Madrid - Alicante

Day Five. It started badly since Montezuma decided to well and truly take his revenge. My guess is that it might have been something to do with the fried rice I had from a Chinese takeaway just outside Anton Martin Metro station earlier in the day. Who knows? Anyway, I doubt I got much more than a couple of hours sleep, and those came in short instalments.

Still, for all that things started looking up when I started packing. I didn’t mention this in my last post, but I was quite upset on Wednesday because I lost my wedding ring. I told you about my visit to the Puenta de Toledo. Well, while I was there it suddenly occurred to me that my right finger felt a bit funny. I looked at it and I saw why. My wedding ring had gone. Now, I did cling to the hope that maybe it had come off in the shower earlier, but when I got back to my room for a siesta I checked and couldn’t find it there or in the wash basin. Then, yesterday morning, as I was making the bed for the las time I picked up the pillow, and there it was, just as f the tooth fairy had put it there. Honestly – that was my first thought, that I was being rewarded for my obvious virtue. More prosaically I guess that during Tuesday night I must have put my had under my pillow and it came off then, but even so, it made my day yesterday.

I don’t think of myself as a luddite technophobe, but I was very anxious about the fact that I hadn’t printed off my train ticket. So much so that the night before I’d downloaded it to a) my wee laptop that comes with me on all my trips – b) my phone, and finally c) my Kindle. Even so I made sure that I was at the station 2 and a half hours early AND went to customer services to check that my ticket on my kindle would be okay.

With a long time to kill I went for a walk along the Paseo del Prado and then came back to the station. I know that this sounds silly, but my train was at 12:15, and I didn’t want to go back into the station until the previous Alicante train – the 10:45 – had gone. To be honest, the Atocha station in Madrid seems to be going through a bit of an identity crisis, as I’m sure it thinks that it’s an airport. Before you could go into the Departure (Lounge) Area, you had to go through an airport style luggage check. Then when you got into the Departure area you couldn’t go onto the platform until your train was called, in the same way that you get called to the Departure gate in an airport. For all of that, though, the system seemed to work. I sat in one of the more comfy chairs which faced the glass doors onto the platforms and sketched one of the choo-choos which was waiting there.

When they allowed us onto the platform at about 5 to 12 I had time to quickly sketch the outlines of some of the people waiting, and when we got on the train – 5 minutes late so no bonus points to Renfe there – I completed the shading. The blokey sitting next to me seemed very interested in what I was doing. Finally he started talking to me, and even after my standard apologetic – ‘soy Ingles, no hablo Espanol mucho’ he kept talking. I kept picking up the odd word here and there, and after he pointed to my sketch, then the colourful logo on his T shirt I gathered that he was saying that my sketch would be a lot better with colour. Everyone’s a critic. I tried to show him the watercolour sketches in the book, but he wasn’t interested in a retrospective of my Madrid period, and said nothing. So, in an act of revenge, I noisily ate my crisps and drank my drink at him. That’ll teach him. I’d like to think that when he got off at Cuenca he had seen the error of his ways.

Fair play to the driver of the train. We left Madrid late, but we arrived at Alicante early. The last stage of the journey was to use the Cercania train out to San Isidro-Catral. Unbeknownst to me, the ticket machines are actually on the little bit that leads to their platforms. In all honesty I just didn’t see them. So I went to the ticket office. Now, in Madrid, on the very rare occasions that I did attempt to speak Spanish, the person to whom I was speaking invariably replied in English. So rather than messing about I asked the chap behind the desk if he spoke English. He looked at me as if I’d just asked him if he’d like a sniff of the dirty laundry in my pack, and replied, “No!” I’ve always wondered why they use two exclamation marks in Spanish – one like we do, and the other upside down at the start of the word. Now I know – I could actually hear the other exclamation mark. So I asked him in Spanish for a ticket to San Isidro – Catral – Albatera. He seemed most disgruntled – in fact I would dare to say that there wasn’t a single inch of him that was still gruntled – but he gave me the ticket anyway.