This morning I got up and did my best to repack my bags and get everything into a transportable fashion. Joaquin is an amazing packer, and I couldn’t quite recreate the magic he must have used to fit everything in, but I did the best I could. I said goodbye to the over-priced touristic apartment, gave the key to the guy at the front desk and high-tailed it out of there to find some place a lot more economical. Well, high-tailing it is a bit of an exaggeration, because with all my bags, the best I could really do was struggle valiantly. So…I struggled valiantly out of there and to the main road, determined to make it on foot because taxis are dang expensive. However, contrary to my belief that cheap hostals would pop up everywhere I turned, I was apparently in the wrong part of town for that. So after an hour of huffing and puffing and fighting my luggage around the neighborhood, I finally gave up and hailed a taxi to take me somewhere…anywhere!...to a place where I could leave that maldito equipaje. Thankfully, the cab driver who picked me up knew just where to go.
So here I am at Hostal Cantábrico, a neat 30€ per night, and really close to the Puerta del Sol, an extremely busy and popular plaza which serves as the hub of commercial Madrid, or so it seems to me. There are several pedestrian-only streets here, lined with every kind of store imaginable. I saw H&M (definitely gonna go check that one out soon), El Corte Inglés, FNAC (where I bought my plug convertors and USB) (by the way, how the heck do you say that? Fuh-nack?) (Is it ok to have several phrases in parentheses strung together like this? Oh well.), lots and lots of shoe stores, Mcdonald’s, Burger King, and Starbucks, lots of food stores and little Chinese grocers, and so forth. It was an amazing discovery for me. And I ate lunch at Pollo Campero! I didn’t know they had that here. I was so happy to be someplace familiar.
I also found where my orientation will take place tomorrow. Well, I think I found it. I followed the directions from Canterbury’s website and arrived at the correct building, but there is no indication anywhere that English classes take place there. I felt a deep sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach after walking up and down the street trying to figure it out. On top of that, yesterday I tried to find Canterbury’s main administrative office, located in a different neighborhood. The building I arrived at, following the address from the website, was the same case as today. No indication whatsoever that people speak English in those parts. Plus, I asked everyone within a 100-meter radius of the address (See? Meters! Hee hee, I am converting…) but nobody knew of Canterbury English. So today, with great dread in my heart, I finally called the office phone number, half-expecting to hear “We’re sorry, but this number has been disconnected,” or whatever its equivalent is in Spanish. I was convinced I had fallen into a great Internet scam in which some hacker ran off with my 300€ I transferred to hold my place in the program. Much to my surprise and massive relief, a lady answered the phone and verified that there is indeed a Canterbury English program in Madrid, and not to worry, the orientation would take place as planned in the afore-mentioned building. Hopefully, tomorrow morning, as I try once again to figure out how to get in, there will be several English-speaking people like me in the same predicament, and we can work together to figure it out. Heck, I’m getting there thirty minutes early just in case.
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