Voyassitude

So, you lost the souvenirs you’d bought for relatives back home; a rude local in Barcelona yelled at you while you completed a bike tour; the taxi driver charged you way more than expected on your way to the airport. If you’ve traveled around a couple of times, it’s very likely you’ve faced these or many other uncomfortable situations in which a trip doesn’t go according to plan and suddenly, in the arrondisements of Paris or avenues of New York, you find yourself feeling miserable and cheated by fate. We’ve all been there. Exploring new places comes with certain challenges, such as the ones I’m about to describe; three cities with three bitter experiences that managed to kill (at least momentarily) the enthusiasm of being in a new town.

Time to wake up yet?
Dublin, March of 2022. I’ve only got twenty-four hours in the Irish capital before flying to Edinburgh, so I’m more than ready to squeeze every possible activity into one breezy Friday that smells of Guinness and exploration. Little do I care for jetlag or the lack of sleep preceding me after a busy week of work, so I devote all my energy towards museum walks, bike rides, cathedral visits and, to top it all, a late pub crawl.
By 3 a.m. I’m a human wreck with footache and blurry vision, so I finally head to my Airbnb. Before landing on the bed, I set four different alarms and dread the moment they’ll wake me up in about ninety minutes. However, I apparently mastered the skill of ignoring and turning off multiple alarms, because by the time I rush out of bed, it’s 6:05 a.m. …fifteen minutes before my flight is set to depart. Cursing in both Spanish and English, I grab my belongings and leave. An hour later I get to the Ryanair counter at the airport where I rearrange a flight to Scotland but only after paying the lovely sum of €100. Only a day on European soil and down a hundred already due to stupidity. Lovely.

“Plenty of time”
I’m sitting on some steps at Trafalgar Square watching life unfold in full furor. After a morning of walking around by the Thames and Buckingham Palace, I enjoy the fresh Saturday afternoon London delivers, excitedly waiting for the theatre production I’m seeing at 3:15 p.m.
I grab my phone to confirm the address. Ticket ready? Check. Theatre nearby? Check. Directions? Check. But when I look at the start time my heart drops. It begins not at 3:15 p.m. but at 3’o o’clock, in less than 10 minutes. I somehow typed the wrong time on my itinerary, which is the one I kept checking throughout the trip. I start running as if I was playing the FA Cup final at Wembley. I hurry between crowds and black cabs hoping to get to the theatre in time, the Mamma Mía! musical hit I’ve so longed to witness infusing me with adrenaline, but when I get there the doors are closed and nothing can be done about it. The cherry on top? I could’ve received a full refund had I secured my ticket for a mere three or four pounds, but I’d chosen to save that amount thinking nothing could go wrong. Silly, silly Jef.

Here’s your tip, bitch
For our last night in Europe, my family and I decide to go out for laughs and sangría. Madrid on the cusp of summer proves beneficial for both of those things. We’ve eaten already, so we go to a bar I know to get the drinks and begin reminiscing about the incredible trip we’ve had. It’s about 9 p.m., the ideal time for people to go out for dinner, so when we get to the place all dressed up and jovial, the waitress that greets us assumes we’ll consume food as well. She guides us to a table inside and before I have a chance to clarify we just want drinks, she starts setting up the table as if we’re about to have a banquet. She’s all smiles, treating us like royalty, but when I finally tell her that we only want some sangría, things get awkward.
Her smile disappears, courtesy vanishes, and only a look of absolute disdain emerges from her eyes. She says something to the bartender as she cleans the table so rudely that the small chats between my cousins and aunts go dead silent. I feel embarrassed, humiliated. None of us say anything but we know we’re being judged and treated like garbage for taking an entire table just for drinks —at an empty restaurant, mind you. The waitress comes back with the sangría, sets two jugs on the tables and promptly goes away. We start drinking but it all tastes sour now. We don’t acknowledge what’s happened, but we consume our drinks impatiently in a silent agreement to leave as soon as possible.
When it’s time to pay, I tell everyone to wait for me outside while I go to the register. The waitress is there. I give her the money owed and then, in a move out of spite and resentment, I take the last €30 I have on me, which I’d reserved for last-minute souvenirs at the airport, and throw them on the bar table as a tip without saying anything. I regretted it instantly, but I regretted more the way I felt so diminished by her hostility.

Years later, these bad experiences feel very inconsequential. Yes, in Ireland my whole morning was ruined because I’d wasted €100 due to poor planning and stupid mistakes, but Edinburgh came to be so intensely magical that the Dublin episode was soon forgotten. After missing out on Mamma Mia! in London I felt like an idiot. It ruined the rest of my afternoon, my very first afternoon in the UK. That’s ridiculous. Luckily, the first pub crawl I ever did happened hours later and that left wonderful memories. And Madrid… well, it still stings a little bit because it involved my family, but after that uncomfortable situation some of us fixed the awful evening by going to dance one last time till 4 a.m. So yeah, there’s life and joy and dance after a bad experience during a trip. That’s why you always want a new destination, right?