Getting There - Aneel's Travelogue

I'm in Spain! My friend Adrienne is presenting at a conference in Valencia, and she's letting me tag along. The plan is to rent a car after her conference and drive around southern and central Spain for a couple weeks.

The travel so far has gone quite well. Christian was kind enough to drop us off at the airport on Saturday afternoon, and most of the flights were fairly uneventful. We ran into a slightly sticky spot with my boarding pass from Madrid to Valencia. When I checked in in Austin, they couldn't issue me that boarding pass (though Adrienne got hers just fine, and we're on the exact same flights). They couldn't help me in Dallas either, which meant that I had to get the boarding pass at the Iberia desk in Madrid, which, of course, had a long line. Luckily immigration was trivial: not even any questions, just a "Hola" and a passport stamp. We made it to our connection with a full seven minutes to spare.

Getting to our hotel from the airport was fairly easy on the Metro, and after lunch at the hotel restaurant (we were starving, and lots of places were closed because it was Sunday), we set out to find a SIM card for my phone. It took some trying since lots of places were closed because it was Sunday, but I now have a working Spanish SIM card, and can access the RAE dictionary when I want to know where a particular word comes from while out and about (Yes, the Spanish equivalent of the OED has a free iPhone app!). Plus maps and transit info. Those are handy too.

We were pretty beat after walking around searching for SIM cards, so we toyed with the idea of just going to sleep early, but we rallied and discovered that there was a branch of a recommended tapas bar just a few blocks away that was actually open on Sunday. The tapas were only okay, but the drinks were great, and we managed to stay up until a reasonable hour.