Sunday, May 16th, 2010
The airplane ticket I had from Santander to London had only cost me about €20 so my concern wasn’t much over the lost sunk costs of a missed flight. Nevertheless, if I could somehow get to Santander within the next 3 to 3½ hours I might be able to catch my flight. Santander is about a two hour drive west of San Sebastián along the coastline of northern Spain; all the bus routes offered for that day were scheduled to arrive within that two hour time frame, except for the one I was expecting to be on which for whatever reason would take 3½ hours, although it was still the latest service offered that would get me to the airport in time, the next service leaving at three and not expecting to get me there until five. Presumably if they kept any regular schedule my three o’clock arrival should have departed at 1:00 and not 11:25, but that would be too logical, wouldn’t it? (Do I need to say it again? I fucking hate buses.) The first thing I did after disembarking the funicular was to head to my originally intended destination of the San Sebastián bus center. I had only looked at the schedule of the main national bus company, and figuring that there were no rail links along the northern coast there surely had to be many other competing companies offering their
own service.
Upon my arrival there were indeed a number of busses lined up with insignia from different operators. This seemed promising. This was supposed to also be the city’s tourist information center so I hoped to find an office or kiosk or something such that someone hired to deal with English tourists could help plan and direct me to the best solution for getting to where I needed to go. This turned out to be not the case. The lone kiosk was shut down, not keeping hours on Sunday (which makes sense, I suppose, as weekends are generally the least popular time for people to travel). I tried to glean if any of the busses had a destination of ‘Santander’ written anywhere on them. ‘Bilbao’, ‘Bilbao’, ‘Bilbao’, ‘Bilbao’… they’re all either going to Bilbao (a city about halfway between San Sebastián and Santander) or they’re not labeled. I tracked down a driver to see if I could get any information out of him.
“Excuse me, hablas Inglés?”
“¿Inglés? No.”
“Oh. Um… necesito ir a Santander en dos o tres horas. ¿Hay un autobús?”
“No, no hay autobús a Santander.”
“¿No? ¿Y no hay tren, correcto?”
“Sí, corrige.”
So there’s no bus to Santander and confirmed once again no train either. Basically what this town is telling me is that if I want to get from here to there, I’m screwed. There was several moments’ silence as I waited to see if he might voluntarily propose another solution but it became clear I was the one that would have to concoct any plans for his confirmation or denial. My mind fumbled for the next best option that I would also be able to communicate in Spanish.
“¿Hay un taxi?”
“Sí,” and he pointed me to a taxi parked opposite of the plaza. I went off to investigate if this would be a feasible solution, prepared for it to not be as cost-friendly a solution.
“Hablas Inglés?”
“No, lo siento.”
“Okay, um, necesito ir a Santander Aeropuerto. Uhh… ¿Cuánto dinero por…?”
“¿A Santander?”
“Sí.”
“Un momento,” and he went to dig a booklet out of the glove compartment. Flipping through the pages he found what he was looking for and showed me.
“De San Sebastián a Santander Aeropuerto, será doscientos veinte euro, un poco menos.”
It would be about €200 to get to the airport by taxi. Quite a bit more than the €50 I originally promised to pay to get a ride on the Montaña Suiza. I quickly weighed what my best possible alternative would likely be. There were no trains heading west to Santander but they did head northeast into France. I could probably get somewhere into France for €20, get to Paris for another €40, and take the Eurostar from Paris to London, which I figured being as well-traveled a line as it is wouldn’t cost more than €50. That was about half the cost, and plus (call me a romantic) I secretly had always wanted to arrive in London from Paris via the tunnel under the English Channel. I thanked the driver but disinclined based on the price, leaving him to continue his siesta. It seemed I would not be catching my flight after all.
San Sebastián had two train stations, the main central train station I arrived in last night and a smaller station a couple blocks away. I entered the smaller station, believing this was the one I needed to go north. An attendant there spoke a little English and my Spanish was feeling exhausted by that time so I tried to see how far I could get using my native tongue.
“I need to get to London. Is this the station for trains heading in that direction?”
“To London? No, this is just for the local network. The main station handles all the long-distance train routes.”
Ten minutes later:
“No, these trains only for going south into Spain, cities like Zaragoza, Madrid or Barcelona. You want the regional Euskotren station; that one serves all northbound trains into France. Do you need directions?”
Another ten minutes later:
“The main station is only for southbound trains.”
“Yes.”
“So I obviously can’t get to London from there.”
“No, but this station only has a shuttle service north to Biarritz.”
“From there would I be able to get to Paris?”
“Yes, they have many direct trains to the rest of France including Paris.”
“And from Paris I can probably get to London… right?”
“Yes.”
Okay… I’m not so sure if our initial confusion was due to a communication barrier or an intelligence barrier. Regardless I soon had an €8 ticket in hand and within fifteen minutes was boarding the shuttle train to Biarritz, wherever the hell that was. Watching as stations went by it seemed clear that I left the Spanish speaking world, but it was hard to tell exactly where in the world I really was… most of the platform signs appeared to be written in Hungarian. When I arrived at the station forty minutes later I honestly had no clue whether or not I was still in Spain or in France or in some independent regional-state I had never heard of before. Even with open borders in the EU, you’d at least think you’d see a big sign telling you when you go from one country to another; even the border from Michigan into Ohio is pretty obvious. Regardless of which nation I was in, (a piece of knowledge that without was more discomforting and surreal than you’d expect) I was looking at a schedule board with several departures for Paris listed. This was going to work.
Or was it? I tried buying a ticket using the automated machine but it was refusing every option I tried to enter. A man waiting behind me commented that all the trains to Paris are fully booked. That can’t be good. The train to Paris waiting at the platform departed, another one was set to leave within the next half hour, after that I would need to wait until early evening for the next train. I needed to talk to the ticket agent ASAP.
“The first seats I have available for Paris leave… next Tuesday.”
Uh oh. This was a bit more than just another setback. This was potentially a disaster. At least in San Sebastián I knew with some degree of epistemic certainty what country I was in, with a vague idea of where to go next when my first plan didn’t work and some basic comprehension of the local language. Now I didn’t even have that. Thankfully I was not alone.
The sound of American college student voices, sweet nectar to my lonely ears, rung out across the office. Two other pairs of travelers had found themselves in the same predicament as I; introductions were not even necessary before I was brainstorming a solution with the four of them. The two pairs were each students at a different school in Paris doing some weekend sightseeing in Spain and needed to be back for classes by tomorrow morning. The first solution they had come to was to pool their resources for a rental car, but, as the ticket agent helpfully informed us, the rental car agency in this town wasn’t open on Sundays. What about the next train to Bordeaux? That one still has seat remaining. True, but according to the computers that will just be another dead-end for us only slightly closer to our destination; there are still no trains that can get us to Paris by tonight.
It was not looking good. While the others tried finding if any rental car agencies in Bordeaux were still open on Sunday, I discovered that a ticket did open up for a single passenger on an overnight train from here to Paris for €120. Worse yet, my expectations that the Eurostar from Paris to London would have a standard, competitive price around €50 proved to be off by a margin; the actual ticket was closer to €180, which I reluctantly agreed to buy for tomorrow morning. But finally good news: if we all got tickets to Bordeaux, we would arrive by 6:30, just in time before the rental car agency there closes at 7:00, where they reserved a car that, by their estimates, would cost some €20 each if split five ways. I agreed to that. Finally, after a couple of hours of spontaneous, ill-advised decision making, I had a plan to get to London by tomorrow morning.
“By the way, I’m Jeremy. Nice to meet you all. Do any of you know what country we’re in?”
It turned out we had crossed into France, and we used the opportunity as we waited for our train to Bordeaux to get some French pastries and learn more about each other. The two guys (darn, I can’t remember their names at the moment) went to school in Massachusetts and the two girls (Anna and Berenice) went to school for art in Chicago. On the train to Bordeaux I confessed my story about why I wasn’t on an airplane right now to be swiftly taken to London, and upon revealing the existence of this website impressed the guys with my acute familiarity with all of their local parks despite never having been to Six Flags New England, Lake Compounce or Quassy. Later they spent the rest of the train ride flirting with a French woman
sitting opposite from us, asking for pronunciation of basic French vocabulary that, having lived in Paris for four months, I’m certain they would have known by then.
Upon our arrival in Bordeaux we had to hurry to get to the rental agency before 7:00pm to pick up our car, which like most European vehicles was only standard transmission. Thankfully two of our group knew how to drive a stick shift, but part of me almost wanted a chance to get behind the wheel, just because learning how to drive a stick on the French motorways would have definitely been the icing on the cake of this whole crazy saga.
The drive to Paris promised to be a six or seven hour ordeal, although thankfully it went with few incidents.
As we reached the start of a toll road, Berenice accidentally dropped the ticket on the pavement and was forced to move forward out of the way. After parking along a side rest area we debated whether to run back and get another but decided against it on the grounds that since this was the first toll stop they’d just charge us the full amount on the exit anyway if we didn’t have an entry point ticket to show. We then got stuck in our parking spot and neither driver was able to get the transmission to reverse further than an inch or two before we jolted back forward. After five minutes of red-faced perseverance over this seemingly simple task with the local Frenchies laughing their asses off at us, one of them finally came over to show us how to get out. “Merci beaucoup,” and we were back on our way.
Well, the French toll road authorities did seem to think a Dumb Americans Tax was in order when we failed to produce a ticket, as our toll ended up totaling €30. At the next pickup point we were extra cautious not to throw our ticket to the wind, as it were, only to later be hit with another €20 toll. Are French expressways really just that expensive to drive on?
As the night grew long the guys both drifted off to sleep in their seats, but I stayed up to help Anna keep our driver Berenice alert, where I learned they were both in France as art students and we entertained a lengthy conversation about various artistic appreciations and philosophies. We eventually arrived at the girls’ university dorms by 2:00am, all completely whipped out. Anna offered to house the other two guys in her room for the night while Berenice agreed to let me sleep on her floor. In all honesty a few blankets on the floor and a wad of clothes as a pillow seemed like a luxury after the past 16 hours as I was actually able to stretch my feet out for once. Plus, for the first time in over a week: free internet in the room! I wrote a letter to my professors explaining why I was going to be a day late (it turned out volcanic ash from Iceland made a convenient, catch all excuse… and who knows, maybe if I had made it to Santander airport I would have discovered that very reason was responsible for delaying me even longer?)
The next morning we decided that between the per-kilometer surcharge, the diesel and the ridiculous toll fares, the per-person share of expenses had jumped to €86, which combined with the train to Bordeaux was about precisely equal to what that overnight train ticket would have cost. Oh well, this was undoubtedly the more interesting of experiences and I got the chance to make some new friends on the way as well.
I was late to missing my scheduled Eurostar train to London. Berenice misheard me when I told her what time my train left so I got a later start, and I didn’t account for the fact that customs would take place before getting on the train. Before I could even groan the ticket checkers took a pen and wrote a new time and seat assignment for the train departing the very next hour, no fees or anything. Finally, something that went wrong that went right! The ride was truly first class but I could hardly even notice as a minor cold I had been fighting with for the past few days (likely resulting from my original decision back before Madrid not to bring my coat under the assumption that springtime in Spain would be all smiles and sunshine) finally manifested into a sinus blow-out on the scales of which I’ve never seen before (that was probably TMI).
After five minutes in the restroom when I finally got it under control, I promptly fell asleep in my seat. I hoped I would be alerted of our passage through the channel tunnel but I somehow missed it. Sigh… maybe next time.
I arrived in London around 11am local time. It was weird seeing everything written in English again. Part of me felt like I had somehow wound up back home, even though I knew I was taking my first steps in a distant country. In many ways it was that very sense of homecoming that made it seem all the more foreign, my expectations that as soon as they stopped talking in accented English they’d carry on conversation in a language I barely understood always eerily broken. No more having to ask “do you speak English”… just having to accept the fact that
“Soears abaht ahr yehfrum guvner?” was already most likely English. I rode the London Underground to Regent’s Park where the university hosting my philosophy program was located. They got me checked in, called my professors who said I didn’t miss anything important anyway and should just go back to the apartment. After letting me get lunch in the cafeteria they called a cab and the landlord took me up to our group’s rented flats. I took a shower then collapsed on the couch for a half hour while I got caught up with everything I had missed online over the past week. Eventually I heard the door unlock and I got to meet the rest of my nine fellow philosophers, closing the book on one chapter of my European odyssey while simultaneously beginning the next.
Great retelling of this, Jeremy. Thanks for sharing!