunday)
Toured around Madrid. Visited some museums and had loads of Mojitos (some free as well! I love this about Spain. To fill up the bars in the beginning of the night, most bars often give out free drinks to visitors and if you go around a few bars before 12 you could end up having a pretty good night out for almost nothing!)
Shisha. He Hui disapproves
Day 10 (Monday)
Time to go home. Having checked out at about 11am, I stayed around the hostel for a bit helping Ben with his Lloyds interview preparation. Then at around noon, we started our journey home.
First leg of the journey: Metro from Anton Martin to the Bus station.
Second task: Get our tickets. We were quite lucky that the other group of us who came straight from Salamanca arrived there early. They queued for an hour and when we arrived, we joined them right at the front of the queue that had ballooned up to 5 times the size after they started queueing. Reporters were present and the whole place was chaos. The worse that could happen. Or so we thought.
Third task: Get ON the bus. This proved to be trickier than we anticipated. After some Burger Kings (not me this time, blame Max and his cravings!) and a few rounds of shithead (a really cool game of cards, yeh, I got pulled into their card playing habit. Again, not proud), we started heading towards our bus an hour before the bus SHOULD leave. What happened next was a complete nightmare. Right behind our bus was a queue. Or rather, a huge group of people pushing and pulling at one another. The more conversational people from our group asked a few people in front of us and we realised that to board our bus, we need to 'Check-In', which means joining that pool of people to get to the check-in booth.
We were NOT the best at this sport. Half an hour after our 'attempt' to get to the front, we were still right at the back of the pack, the queue was still as long. At 4, we managed to advance a foot and 2 hours after the bus was scheduled to leave, we finally made it to the front and got ourselves checked-in. (Only then we knew that check-in meant getting 'Bus 90, Platform 29' written on our tickets. Duh, could have so done that ourselves.
Forth task: Survive the bus journey. I don't really know how, but we managed to somehow stay sane throughout the 25 hour bus journey.
Fifth task: Check our call charges. My call charges for the last week was £35, Max was £85 and Josceline managed to top us all with a whooping £106.
Sixth task: get from London to Coventry. The whole bus shook as we cheered when we left the ferry, and when we arrived in London. It felt so triumphant that some of us on board even had tears in their eyes. We made it made it made it! Daniel surprised me in London, which was really helpful as I would have gone crazy being on the bus again after just getting off one. And another from Coventry to Warwick University.
Arrived in London!
I have never felt so happy arriving at Warwick. Not even the first time I came to UK. I jumped off the bus and kissed the bus stop (Don't ask me why but I just felt the need to OK!) and ran all the way home leaving Daniel chasing after me all the way.
The trip has done 2 things:
Firstly, I had the opportunity to know a few people not from the Business School. History, Physics, Economics, language studies etc. It's the first time I get this close to people who DOESNT like math, and it is actually interesting.
Secondly, well... this is the obvious. From now on, I will think twice before un-checking the option to buy insurance for any flights or accommodations!
