Christmas Holidays

Well, here I am back in Spain after a 2-week holiday in Canada (wow, saying it like that really makes me realize that I live in Spain.) As some of you might already know, it was a long and painful process just to get to Canada in the first place, but it was all worth it.

The trip started off well on Friday, December 21, as I managed to get to the airport in Jerez with plenty of time to spare to catch my flight. After that though, everything went downhill. Boarding for the flight from there to Madrid was delayed by about 45 minutes, which wasn't a big deal, since I wasn't actually supposed to fly out of Madrid until early the next morning. So although I was an hour late getting into Madrid, I just called my friend Princess (who I was going to hang out with in the city until I had to get back to the airport) and told her I would be a bit late. After finding the luggage storage (which is in a very inconvenient location outside the airport and across the road), and dragging my heavy bag over there, I hopped on the metro and met Princess. We did some shopping and just wandering, and just like in Rota, all the streets and many of the buildings were decorated with Christmas lights.

Afterwards we went for dinner and back to Princess' house, and then at half past midnight I left to catch the last train to the airport. Unfortunately, because my flight left at 6:30 am, that meant I had to spend the night in the Madrid airport. I managed to find some comfortable chairs to sleep on for about an hour, and soon enough it was time to get in the massive line up to check in for my next flight to Frankfurt, Germany. Supposedly as a result of this long line up, our flight was delayed for 2 hours. Since my connection time in Germany was less than 2 hours, I had to run to catch my next flight to London. And the only reason I caught that flight was that it too was delayed for about an hour leaving Frankfurt. Later it was also delayed as there was a lot of fog in London and we had to wait for another hour before we could land.

By the time I got to London, I was 4 hours later arriving than expected, and the flight to Calgary had already left without me an hour earlier! There were many other people who had missed flights due to the fog, so Air Canada started putting people on standby flights to Toronto. Since I had booked my flight with Aeroplan Miles though, they told me that my ticket was the lowest priority. I didn't catch the first flight, but they did manage to put me on the second flight to Toronto later that night. So I ended up spending another night in yet another airport... although at least I was in Canada. Especially since I heard later that the next day hundreds of flights out of London were not just delayed, but cancelled due to the fog! I flew to Calgary early the next morning, after spending the night with some people I had met in the London airport in the same situation as me.

All in all, the trip home took me 80 hours from start to finish and made me hate airports with a passion. I highly recommend NOT travelling on December 22 as it is one of the busiest travel days of the year.

My time at home was really great (though not long enough), as I got to spend time with friends and family, and I got the chance to bring back lots of things I'd been missing the last 3 months! The trip back to Spain was a lot less exciting, but still took about 17 hours, so I'm pretty tired. The best news about being back in Spain is that when I left Canada, it was -20 degrees Celsius, and here in Spain it is +15 degrees!