A sorry tale...........

Well, so much for my resolve to update the blog more frequently! I meant to update after my trip to Lisbon, but having my handbag stolen left me feeling very sorry for myself, and I needed to put a bit of distance between me and the event before I could put pen to paper so to speak.

So I'll get that story over with first.

The trip to Lisbon was to be my birthday treat for this year. I persuaded Katie to change the dates of her trip so she could come with me, and I got tickets to see Joe Bonamassa at the Centro Cultural de Belem.

In theory, Lisbon's not too far from here, but I don’t like city driving, especially in places I don’t know and I don’t know the language, so I started my research on the best way to get there. Flights from Malaga were around 170€ each way, adding 680€ to a few days in Lisbon, seemed a bit excessive, the train involved getting to Madrid and taking the sleeper, seemed a bit long winded. There's a bus from Seville to Lisbon, 61€ return, that seemed much more realistic and it would be an adventure!........Little did I know it would turn out to be an adventure worthy of any holiday with Mick!

First hurdle, buying tickets. Tried to do this online, but the website just got into a loop, first telling me that the seats on this service were not numbered, then asking me to choose a numbered seat! Gave up, considered go to Seville to buy the tickets, but then used this as an exercise in my Spanish class and Cristina, my teacher, phoned the ticket office for me and booked the seats. We just had to get to Seville before 10pm on the day of travel (the bus left at midnight) to collect the tickets from the ticket office.

Katie arrived on Saturday. We travelled on Sunday. However, we needed to get to Seville. There was a bus at 7.30pm, and it a 2 hour bus journey to Seville, but I reasoned if there was any problem on the road we might be delayed, perhaps we should give ourselves more than 30 minutes leeway. The earlier bus was at 4pm, but it was carnival weekend and there was procession scheduled, 'sometimes' the bus doesn’t come down into the village if the road is cordoned off for a procession, so perhaps we shouldn’t risk expecting to get that one. My neighbour, Peter offered to run us into Pedrera to get the train at 6.45pm, this seemed perfect.

Peter duly dropped us off, and drove away. I went to the ticket office to ask for 2 tickets to Seville, 'sorry, no seats available', the next train was at 9.20pm, the journey takes an hour and 20 minutes, so that would be much too late. I asked for the number of a taxi, the station master gave me a couple of numbers, but with the warning that it was a holiday in Pedrera and they might not be working! I was already in overdrive; running through all the alternative options we had: returning home and driving to Seville, finding somewhere to park for 5 days, getting a taxi, abandoning any attempt to travel on Sunday and going on Monday instead, getting the taxi to Estepa, the next town on the bus route, and getting on the bus there.

Fortunately the taxi driver was working and he took us to Estepa, to the bus stop, he knew where the bus stop was, which was just as well, as I didn’t! He dropped us off at the bus stop and there must have been 30 people waiting at the stop!

One of my Thursday morning breakfast friends lives in Estepa, so I phoned her for help. This was a delaying tactic as I wasn’t sure quite what she could do to help, but a problem shared..

Mari Carmen arrived at the bus stop, 'have you asked about tickets in the café?'

'You can buy bus tickets in the café?'

'Come with me'. She took us to a café across the road and asked if there were tickets for the bus to Seville. 'Yes, of course'. I bought 2 tickets and we joined the crowd of people milling around on the pavement waiting for the bus.

By now the time was around 7.30.

The bus arrived, the driver climbed down and announced, 5 places available. All the while Mari Carmen is saying keep calm, it'll be alright. Two minutes later an empty bus arrived.

So we loaded our bags and settled into our seats, only the time to be anxious about now. One of the other passengers told us that if the bus was full, there would be fewer stops so the bus would be quicker. The other issue was that this bus went into a different bus station in Seville, so we needed to get across town as well before 10pm.

The bus pulled into San Sebastian bus station at around 20 minutes to 10. There was a taxi rank outside and we were lucky enough to get straight into a taxi.

At Plaza de Armas bus station I left Katie to look after the bags and pay the taxi driver while I ran up the steps to collect our tickets. There was a queue. When I got to the front of the queue the man didn’t understand me and kept trying to send me to another counter, but all the other counters were closed. In my head I reasoned he must have my tickets I just need to make him understand I have already paid for my tickets and I just want to collect them. He nodded very slowly, reached over to the far side of his desk and picked up our tickets and passed them to me, without a word. Clearly a man happy in his work!

So now we had 2 hours to kill before the bus was due. We found a bar which turned out to be a self service cerveceria, a concept I hadn’t come across before so the bartender had to explain it all to me. You choose your beer and food options, pay for them, and collect them from the counter – but I took too long explaining this to Katie when I got back to our table with the beers, so we got table service for the food! At last, now we could relax for a bit.

We sat and watch the world go by, and gradually became aware of a young man with a puppy walking up and down. The puppy was very young and seemed not to be enjoying his walk. After some time the young man came over to our table and asked if we spoke English. Would we mind the dog while he went inside and got some food.

I must have a suspicious streak in me, as my first thought was he was going to walk off and leave us with this puppy, Katie is obvious more open than me and immediately agreed. The puppy was very young and nervous, and ended up on Katie's lap being cuddled. Anyway, the young man returned and joined us at our table and told us his story.

He came from Argentina and was studying Psychology in Barcelona. He had friend in Buenos Aires working for a company that sources and delivers rare breeds and when they got the request to deliver this particular dog from Seville to Rome, he thought, my friend is living in Barcelona, I can give him some work. Clearly not registering that Barcelona is about 1000 km away. The dog was to go to an English actress living in Rome, Katy Saunders. So the next day he would take the dog to Rome, by plane. We googled Katy Saunders and discovered she's one of the girls with George Clooney in the Nespresso advert!Sadly I don’t know the breed of dog, but it was a blue something and its going to grow up to be a very big dog!

Time came for us to head back to the bus station, the departure boards appeared to have stopped working so I went off to find out which platform our bus left from. The bus was late but eventually we found our seats and settled down for the 7 hour trip.

I only have short legs so it wasn’t so bad for me, and I managed to get some sleep. At Faro about half the passengers got off so Katie was able to change seats and take her brace off and put her leg up for the rest of the journey.

We arrived in Lisbon at 6.15am (local time) and headed for the metro, which opened at 6.30!

After coffee and toast we turned up at our hotel at about 8 am. They were really helpful, looked after our bags and said they would call us when the room was ready. I also needed another favour. I needed to collect the tickets for the concert but my instructions were in Portuguese. It turned out I had not printed out the voucher I needed to present at the theatre, but the receptionist said if I forwarded the email to the hotel email account they would print it out for me.

We'd made it. We had arrived at our hotel in Lisbon, what an experience!

The weather in Lisbon was great, blue skies and sunny days a vast improvement on the cold spell (-8 over night) in La Roda. We did the tram tour, the open top bus tours (all 3), Katie's knee means not much walking for her, so I did my walking in the mornings before she got up! We rode the lift and the funicular railway before getting the bus out to Belem to have lunch, collect the tickets and go to the concert.

Katie got chatted up by a 70 year old Portuguese guy, a little in his cups, who spoke a mixture of Spanish, French and Portuguese but no English. He kept telling Katie she was beautiful, and then as a bit of an afterthought, I was interesting!

The concert was great, Joe on form as always. This was the start of his European tour, and the first of 3 concerts I was going to see. It would be interesting to see how he changes the set along the way. I've seen him a few times now and come to realise that he always has a tale to tell about the city he's in. This time it was about the porter at his hotel. He had offered to take Joe's bags, but Joe said no that's OK, the porter mumbled something and when asked to repeat he said 'You're that John Henry guy, aren’t you?', so in Lisbon I'm the John Henry guy. Which only means something to the fans who know 'The Ballad of John Henry', but it was appreciated. Katie enjoyed it too, saying some of the guitar work gave her goosebumps!

On our last day we went to the tile museum, then went for a late lunch, early supper at a restaurant on the river. We sat on the terrace in the late sunshine, there were lots of people about because there was a big football match on (Sporting v Legia Warszawa) and a lot of Polish fans were wandering about. There had been some trouble so there was quite a high police presence.

In retrospect I was a bit blasé, I suppose. I put my handbag down between my chair and a rather large planter on the edge of the terrace. The chair had a material 'skirt', and I thought, if I'd thought about it at all, it was well hidden.

So with our meal, a bottle of wine and deep in conversation I didn’t notice it was gone until we came to leave. The police arrived immediately and went off to see if the bag had been discarded close by, but no luck. They then called their colleagues in the Tourist Police department, who turned up shortly after. Katie paid the bill.

The Tourist Police were sympathetic and took down all the stuff I'd lost to include in the report. I never used to carry anything at all, Mick looked after the money and I was like the Queen! But over time I've started taking everything with me, so my phone, palm pilot, ipod, glasses, fountain pen, purse but worst of all my passport and driving licence. Don’t ask me why I didn’t leave this stuff in the hotel, I have no idea. My Spanish friends tell me they even put their money in their bra when they are out and about in a city!

So I cancelled my cards and we went out for a drink.

A local jazz bar http://www.ondajazz.com/ had a live act, a singer, more soul than jazz, and it turned into a not bad night all things considered.

The journey back to Seville the next day was less eventful. We got back to Seville too late for the onward journey to La Roda so we stopped in Seville for a couple of nights. We had a good couple of days, visiting Mick's favourite bar where one of the barmen fell in love with Katie, which meant we got exceptional service in a very busy bar, and I was complimented on my Spanish.

Back home and I eventually got around to requesting a new passport, new driving licence and making an insurance claim. I waited about a week for the new cards to come, but once I saw the new card number was available through my online account it dawned on me I could phone the bank for the expiry date so I didn't have to wait! Not having someone to talk to means I take a long time to come to some relatively simple conclusions!

With only 3 weeks before my next trip to the UK, and the fco website advising up to 6 weeks to replace a stolen passport I was in a bit of a panic.

I was uncomfortable about driving around without any documents, so I didn’t go anywhere unless it was absolutely necessary. Although my Spanish teacher phoned the Guardia Civil for me and they said as long as I had a copy of the police report and a new licence application I would be OK. As I had applied for a new licence by phone I wasn’t quite sure how I could do that!

The passport application had to go to Madrid, before being sent on to London to be printed. After a week the Embassy emailed to say the photos weren’t good enough and they wanted more information on the counter signatory to prove she was a fine upstanding citizen! (now 2 weeks before my travel date)

I just burst into tears.

I'm afraid I don't share my unhappiness well and prefer to hide myself in a corner until I can be sociable, all this coincided with my birthday.

Anyway, I dried my eyes and drove into Antequera to have another go in the photo booth. Phoned my Spanish teacher for advice and yes she is a teacher she could counter sign the photos.

On Saturday I took myself off to Malaga on the bus. I thought a day looking at the sea might improve my spirits.

So on Monday another package went off to the Embassy in Madrid, 'certificada y urgente' registered and express delivery!

So with 11 days to go my revised application arrived in Madrid.

Now it was the driving licence, without a licence I couldn't arrange a hire car for my trip, but that that arrived on Thursday.

By Friday I was convinced the photos weren't quite right, I phoned the Consulate in Malaga to ask about Emergency Travel Documents, and called the Embassy to check on progress. The advisor told me, it was printed yesterday and you should get it on Monday. I told the advisor he was the most wonderful human being in the world.

Huge relief.

My passport arrived on Monday and I was fit to fly for Friday.

The insurance company put me through all sorts of hoops requiring extra documents from the bank, the invoice from the hotel, the bus tickets, and then because of the excesses on the policy only paid out £100. I suppose I shouldn't complain, I only took the policy out for the health cover, as I don’t have an EHIC, so deliberately weighted it in favour of health and not for loss or damage! C'est la vie!

I'll post an update on my other exciting adventures shortly.