pour améliorer: Let Me Outta Here!

We got ourselves up nice and early the day that we were supposed to leave Barcelona, which was of course great fun after staying up late watching Flamenco dancers.

We had paid a visit to the train station the previous day, because you have to buy reservations for your seats on all Spanish fast trains (our Eurail pass covered the tickets, but not the reservations - gotta love that distinction). We thought we were so clever going in a day early to sort things out instead of hoping it would work out when we turned up.

But no, Barcelona didn't approve of us being organised!

We tried to get ourselves a ticket from this machine, to get in the 'tickets for future travel (i.e. not today) ' queue.

It didn't have a number on it! We tried again. Still no number! And the writing on it was in Spanish, which we could only vaguely understand.

So, not knowing what else to do, we moved to the 'tickets for today' queue, even though (heaven forbid) we were a whole day early!

We did our time in the line, got to the front, and discovered that apparently you can't even consider buying tickets unless you can tell them exactly what trains you want to catch. To find out exactly what trains you want to catch, you have to go to a different line. The information line!

So off we went.

We did our time in that line, and told the limited-English-speaking lady that we wanted to go to Beaune in France. In fact, we actually wrote it down for her, which is interesting, since as it turns out she gave us a printout saying how to get to Beaulieu-sur-Mer. At the time we didn't think much of it, but realised later that Beaulieu-sur-Mer is actually nowhere near Beaune.

Anyway, that's beside the point for the moment. Clutching our hard-won train timetable printout (which involved about 12-hours worth of train travel mind you - yay), we trundled back to the 'tickets for today' queue, lined up, and that's where it really turned sour.

See... Barcelona have a bit of a problem. That is, that their train administration staff not only speak hardly any English (yes, I know I sound like an arrogant tourist, but Spain was the 15th country we visited in Europe - we'd managed pretty well so far with a combination of mime and two-syllable words, even when English wasn't an option, so we had some basic expectations), but worse, they DO NOT WANT TO HELP YOU.

I think our attempt at conversation to try to book a reservation consisted of a single word from the guy on the other side of the little plastic barrier. NO. He didn't try to communicate. He didn't try to explain anything. He simply got increasingly angry. We got increasingly frustrated. He stormed off, and we watched in amazement as he stood with his arms folded like a little child throwing a tantrum in the corner of the ticket booth room, simply waiting for us to leave.

We stood there open mouthed for a while, unable to believe what was happening, and eventually walked away from the window stunned. We flatter ourselves that we are usually fairly normal, rational adults, and usually we don't find that we have that kind of effect on people. Tantrums... seriously???

The only place we actually managed to have an adult conversation was in the 'Lost and Found' office, where we were able to discover that the ticket machine in the 'tomorrow' line gives out a maximum of 400 tickets, and then stops spitting out numbers. So there had been 400 tickets issued in the 'tomorrow line that day. We figured it was probably related to the giant influx of people for the San Fermin festival (that we had visited, but that didn't really console us much.

The result? That we should just come back the following day, use the 'today' line, and get ourselves on a train and OUT of Barcelona!

So there we were the next day, having trammed it into the station (fortunately I'd done a bit of Internet research too, and realised that we should be going to Beaune station and not Beaulieu-sur-Mer, which would really have topped off our day), and we got ourselves back in the 'today' tickets line. And then held our breath.

Joy of joys, we couldn't buy a reservation for the train we wanted, because it was booked out!!!!

Do you really want me to keep going with this story?

Probably not.

Let's just say that there was more time spent in the information line trying to find an alternative option, which ended up involving a three-hour trip on a Spanish regional train (the kind that stops at every single station along the way) just to get to the border between Spain and France.

And so our 12.25 hour train journey began.

Here's my very angry at Spanish train companies face.

Here's Tom reading whta looks like an essay, but is actually a list of the trains we had to catch that day.

Since I'm on a roll, why don't we also take a moment to admire the interesting window decor on Spanish trains? It was actually very handy, since the sun was on that side of the train.

We admired the Spanish landscape for the last time, sad that our Spanish experience had been somewhat ruined by the fact that they WOULDN'T LET US LEAVE!

We switched trains at Cerbere, just over the border in France, and breathed a sigh of relief. Contrary to popular opinion, the French people are more than happy to speak English. Provided you make a little bit of effort with French first. And compared with Spanish ticket officer tantrums, that's certainly no problem!