Seville (Spain)
29 August – 01 Sep 2019
To quote Don
Henley;
‘In a
New York minute everything can change, In a New York minute, Things can get
pretty strange’
The
29th of August commenced under the auspices of a typical transit
day. The intended logistics of that morning were for us to collectively move out if our rented apartment on the edge of
Plaza Santa Ana and take the high-speed train down south, to the heart of Andalusia,
Sevilla.
Travel
and transit are known to be my domain. When it comes to organisation,
connections, dependency on accommodation, arranging rooms, things to see,
orientation in a city, more often than, ownership and responsibility resides with me. I feel
comfortable in that role, which is to say more pointedly, I don’t trust the
ability of anyone in my family to do the job to my standard…although, there are
some ‘up and comers’ in the ranks.
On this day we were fortunate. A disaster was averted by a relatively small margin.
As anticipated, our apartment pick-up ran smoothly, the transit to Madrid’s Atocha Central station was also smooth, even the much maligned passing through security was an actual breeze ,and then, we did one final passport check.
Inga
to Henry ‘Do you know where you put your
passport?’
Which I immediately took to mean – it’s not where I usually leave it, i.e., the passport folder that contains
all our passports?
No.
It wasn’t there.
This situations triggers 'ALERT LEVEL 2' and instigation of the bag search. Initiated in a fairly relaxed mode, each passing minute without success translated into increased levels of anxiety and frustration. This continued for several minutes until someone had to make the call. There was no denying the situation, we had stepped into the universe of one missing Australian passport. And one down in a situation such as this means all down.
Situations like this commonly challenge my mental outcome simulator to oscillate between
past potential fact and future potential prediction. Meaning, that all at once
the scenarios of where the passport could possibly be, and, what could happen
if I don’t have my passport, play out in one rapid fire game of scenario dodgem.
Past
potential fact scenarios–
1. (1) Perhaps I left it on the seat pocket in
the flight from Lisbon? I know I saw it there at some point during the flight and I convinced myself to move it to a more memorable location the seat-back pockets are both the easiest and dumbest place to forget personal belongings.
2. (2) Did I leave it in the taxi as I made my
way from the airport to the centre of Madrid?
3. (3) Did I leave it in the apartment which we
had just left?
4. (4) Could it possibly in one of our bags
that commonly does not carry my passport?
Scenario
1 & 3 seemed most likely, with 3 out in front as a clear favourite due to my vague recollection of the passport appearing on the nightstand at some point during our stay.
Future
potential prediction -
1. (1) Take the train down to Sevilla and go to the Australian consulate, if indeed there was one there.
2. (2) Go back to the apartment and search the premises
3. (3) Go to the Australian embassy in Madrid
and organise a replacement
The future potential prediction also caused much logistical concern in my mind. Without a passport I couldn’t get out of the country, which really, was not particularly stressful to me but I had other people that needed me to get them from Sevilla to Barcelona via Malaga where they had booked flights to get them back home in a few days time. Additionally, it would be unfair to have everyone tied up in Madrid until the mess was sorted out. Quickly thinking through each option I made the assumption that could back to the apartment, option (2), but this in itself would be futile in that now, having to organise the owner to arrive, and, me waiting around hours on end for a potential nil result meant that it wasted time against what would be the most assured and essentially logical decisions– actually going to the embassy in Madrid and obtaining a replacement passport.
So I called the embassy, it was a Friday.
They advised that they could produce a
replacement on the day but that I had to make it there in the next few hours,
also, they made me aware that the embassy was closed on the weekends. My hand had now been forced.
I scooped up the family, pushed them through the barricades and sent them on their way to Sevilla. I in turn jumped a cab out of the city to
the ‘Gates of Europe’ – the twin towers in Madrid, where the Australian embassy was
located.
At this point in time I felt like I was in an episode of the Amazing Race – queue Phil Keoghan - ‘In this leg teams will be asked to head to the Australian Embassy where they will be asked to present themselves in order to obtain an Australian passport, failure to obtain the correct documentation will spell disaster. The last team to finish may be eliminated’.
Certainly, if I couldn’t an
emergency passport in time or if there was any extended delay then the rest of
our ‘locked in’ plans for Spain would come falling down like a house of cards. There was only one way to get this done, successfully.
If
you’ve ever walked into an embassy on foreign soil, be it your own or that of
another country, there is an overt sense of patriotism underpinned by nationalistic
paraphernalia that is meant to impart a certain feeling and notion of that
country. I’d been to several US embassies over the last few years. Their over
the top security, good ‘ole red, white & blue flags, as well their regal
style of presidential portraiture wreaks of self-appreciation and grandeur. The
Serbian embassy is socialist in style and make-up, basic furnishings,
ridiculous paperwork, disinterested security. The Australian consulate in
Madrid was as I expected, a little formal, very friendly in approach, decorated
with kitsch Australiana. The ‘G’day’ greeting was enough to give me a little
slice of home and make me feel like I could sort the situation out relatively
quickly, and by the natural course of things, that’s the way it worked. All I
need to do was get a few passport photos, pay $250 and by tomorrow I’d have a
temporary passport in my hands. Too easy.
I
headed out to get myself a few passport photo from a photographer recommended
by the embassy. In the time it took to locate the photographer, get the photos
and be on my way back I had received a call from the embassy telling me that
Inga has located my passport, hidden in one of our travelling magazines
apparently…
From
here on out my day was quite pleasant. A drop in at the Madrid Hard Rock for a
couple of margaritas and obligatory shirt purchase, a quick ride to Atocha
station, and just like that, I was zipping south towards the Andalusian city of
Seville.
Picking
a rental car at Sevilla Santa Justa station, my brain needed to locate the
‘driving on the right side skill-set’ that I’d left behind some 18 months
prior. As the old cliché goes, it really is like getting back on that bike again. The most stressful thing about
driving in a city you don’t know is that you have no reference to the tricks
and snippets of insider information that can get you to your location. 100%
dependency on a GPS will inevitably run you into one way streets, closed
streets and dead ends, which in Seville means you might find yourself driving
into a public square – not the most astute position to find yourself in an era
of lone wolf terrorist attacks.
