18:25 does not mean 10:25pm

It seems like no matter how hard I try to post once a week, something always comes up and I don’t have enough time to write a proper post. These past few weeks have been great though, besides usually having 1 test a week I have been traveling every weekend which is amazing but also wears you down pretty fast. I went to London two weeks ago which was quite an adventure, just getting to the airport was a story in itself which of course I will share here. You would think that with all this traveling I am becoming quite the expert at everything but sometimes I do the dumbest things. I actually wrote it down in my notebook as it was happening so I wouldn’t forget, here’s what happened…
I was off to Santander, a town 1 hour west of here, to try and catch my flight. I would say off to London but I might not make my flight… The problem was that when I converted the departure time from the 24 hour clock I did it wrong and thus missed my bus to the airport by about 2 hours. Originally I had planned everything out carefully, bought my bus ticket for the right time, and talked with my Professor about missing class. But then a few hours before my flight I was grabbing a quick lunch before going home to pack and I was just thinking everything over in my head. For some reason I re-figured out the time of departure and realized I had way more time than I originally thought (although I was way wrong in thinking this). So then when I was sitting in the class that I had already gotten permission to miss it hit me at 2:37 exactly that my bus had left seven minutes before. So then I was like, man I am an idiot, and I told Sean and he agreed. Buses from school leave every hour so all I could do was finish class and wait for the regular bus. I left the bus and sprinted all the way home, ran up 6 flights of stairs to my apartment, and frantically threw clothes in my backpack. Buses to Santander airport leave every hour so at that time I had 4 minutes to get to the metro which would take me to the bus station that is a half hour away. My roommate Borja was home so I begged him to drive me their instead which he reluctantly did and I was able to make it onto the bus but the chaos didn’t end there. I took a seat in the front row, planning ahead for a quick exit, but then a lady came and said that I was in her seat. So then I was like, alright, we have assigned seats, where the heck does it say on my ticket which one is mine. Some nice old ladies, seeing that I was new at all this, took my ticket and told me I was in seat 49. Great, “Vale, gracias” I said as I made my way to seat 49, which as I got to the back of the bus I found was taken by a very large black man. So I thought, ok, I’ll let him sit there with his friends, and I’ll take one of the empty seats a few rows ahead. However, not long after a guy comes and shows me that those empty seats belong to him and his friend. So then I had to go back to seat 49 and tell the guy that it’s my seat. He then gets out his ticket, which is for seat 15, and tells me I can just sit there. So then I went back up to the front of the bus to seat 15, but then the nice old ladies see me and are like, “Chico, you are 49” and I’m like, “yes, I know” but I don’t know how to say “I switched seats with the nice black man in the back of the bus” in Spanish so then ended up just telling me to sit in the open seat behind them which was seat 21. So I sat there for a while with no problems, but then we had a stop before Santander where more people got on the bus and sure enough a woman came down the aisle and told me I was in her seat. Luckily though one of the ladies told her what was going on (basically that I was a stupid foreigner) so she sat somewhere else.
One of the ladies spoke a little English and said she wanted to practice it with me so we had a pretty good conversation but when I told her what time my flight was she didn’t think I would make it. From the bus station in Santander I still had to take another bus to the airport so she said I should take a taxi which would be faster. Once we got to the station I sprinted to the taxi stop and told the guy I needed to go to the airport and that my flight left in 40 minutes. He was like, “Es imposible” but I had come so far I couldn’t give up yet. From the taxi I ran into the little airport and straight to the RyanAir counter, but nobody was there. I banged on the window but got nothing. I was like, there’s no way I get all the way here only to miss my flight because nobody’s at the desk. I ran around the corner to security who were like, “you are trying to get on the RyanAir flight? Good luck” and just pointed me back to the unmanned counter. I went back and banged on the glass some more with no results, luckily some nice lady who worked at the airport offered to help me, and she spoke English. We went back to security and one of the guards radioed for the RyanAir agent who came running in from the tarmac and was like, “What the heck are you doing here so late?” I told her I was very sorry and then the security guy gave me a lecture on how you’re supposed to always arrive 2 hours early, I told him I understood and that normally I get to the airport with more than 25 minutes before takeoff. So I made it onto the plane! I don’t think I would’ve made it though even if I was just 5 minutes later. It was a nice flight, I sat next to a guy from Tasmania who was pretty cool.
Traveling alone in London was different but nice. I spent all my time walking around all the famous sites and going inside the free museums and galleries which are amazing. One great part about being by myself was that I could take as much or as little time as I wanted at the different places. I spent almost 5 hours wandering around the British Museum and about the same the next day at the Natural History Museum. I felt like it was a trip of learning; I’ve got the London Underground down pat, “minding the gap” and all, I learned to double check my 24 hour clock reading skills, and then just reading about all the stuff in the museums helps you learn a lot about stuff.

By the time I got back home from London, my good friend Bertram had arrived with his friend Dave from Italy where they are studying art for the semester. They stayed with me until Wednesday when we left, along with Sean, for France for the weekend. We went to Biarritz which is a beautiful little vacation town in southern France. It was really fun hanging out with Bertram again and just doing stupid stuff in France. We stayed there for 2 days, surfed and messed around a bit, but then Bertram and Dave had to leave for Italy so Sean and I came back home. Because we got back early I was able to go “puenting” on Saturday. Puenting translates to Bungee Jumping in English and the outdoor club at my school was having a trip which for 2 jumps and transportation was only 20 bucks. So we drove for a while and then stopped in the middle of a big bridge. As they started setting up the ropes and everything I was like, these aren’t elastic at all, just regular ropes. So instead of going first, which they wanted me to do after they learned I had gone skydiving, I chose to see what exactly was going to happen and then jump off the bridge. So it turned out that puenting is where you hang ropes from one side of a bridge, bring them underneath and up to the other side where they are then hooked onto the harness that you wear. When you jump you fall a bit before the rope catches and then swings you underneath to the other side. It’s kinda like a free fall that turns into a big rope swing, which is scary but very fun and the way the harnesses are when the rope finally catches it flips you around before swinging you to the other side. On my second jump I wrapped my bendy tripod around my wrist and then held onto my camera to take a video. It turned out to not be a bad little video and I put it together with some other clips and pictures which you can see here, I think the funniest part is Julian, the guy I jumped with, going crazy in the background.

So my weekends are obviously very fun but I always have to come back and go to class Monday morning and although they aren’t as hard as Westmont I still have to find time to study and do homework. My roommate also got a kitten from someone at his bar so now we have Siam Capitan Puravida running around, yes the cat has 3 names which translate to Siam Captain Pure life, it’s a cool cat except it poo’ed on my socks the other night which was not so cool. The first few days it was really mellow but now it is constantly running around the house playing with everything and anything. On Wednesday we’re leaving for Paris for a long weekend. Sean’s brother will be there along with Westmont’s Europe semester with 6 or 7 of my good friends and Bertram is meeting us there too, so its gonna be a rendezvous in the Frenchest sense of the word and will probably make for some really crazy times. Thanks for reading, hope you all are doing well.
PS: I love when you write comments, especially when they’re not anonymous, and I would love to hear more about what everyone is doing back home or wherever.