Inspired by the odd experiences thread , I started to type this there, then realized it was much too long. So here it is. I hope you enjoy it, it is my blockbuster true story that I tell at parties when the wine has been flowing and I’m talking to new people.
In the summer of 1986, I was 18 and I had just graduated high school. My present from my grandmother was a trip to Europe: round trip flight (arrival at Heathrow, open-ended departure from Amsterdam), Eurail pass, and $1000 US spending cash. I went alone, and apart from my aunt who was living in London at the time and my girlfriend who was in Madrid on some kind of language study program, I knew no one. I had many adventures on that trip, but the one I must tell here goes like this:
I was on my way to Madrid from Bordeaux to surprise my girlfriend (I hadn’t been planning to go to Spain and she knew that). Through poor planning I arrived in Barcelona late at night and without any Spanish money. The train station I arrived at was closing. I decided to walk to the main station. When I got there, I found that it was closed as well but there were many people scattered about outside with their backpacks and gear, apparently prepared to camp there for the night. I met a guy who said he and his friends were going to hang out together and wait for the station to open in the morning. He invited me to join them. There were about 6 or 7 young people, all of indeterminate nationality, but all with fair-to-decent English, hanging out on the steps (just out of sight of the station building) and talking and playing guitars. Someone asked me if I played, and handed me a guitar, and I played ‘Wish You Were Here’, which everyone knew and sung along with. We played and sang more songs. The camaraderie was exciting and I was having the time of my life. My mouth was dry and someone handed me an open can of juice and I gratefully accepted and drank it down. After about 20 minutes I suddenly felt seriously sleepy, like I was about to pass out. I handed the guitar to someone and stumbled off to the area where I had been planning to sleep, dizzy and disoriented. I fell forward and hit my head hard on the concrete steps, though I barely felt it. That woke me up for a minute, and my ‘friends’ crowded around me, made me comfortable, etc., even as I slipped back into sleep.
What happened next I remember as if it were a fever dream, and is pieced together from my own hazy memories and information I later received from the American Consulate in Barcelona. Apparently someone found my unconscious body the next morning and I was transported to a medical clinic, where I lay in a sort of holding area. When I awoke I was extremely disoriented, having suffered a concussion. I checked for my money belt. It was gone. All my money was gone, my Eurail pass was gone, and my backpack was gone. I still had my cheapo watch (which told me I had slept all the way through the 22nd of July and into the 23rd) and my passport, which had been stuffed into the pocket of the shorts I was wearing under my jeans. I decided I had to escape. I got up from the bed/cot, and started to walk towards the elevators I could see outside the door. Someone came along and smilingly led me back to the bed/cot and made me lie down. I pretended to be cooperative and lay down and closed my eyes. When I opened them again, I stealthily crept out of the room and got in an elevator. I exited the building and found myself in the middle of Barcelona not long after sunrise with nothing but the clothes on my back. After wandering the mostly-deserted streets for a while, my head started to clear and I somehow made my way to the train station! I decided I had to get to Madrid, no matter what and without any further delay. I found the Madrid train and got on, reasoning that I would somehow be able to elude the ticket taker (I had actually just traveled from Paris to Bordeaux to Barcelona, only having to show my Eurail pass once). I was mistaken.
I was a dirty, smelly, skinny guy with scabs on my face (from my fall against the concrete steps), no money and two years of high school Spanish, which meant I couldn’t speak Spanish to save my life. When the ticket taker confronted me, I tried to explain that “banditos” had robbed me. I’m sure now that it wouldn’t have mattered what I said. I was breaking the law and probably lucky he didn’t decide to just toss me out bodily while we were moving. He took me back to the dining car, where there were a couple of men in some kind of uniform. I don’t know if they were train cops or what, and I could not understand what was being said in any case. As I sat there miserably, a man walked by carrying his suitcases. He listened to the ticket collector and the uniformed men talking and then he looked at me.
“Do you speak English?” he asked me. I said I did. “Do you know what’s happening?” I said I wasn’t sure, and I told him I’d been robbed of my money and train pass and that I had to get to Madrid because I had a friend there that could help me. The man spoke to the train guys, and then told me he’d be right back. He took his bags down the corridor. When he returned, he spoke to the train guys at length and then gave them some money. Then he spoke to me. “They were going to take you off at the next stop and throw you in jail. I paid them the cost of your ticket to Madrid. You’re free to go.” I thanked him profusely and insisted he give me his name, address and telephone number (he lived in Madrid) so that I could repay him. Of course he tried to tell me I needed to do no such thing, but I was persistent and he did give me the information. He then explained that it was mere happenstance for him to have even been in the dining car at that moment. He and his wife, on holiday in Barcelona, had arrived so close to departure time that he had simply flung their suitcases into the car nearest to them on the platform, clambered aboard, and they made their way to their berth. Once the train was underway, he had come forward to retrieve the bags when he happened to overhear what was going on.
The rest of the train ride was uneventful, and when I arrived in Madrid I called the house where my girlfriend was boarded. In another stroke of luck, she was there and persuaded the family she was staying with to accept the collect call and come pick me up and bring me to their house. When I came in the door and she took me in her arms, I burst into tears. Tears of relief mingled with tears of sorrow at my ordeal. I spent a week in a hotel in Madrid, seeing my girlfriend every day and eating mountains of food, mostly paella. American Express refunded my outstanding checks even without the receipts; the Consulate in Barcelona had recovered my backpack (my camera was gone but my clothes were not) and filled me in on some of the missing info. My last day in Madrid, I called up my benefactor, came to his house, and repaid him in full. He was a wonderful man. From Scotland originally, but had been living in Madrid with his very sweet Spanish wife for some 20 years. I owed him much more than the $50 he put up to buy my safe passage, and I told him so, but he claimed any man would have done the same in his shoes and would not accept a penny more. To this day I wonder how my life would have turned out if
he hadn’t come along when he did.
