Arrival and the big reveal

We made it to the Barcelona airport, major milestone.  

Now begins the intrepid journey to exit the airport, make a phone call to your host to notify them of your rather inconvenient arrival time, find the right transportation, buy a ticket for the bus/train, know the right stop at which to exit the transportation and then channel your inner Magellan on foreign streets to the apartment you reserved several months ago at 11 PM at night. 

First stop outside the baggage claim/declaration gate, get local currency.  Chose the buttons carefully, don't want to lose the ATM card in your first hour in a foreign country.  

Euros, check.

Our host had sent us fairly detailed directions about the bus from the airport, we need the blue Aero bus. Most airports are laid out the same so ground transportation signs were pretty obvious.  We got a visual on the big blue bus and it's nearby ticket machine.  Mike began his quest to call our contact so she could meet us at the apartment.  I went over to the ticket machine to procure two bus tickets.

Mike's first couple of phone call attempts did not go through...tension mounting.  I navigated the ticket machine to the payment screen twice only to be stymied by a PIN number request.  Rats!

In the din of the airport I hear Mike finish a quick call with our contact. Whew!  As tension rises for me at the ticket machine, a very helpful person comes over to explain that you can pay cash for tickets on the bus. It a common practice that most, if not all credit card transactions using machines require a PIN in Europe.  This is not common practice in the US as Mike found out when he called both our credit card providers the next day.  "Our cards don't have a PIN security capability yet, you will not be able to use your credit cards for payment at those machines that require it." Thank you and have a nice day.  I guess we are no longer the center of the technology universe.

We got on the Aero bus and uneasily ride along, hoping we are on the right one. The airport suburb gives weigh to to lights and density of Barcelona.  I hear our destination, Universidad Metro on the recording, I think.  The instructions provided by our host indicated a 45 min bus ride.  Our ride seemed much shorter, but sleep deprived and disoriented we schlepped our bags from the bus onto a very busy plaza.

There were hundreds of people bustling around us a we went in the wrong direction a couple of times.  It was like we were staring in a Candid Camera version of The Amazing Race.  We finally identified a few of the landmarks from the directions.  Mike may actually be a direct descendant of Magellan...

We walked purposefully, but uneasily down the narrow, graffiti-laden street of Joaqin de Costa with our suitcases and packs. Really, no one even paid attention to us, but it was slightly intimidating.  We arrived at the apartment and waited about 5 minutes for our contact to arrive.  

I remembered discussing that the apartment was on the 3rd floor when we booked it.  No lift/elevator.  We figured 3 floors would be OK to carry luggage.  As we began to go up, it was more like 5 flights of stairs.  The first two flights were not numbered, then the last 3 flights were numbered Primero, Segundo and Tercero.  The building was extremely old and the automatic timer on the stairwell light expired as we schlepped our bags up the stairs, plunging us into darkness halfway up.

We waited for Danielle to unlock the apartment door for the big reveal...it was newly remodeled as advertised with hardwood floors, 2 bedrooms, very modern bathroom and kitchen and nicely appointed living salon.  A very welcoming place to start our journey and our revisit to Barcelona.