So the journey to the Spain was crazy. I just look on it all as a hilarious adventure though. The trip started out very smoothly: Olivia and I arrived at the Charlotte airport with plenty of time, security was painless so we were on the plane quickly, and I even had an extra seat next to me on the plane, so I was spacious and slept the entire flight comfortably. When we got to Detroit, we didn’t have to wait long at all before boarding the plane for our connection to Amsterdam.
The problems began once we were on the plane. Boarding had begun an hour before the plane was supposed to leave, so we sat there for an hour, and then when we were supposed to leave, we had to undergo de-icing, so we didn’t leave for an additional hour. This meant that when we arrived in Amsterdam, we were behind schedule and had 50 minutes to get from the very back of the plane to the gate for our connection to Madrid. I’ve never rushed through an airport so fast. The Amsterdam airport is apparently 5 miles long and has a ridiculous number of terminals and gates, and unfortunately for us, the gate we needed to get to was D79 (I still don’t understand how the D terminal could possibly need 87 gates!?), which was nowhere close.
Despite being told by the flight attendants that if you were connecting to another flight you wouldn’t need to go through customs or security, we did…and the lines were of course long. Going through security was a mess! I had water from the plane in a nalgene and I didn’t want to throw away my bottle, so I had to drink 24 oz of water in 60 sec. as everyone in security watched (looking at me like I was straight crazy). Then when I walked through the metal detector, the staple on my boarding pass set the alarm off, so I got intensely frisked. I was pulled to the side, got a hardcore pat down, and even had the lining of my pants checked. It was ridiculous! Thank goodness it was a woman. By the time we got out of security, we had 15 minutes before our plane departed. We began to run like mad, each of us with two bags, through the airport- down hallways, up stairs, and down more hallways. Proud of ourselves, we arrived at the gate 5 minutes before departure…but they wouldn’t let us on the plane. Even though we could see the plane outside, they’d closed the doors. AHHH!
So we spent the next 3 hours waiting in the Amsterdam airport for the next flight to Madrid, only to arrive in Madrid and find out that our luggage apparently hadn’t been loaded and would come on the next flight. So then we waited in the Madrid airport on the floor for 5 hours until the next flight arrived. It was a cold, hard floor, we were starving, and we were tired…I’m really not sure why I just found the whole experience hilarious, but I did. Several people on our flight from Detroit to Amsterdam missed their connections, so we ended up meeting other students studying abroad and bonding with them. One guy named Vincent, who also was going to Seville for our same program, never got his bags. From the airport we took a taxi to the train station and then took a 2 hour train to Seville. A journey that was supposed to be much shorter ended up lasting 30 hours. And when we arrived in Sevilla, we found out that 1 in 3 students in the UNC program arrived in Madrid but their luggage didn’t, so many only had their carry-ons. Wow!
Highlights: 1) On our flight to Amsterdam, each seat had personal screens, so I watched four movies (Vicky, Cristina, Barcelona; Eagle Eye; The Waitress; and The Duchess). 2) The people by me on the plane were always really nice. In between me and Olivia on the way to Amsterdam was a really sweet girl going to study in Germany for the semester- I absolutely LOVED her accent…she was from Minnesota. 3) The Amsterdam airport is a riot: they make mean announcements in a nice way, such as saying the full names of people who haven’t boarded the plane yet and announcing to them over the intercom that they are single-handedly holding up the flight and their items will be removed if they don’t show up pronto. Olivia and I got one (as well as Vincent).
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