At the airport

At the airport

Walking in to departures I find my booking desk is at the other end of the airport (yay that’ll count towards my steps at least) What is this I see?? there is No Queue !!! how is this possible 😱😂

I start walking up to the line to hear…

“Excuse me sir, desk 33 please, desk 33 sir”, so I turn round as the person is speaking behind me and I want to get out of the guy’s way, to which the lady speaking goes bright red in the face and says “oh I’m so sorry, I mean madam, desk 33 madam”.

OMG! I really did laugh out loud with that. First time since I was 12 I was mistaken for a male. To give a pass to her, she was stood behind me, I’m carrying a man’s 701 osprey charcoal backpack, and I’m wearing a hat so you can’t see my hair or any curves 😂😂😂.

Anyway, you get the picture, there is no queue and I get straight to the desk with no time to sort my luggage.  Luggage you say? I thought you had a backpack?

Well yes I do, but it’s too big for hand luggage and it has the cute trick of being able to hide the straps and lose the front part as a day pack, cool right? Well yes, but it takes a few minutes to sort it out, which I had thought to do whilst in the queue… get it?

So there I am scrambling to sort the bag out, while the poor guy at the counter is looking at me like I’ve gone off, and you’ve guessed it, a ton of people have now turned up to book in 😂😂😂

Getting through security 

I got stopped, I always do, even when I have no metal on me, maybe my titanium earrings are the issue 🤷🏼‍♀️.  New thing this time was failing the swipe test they do on you for banned substances.  I imagine my face was a picture when the guard shouted across to another guard to “please come and retest this failed substance test”, mortified. Stood there thinking of all the ways I could kill my daughter and her fiancé if I wasn’t allowed through (all my clothes had been washed at theirs).

As you can guess by the fact that I’m still writing, it was all fine and my daughter is safe from my wrath for the foreseeable future, she’ll be pleased to hear that 😂

BTW I should have said at the start that this is probably just going to be a long stream of consciousness as well as a lot of babbling, apologies (not quite) in advance 🤪

Breakfast

Confusion over coffee.  Spain doesn’t really do tea, they do coffee, and I dislike coffee. However, I have found that if I have a tiny amount of coffee and drown it in milk, I can drink it. Stupid right? Take 2 drinks, both of which I dislike and mix them in the right ratios and you end up with something I can drink.

In Spain it’s called a “Leche manchada”, the literal translation is “stained milk” 😂😂😂.  I stain the milk with the coffee 😂

I had to ask for a cup of hot milk to add to the café con leche he gave me 😳🤪  otherwise it was a lovely breakfast 

Getting through the gate…

Shows how long it’s been since I’ve flown outside of the EU …  I decided to wait for the queue to go down before I joined it. I watch the people ahead of me getting their passports checked and stamped and think “Yay, don’t know the last time mine was stamped, this is great”, only for the guy on the desk to flip through my passport several times whilst looking back and fore between the passport and me, looking totally confused, till it twigged that he was looking for my entry stamp.

I laugh and say “Lo siento pero vivo en alicante, mi es no visitar en Alicante” (apologies to all Spaniards for my poor Spanish) only for him to smile in relief at me whilst spewing a very large amount of very rapid Spanish back at me, of which the only word I understood was “Residencia”, so I nodded, smiled, took my passport back and raced away, disappointed that I didn’t get a stamp in my passport 😂