Traveling Chaos

To those of you how knew how freaked out I was about traveling internationally by myself - it wasn't as bad as I thought it would be.  I sat next to some really nice people, which made it a lot easier.  However, once I arrived in Madrid, things got... crazy.

We landed in Madrid somewhere around 7:00am (30 MINUTES earlier than we were supposed to) and then proceeded to take 30 minutes to taxi to our gate.  Needless to say, I was SO happy to get off that plane.  From the gate we headed to the passport checkpoint.  Now this is where my airport adventure got "fun".  The man I sat next to was German, and misinterpreted what line I should be in to get my passport checked.  So I stood in line with him for 20 minutes or more only to realize that it was the European passport line and that they couldn't approve my passport there.  So baaaaaack I went to the "All Passports" line... to wait another 30 minutes.  I made friends with the people in front of me, so it wasn't too bad.

After making my way through the passport line and through customs, I sat down in Terminal 1 to wait until the 10:00am pickup time.  30 minutes passed... then 1 hour... then 1 hour and 15 minutes...  I'm looking around trying to decide if there were any other people from my program waiting also. I finally spotted a girl sitting by herself with a huge duffel bag like mine so I went over and introduced myself.  Fortunately, she was also waiting for Arcadia.  Another 30 minutes passed... and then another 30 minutes... and then another hour... By 11:30am (with 12:00pm being the cutoff time for pickup by Arcadia) we had a group of 6 girls trying to figure out where to go.  Finally one of the girls called a number we had and found out we were supposed to be in Terminal FOUR, even though all of our paperwork said Terminal ONE.  So we were all like, "Ok... off we go then."  None of us realized that we'd have to take a shuttle alllllllll the way across the airport to get there.

Long story short, we managed to find the guy we were looking for and were all put in taxis to the airport.  We all explored on our own during the afternoon and then met up again for dinner.  I was so happy to finally get a chance to sleep!