It’s amazing how far a smile can get you when you show up for your flight two days early…

So at 6am in the morning when I double checked my departure terminal I noticed something that didn’t seem right. Today was the 24^th wasn’t it? So why did my phone say it was the 22^nd? Sitting on the edge of the bed, brain still muddled with jetlag it takes me a while, but eventually I begin to realise that yes, I’ve made a pretty large mistake, and yes I am about to get the shuttle bus to Heathrow two days early. Shit.

“Ah, excuse me? I’m accidently here two days early, any chance I could fly to Madrid please?”

It’s amazing how far a smile can get you. The nice lady from British Airways and I have a bit of a laugh and what do you know, hello to the 8:15 flight to Madrid. What are the chances? I thought I’d got away with the blunder pretty well until I had to explain to the check in lady and baggage man my embarrassing predicament. Humiliation aside, I was on the way to Spain, with a window seat and whole row to myself.

It wasn’t until I was on the plane that I had any time to wonder how on earth I could have misread the ticket maybe 70 times? To be fair, the 22^nd is the date I return home, so it is written just under the 24^th – the day I was supposed to get to Spain. But to be honest, I’d been telling everyone that I’d be arriving in Spain on Saturday all along, I’d made an appointment to look at a flat on the Sunday, so really I have no excuse, it just happened to be one of those moments in my impeccably organised life where my brain suffers a small glitch and I make a mistake. Yes, as far as mistakes go, this was a pretty big one. But these things happen to all of us, well, okay maybe just a small minority.

Madrid Airport was an absolute joke! With old Barry Backpack weighing me down I asked about a million different people where to get my bag from – turns out you have to catch a train to the baggage carousels, of course, because that is so logical! Anyway the next hour and a half of my life was one I’d rather forget, but at 2:00pm I found myself on the high speed train to Valencia cruising at a casual 300km/h.

Turns out rocking up in a new city with a new language in the middle of siesta is kind of difficult. But the universe had been on my side all day, although about an hour later somewhere in the cobblestone alleyways of Valencia without a map, or anyone I to ask for directions it left me for dead. I eventually found a taxi and got to the hostel where I got chatting to the girls at reception, one of whom had a room for rent in her flat and just like that the universe was back on my side! Not only that, in my dorm I met a girl from the Czech Republic also about to study in Valencia on exchange. We were later joined by another Swiss girl who is studying in the same faculty as me in at the University of Valencia.

Anyway, there is much more to say, but I think that will do for now, I’ve just moved into my new flat, more on that story later… E x