So, Barcelona...where to start. Okay then, how about with the shittiest airport experience ever??
Actually the flight from London to Barcelona was very nice, in a British Airways airbus. Now I see why Airbus is a far superior product than anything Boeing can dish up. Seriously, the cabin noise was virtually non-existent, and the seats much more comfortable. Really, if the French can do it, why not everyone else huh?
Anyway, the walk from the arrival gate to the baggage reclaim area can only be described as epic. I think it took nearly 20 minutes. And upon arriving at the baggage carousel we managed to claim one of the our suitcases...the one with all of Miss R's shoes and our dirty washing....but wait a minute, everyone else from the flight has gone, and we've still to get our main suitcase. And I'm talking our main suitcase here, with all of Miss R's new clothes from London, not to mention all of our clean clothes and toiletries. And still we waited.......
In the end we had to go to the baggage counter and file a report of a missing suitcase. The lady was okay, but seriously, their system of missing baggage has to be put into question. The poor lady had no idea where the bag could be, their system in Barcelona is not linked with BA's system. She gave a claim number and that was that. So we were left with the clothes on our backs and a suitcase full of shoes and dirty washing. Great.
So, having been to Barcelona 4 years ago, I had remembered about the Aerobus, a shuttle bus to the city. The automatic ticket machine was infuriating, so I kicked it and we bought a ticket from the driver instead. Seriously, by this stage I wasn't enjoying this country at all, can you tell??
We got to our hotel, which, thankfully, was very very nice and well appointed, as well it should be considering how much we paid. By this time it was 1pm, so we thought we'd head out for a wander, at least have something to eat, and see some sights, and maybe by the time we got back to the hotel our bag would have turned up.
We hired a couple of bicycles which was awesome, and probably highly recommended. It really is s great town to cycle around, although a bit scary with cars being on the opposite side of the road.
We rode down to the beach, along the harbour and up through the old city. The weather was great. I must say though, that coming into evening, we found ourselves in some very dodgy back blocks that we quickly high tailed it out of. We got to Placa Catalunya right in the middle of rush hour, and seriously, there were people freakin everywhere. We couldn't ride anymore, had to walk the bikes around.
So, we returned the bikes and made our way back to the hotel hoping to see our suitcase there. Alas, not to be. By this stage we were getting pretty peeved, no doubt. We rang the number that the woman at the airport gave us only to be told to look it up on the internet tracking system. But he had no idea where the bag was, and couldn't say whether it had left London or not. So we rang BA in London only to get a recorded message saying to call back later when the lines weren't so busy....which we did countless times.
So, we thought we had better ring our travel insurance company. Oh, but wait, they had reps in every country EXCEPT SPAIN! So, we had to somehow find out how to make a reverse charges call to Australia. We had no luck. The phones were crap, no-one would help us. So we went down to the reception, and she ended up ringing for us, but of course, it wasn't business hours in Australia was it?
So we thought we could at least have a shower, clean ourselves up, use the hotel supplied soap etc. Oh, but that would be too easy wouldn't it? We turned the shower on and in the space of a minute the whole bathroom floor had flooded and the expanding tide was making its way out the door. Closer inspection had revealed the sink hole to be plugged full of hair. Ewwwww. We rang reception, they sent up a maid to mop up, but they couldn't change our room as they were full, and they couldn't fix the plug hole as the plumber wasn't available. So we couldn't even have a shower. I'm not kidding, we hadn't washed since the night before, and we stank.
Nothing to do except get some cheap take way, and wallow in the state of how crap Spain had been to us.
The next day, still nothing on the internet regarding the bag. Questions start running thought your mind....was it nicked off the carousel? Did someone take it by mistake?? Would they take it back to the airport? Why wasn't it here?? We made our way down to breakfast, ate a minuscule portion, not hungry at all. Miss R and I were fed up, we were going to go back to the airport and talk to someone face to face as the people of the phone were freakin useless.
We got back into our room and guess what....our suitcase had magically arrived!!! Oh I actually heard angels singing such was the joy.
Hopefully Barcelona was going to redeem itself...unfortunately it was only going to be fleeting. |
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