hallelujah - I finally managed to get my MC bank to set me a new PIN and tell me what it is, rather than mailing it to my house. So we got a cash advance, and we should be able to get more cash tomorrow. I am going to raise hell with my local bank, though, because AFAIK there is absolutely no reason why my ATM card shouldn’t work. But hey, at least we can eat now!
Excellent! I was just now reading this and was about to try and think of some way I could wire you guys some cash. Of course, duh, if everything is closed that probably wouldn’t have worked either, would it :p?
Hope the rest of your trip goes better. And don’t neglect the castles! The number one reason for ever visiting anywhere in Europe ;).
Eh, apparently Barcelona isn’t so big on castles. And I thought you were still pining for the British Museum, anyway? We need to drag you back to Europe one of these days.
The bizarre part of all this is that between us, we’ve been to Siberia, all over the Middle East, India, Africa, etc. and never had a purse snatching, pick pocketing, etc. or any violence. Well, there was that tear gassing in Paris in the springtime, but I wasn’t targeted at all; just ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time when some idiot started lobbing Molotov cocktails at the cops, who returned the favor with tear gas.
Ah well, off to dinner. Screw castles, I want some shellfish!
Glad to hear that things are getting sorted. Here’s a FlyerTalk discussion about locations in Europe not accepting foreign cards, whether or not they are chip-and-PIN.
This is a good point. On several occasions when I have presented a foreign credit card at the checkout of a Spanish store, I have been asked to go to a different desk to present my passport and have the transaction approved before the card will be accepted for payment. It’s probably in breach of their merchant agreement with VISA, but no point in having that argument with the checkout clerk.
A second thing to keep in mind: sometimes when you are told a credit card has been rejected, it hasn’t been. The staff member sees a message saying something like: “call xxx-xxxx for authorisation”. They remove the card and hand it to you saying it has been rejected (either because they don’t understand, or they can’t be bothered). At that point, if you contact the credit card issuer by calling the number on the back of the card, they can give you an authorisation number over the phone, which can then be used to complete the transaction.
The MIddle East is quite safe despite what you see on TV. I have wandered around Iran, Syria, Yemen, Sudan, and the GCC countries with thousands of dollars cash on me with no concern at all. When we lived in Dubai we never locked the front door.
Tom has lived all over the place, mostly around the Gulf, and that was actually part of my point. Except, of course, for the time his apartment in Beirut was burglarized. Oh, and at least he was lucky enough to be out of town during the Israeli invasion. And my mom, for example, who would probably be terrified if I went to Yemen or Sudan (and thought I was insane to go to Russia, where she was convinced I would immediately be attacked by antisemitic thugs, but in fact never once had a problem in 4 months) certainly didn’t expect me to get tear-gassed and have my camera snatched in Paris.
Most of those are out of town, and as for the first, the commentary of the owner of the apartment where we are staying was, “eh, it’s a castle, nothing special.” But maybe everything else is a letdown after the Alhambra. 
No, it’s a required security measure if you don’t have a chipped card; “you won’t need to present ID any more” has been one of the selling points of chipped cards. You need a passport, a driver’s license with picture, or a “passport-equivalent document” (such as the Spanish or Italian National IDs). Normally people present the ID with the card, but you had a foreign ID: if you were at one of the big department stores, they sent you to a “person who can actually check up what different foreign IDs look like”, rather than their generic “clerk who barely knows what a Spanish passport looks like”.
Glad you were able to solve the issue, Eva Luna.
Fair enough, but I do have a chip and PIN card. So the “you won’t need to present ID anymore” only works for Spanish-issued cards, at least at Carrefour.
I just talked to my bank again to ask why my ATM card isn’t working, and am not so happy with the answer. They say my account is fine, no holds, etc., but they show no activity on my ATM card since April 2, which means they don’t even show that I tried to use the card here. They think it got demagnetized, but if that’s true, then how come all the machines have read my card and taken my PIN, and only then had a problem accessing my account? And how come my credit cards, which were in the same place, are fine? And, I am sorry to say, how come in many years of using my old Humungobank ATM card in several different countries, I never had this problem?
Lord, I don’t want to have to move accounts for the second time in 6 months, but this is pissing me off enough that I may just do it.
If they didn’t know the bank, or the chips hadn’t been introduced yet here, they still had to ask for ID.
I have no idea why would you think that trying to ensure that you’re really the owner of the card can be against their agreement with Visa or with anybody else. If they don’t verify and the card isn’t yours, they face penalties including possible criminal charges.