The morning of the day we left Salamanca for London was lazy. We had bought a ton of food the night before that we hadn’t eaten, so we were all set on the breakfast front. We had some delicious goat cheese with some bread and carrots.
Mostly we Internetted and packed our bags. Our train back to Madrid was at 12:30, so we had all morning. We tried to watch a movie for a bit, but all the traffic outside our window drowned out the sound.
The journey back to Madrid was mostly uneventful. I read a book and Will read something on the Nook. We got to the train station and sat down to have a snack. We still had some carrots and bread. We also had some tasty cookies that we bought in Salamanca. One was a vanilla cookie that honestly tasted like the smell of Play-Doh. It was awesome; I love the smell of Play-Doh. We also had some ham flavored potato chips. If you look closely, you can see a picture of one of the whole legs of ham that they sell here. They include the hoof.
After our snack, we headed off to the airport with the subway. Will thought the nearby buildings were interesting. They’re a bit weird, because they’re not really surrounded by other tall buildings like they would be in other cities.
We got to the airport and really just sat around. We looked at the duty free shops. They sell a lot of souvenirs, alcohol, and cigarettes. Then we sat at the gate. We were entertained because we watched the flight before ours being boarded. It was a Ryanair flight. When we flew Ryanair to Spain, we noticed that a lot of carry-on luggage looked like it was too big, but no one got hassled about it. But for this flight, they decided they would check the size of every one’s carry-on luggage. They check it by asking people to put it into a metal box. If it doesn’t fit, they have to pay a fee and have it put in the cargo hold. It was entertaining to watch as people tried in vain to fit their huge luggage into the basket. We gossiped like an old married couple about which pieces of luggage would be too big.
Eventually, we got on our flight. We watched an episode of Mythbusters on the tablet. There was quite a bit of gray cloud cover and I thought I saw some lightning as we were landing. Will told me it might be rough, so I started stressing out, but it was smooth.
We had to fill out little cards for UK border control telling them our name, birthday, nationality, passport number, length of stay, hostel address, and port of last departure. UK border control is notorious for asking a bunch of questions because they’re afraid every one is going to try to overstay their welcome. We are not citizens of the European Union, so we had to wait in a special line. There was a row of desks where you go to show your passport. The sign said to wait until you are called and then there was a set of footprints showing you where to stand in front of the desks. I figured because of the sign and the one set of footprints in front of each desk, we should go one at a time. I got two questions, “are you traveling alone?” and “where are you going when you leave?” I answered his questions and I was on my way. I looked back at Will to see that he was apparently being grilled, mostly about the places we had been previously and whether or not he had friends or family in the UK. Then he started looking around, so I waved at him. The border agent waved me over. I had the hostel reservation sheet in my backpack and she wanted to see it. Then she confirmed with me that we were going back to the U.S. after our “touring” and we were on our way.
We rode the “tube” to the hostel. We’re in a shared room with four other people and they were already in there asleep, so we couldn’t make much noise or turn on the lights. We didn’t mess with the lockers either. We changed our clothes, put all our stuff into a pile next to our beds and went to sleep.
Usually that would be the end of a blogpost, but there was a snorer. I think it was the worst snoring I had ever heard. This guy honestly needs to get that checked out with a doctor, because he would often stop breathing and then he would kind of hitch and wheeze some and then start coughing. He wasn’t old or overweight either. It made me crazy and I couldn’t sleep. It was also hot as heck. There was one window, but it was closed and blocked by a sleeping person. So we suffered through the night, but we got some things fixed in the morning.
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