Airplane trips and other things that are never as exciting as sitcoms would have led me to believe.

I know it is the job of a sitcom to make incredibly mundane events seem like hilarious adventures, but I still haven´t gotten over the fact that in real life, most flights, weddings, and attempts to order soup tend to go off without a hitch. Other than confusing my travel mates by becoming overly excited about buying a zebra print neck pillow, and getting loopy towards the end of the 22 hours we spent in transit*, the flight was rather like every other flight I´ve ever taken (as in, with a surprising lack of crashes, cannibalism, David Bowie or any other celebrity making a surprise appearance from the first class cabin, 10-hour delays, marriage proposals, escaped animals, or children being separated from their parents and ending up in New York City).

I did get the opportunity to encounter a pickpocket on the Metro on the way to our hostel, trying to surreptitiously unlatch the top flap of my purse while I was getting on Line 10. He had almost managed to unzip the compartment where I store my used Kleenex when I noticed him and gave him the death glare. He casually slipped off the train before the doors could close and I spent the first few hours of our hostel assuming anything I misplaced had somehow been lifted off of me by the pickpocket before I had noticed him (the list including my keys, the camera I had borrowed, my clean Kleenex, my glasses cleaning spray, and my apartment keys, all of which were exactly where I had put them before I forgot where that was).

I suppose I should have prefaced this by saying I am currently in Madrid at the hostel, trying to inconspicuously write this blog entry while sandwiched between two other hostel-goers. Luckily neither of their first languages seems to be English, which allows me to pretend there is no way they could be reading over my shoulder**.

Madrid is nice, but seems to be suffering from the same unexpectedly cool weather that everywhere else in the world is experiencing right now. Yesterday walking down the street with the chilly summer wind threatening to take our hats off, we heard someone yelling "I am so done with this stupid weather", which made it feel remarkably like Winnipeg, or apparently anywhere else in the world. Not that I´m complaining, I would absolutely take stupid Madrid weather over stupid Winnipeg weather, even if it is the same weather, because I´d still be in Madrid.

We spent most of yesterday wandering around admiring the trees, the incredibly narrow streets, and the ridiculously long line ups to the Palace Real and other places we didn´t really feel like going to anyway.

*And by this I mean at one point in the Dublin airport I picked up said zebra neckpillow and affectionately referred to it as my little dog, but nobody noticed so it´s alright.

**This is always my biggest fear when writing a blog entry in public. One might think this I´m being incredibly narcissistic, because who would want to read over my shoulder anyway? However I do it to strangers all the time, and I don´t trust the world because I assume it´s full of people like me.