Up until recently, I have been loving public transportation. It is cheaper, easier, and in some cases faster than personal transportation, such as an itty bitty electric car or a moped, which are popular here. Sometimes you even get free entertainment, because it is very common for some musician to come into your car with his guitar or pan pipe or accordion, play a couple of songs, and then walk around with his coin purse held out, asking for money. I probably see a metro musician at least once every day. Sometimes it's good music, and sometimes I have to fight to keep from sticking my fingers into my ears. However, it's all in good fun, and nobody ever seems to mind that much. You can see all sorts of interesting characters in the metro. Dreadlocked punks, prim and proper ladies, and even the world's greatest Rubik's cube solver (I timed him at 17 seconds). In the summer months, it smells like a boys' locker room. Charming. A monthly metro pass lets me use the main metro, the inner-city bus system, and a bit of the Cercanias above-ground train system for one easy fee of 40,45 euros per month. That's a heck of a lot less money than I was spending on gas and car maintenance back home. And once you figure out what goes where, it's smooth sailing. Up until today...
On Mondays and Wednesdays, I have an 8:30 class in Pinar de Chamartin, which is the northernmost metro stop on the brown line, about an hour from where I live. Since today is Wednesday, I dutifully got up at 6:30 so I could leave by 7:30. After I got going on my morning metro commute and made the transfer to the brown line at Avenida de America, I noticed that the platform was way more crowded than usual. I shoved my way into the car anyway when the train came, and tried to maintain my balance as we took off. As more and more people piled in upon reaching each stop, I was starting to have Tomatina flashbacks of being crushed to death. When we got to the Alfonso XIII stop, I breathed a sigh of relief because I knew that the train would empty significantly there, as it usually does. However, an announcement in rapid-fire Spanish came over the intercom system, and for some reason everyone was made to disembark. The train took off completely empty, leaving about 500 people waiting on the platform. Another announcement told us that it would be 20 to 30 more minutes until we could get moving again because the brown line was completely shut down. I knew I needed to call my student and tell her about the delay that was surely going to make me very late, but there is no cell phone service in the underground, so I left the metro station and went up into the open air to call her. After explaining the situation, we decided to make up the class tomorrow morning. Fine, great, so then what? I had no idea where I was. Alfonso XIII, yes, but where is that in relation to anything else in Madrid? I walked to a bus stop and saw that the #72 bus ran to Diego de Leon, which is a stop on my green line. Unfortunately, I took the #72 bus going the wrong way. So instead of heading toward Diego de Leon, I was heading away from it to someplace called Hortaleza. Nothing was familiar, so I got off the bus in frustration and started walking. Two months in Madrid and I had finally gotten myself completely lost. Out of pure luck, I found a bus that would take me in the right direction, and I went and told the bus driver to make sure I got off at the right stop. I wasn't taking any chances. So, after 2.5 hours of traveling, I finally made it back home. Sigh. I got up at 6:30 this morning for nothing! So, you know what I did when I got back to my apartment? That's right. I went to bed.
