lazy day time!

today was a very lazy day of relaxing, doing laundry, catching up on email, and wandering through the city some more.  i spent a couple hours shopping in el corte ingles - word to travelers: it´s like a one stop shop!  it´s about 5 levels or so of clothing, toiletries, sporting goods, electronics, an oversized supermarket - anything you could possibly want.  and there has been one in every city thus far.  i don´t know if all of them are fully loaded like this one was, but they sure are all huge so i would imagine so.

upon boarding the night train to valencia, i found they had put a frenchman next to me, who i swear looked like a poor man´s version of barack obama.  he sat down, took of his left shoe, slowly pulled off his left sock and proceeded to pick skin off his toes.

  no joke!  i couldn´t make it up if i tried.  and this was before we even pulled away from the station!  i had to step outside to get fresh air and composure because i realized it was going to be a very long night.

throughout the remainder of the train ride he continued to contort himself and put his feet up on the tray table, invade my personal space - he wanted some of my water!  and he kept bugging to switch seats with me so he could sleep against the window.  both of these requests i denied multiple times by the way.  at one point i said to him ´keep your coat off me and stay on your side of the seat or i will make you bleed!!!!´  ...okay not really but i should have!  but i did tell him to keep to his side!  this was in english of course, so i´m sure he probably didn´t really understand, but my tone said it all!  were my french good enough we would´ve had it out!  i don´t care if he in fact was barack himself and we were in the white house, we still would´ve had words!  this man was annoying and put on this earth to punish me.

  he´d cough openly all over everybody, burp louder than anything i´ve ever heard, and then at one point i woke up and he was gone and i thought ´yes!´ but then i looked down and he was on the floor!  half of him was in the aisle blocking people´s passage, and the other half was under the seat!!  needless to say i couldn´t wait to get off this train!  (funny that i was just marvelling at the wonders of train travel and wishing i could do more of it like... two days ago.) 

so when i woke up after 6 i started getting ready to get off in valencia at my 7:05am stop, and i pulled out my ticket to double check and nearly cried when i saw the arrival time for valencia said 5:05am!!!  i don´t know how or why, but i was positive we were supposed to get there at 7:05.

  but nope, surely enough the ticket said 5:05.  the thought of dealing with this man all the way to barcelona made me want to jump off the train while it was still moving.  thankfully, must´ve been by the grace of god, the train was actually late and it turned out we hadn´t yet reached valencia.  whew!  when we finally did, i hightailed it outta there faster than i´ve ever moved...