First moments in Spain

This is us in the metro, when we left the airport to get to the bus station




Chaos of a day! Having arrived in Spain, with little sleep, we headed out to yet another brave new world! We stopped by multiple information desks obtaining various maps of the city, metro, county, and having acquired the best method of getting to our bus station we were now in search of an ATM. While in Costa Rica for whatever reason most of the ATMs would not except our debt cards. So we had a routine of stopping by a certain ATM in the mall to get our money. Luckily in Spain this has not been the case, as every ATM we have stopped at has worked. However, they practically only give out 50 Euro bills, which is extremely frustrating when a vendor/restaurant is annoyed that you don’t have any smaller bills, oh well..

So despite lacking energy, we now had Euros and maps for beginning our Spanish adventure. After getting change to buy a metro pass, we jumped on board our first metro. We had to change metros once, which was a maze in it of itself as we had to walk around one of the stops to get to the correct metro. It was my first metro ride ever, so it was quite fun!

Our final metro stop was our bus station and gave us a big sigh of relief as we were concerned that we would have to walk far to find our bus station. We checked in and were told we were set and now had 6 hours to kill before our bus left. We asked around if there was a bar and found a Irish bar to sit, eat lunch, and watch the US vs England world cup match!

It was a little cold and a small drizzle of rain welcomed us as we hurried back from the bar to the bus station. We were quite early and watched the rest of the match in a cafeteria in the bus station. Boarding our bus, we put on our eye covers (from our British airways flight from Miami to London) and tried to get some sleep on our 11pm bus ride to Malaga. We caught a little sleep and arrived in Malaga about 5am. From there, we found a taxi and headed to the airport.

When traveling abroad and probably even when there isn’t a language barrier, it seems like every taxi driver is ripping you off. There were two numbers on the meter in this taxi and unbeknownst to us at the time one was an extra fee for transport to/from the airport ($8 Euros!!!) So we haggled with the taxi driver for a bit and finally paid him, annoyed at feeling ripped off especially when we were tired from 2 days of little sleep.

It was just about 6am and we had about an hour and half to wait for our rental car company to open. When waiting for something you want, it’s definitely an eternity! So when it finally opened we were set, and headed off to Granada to see el Alhambra!