Andalusia

For the Ascension four-day holiday weekend, Emilie and I are visiting the Andalusia region in southern Spain. We’ll spend the majority of our time in Granada and Sevilla, but will also make stops in Cordoba and Ronda as well.

Tonight we flew to Granada (via Madrid) and upon our arrival at Geneva airport we were greeted with an hour-long flight delay. Given that the connection to Granada was the last one of the evening, and that we didn’t have a lot of time between flights to start with, this led to a fair amount of preoccupation on our part. The thought of spending the night at a Madrid Airport hotel and leaving on an early flight to Granada tomorrow morning was definitely not appealing.

We landed in Madrid a few minutes after our flight to Granada was supposed to take off. Fortunately, however, Iberia held the flight for us and a couple other passengers making the connection. Conveniently, the connecting flight was at the nearest possible gate.

Upon boarding the flight to Granada, our fellow passengers –all of whom had probably been seated and ready to take off for a good 10 minutes – looked at us with annoyance, as if we were singlehandedly responsible for the delay. It was like we were inconsiderate travelers who simply didn’t show up to the airport on time.

To add insult to injury, there was a guy sitting in my seat who wouldn’t move because “someone was sitting in his seat”. Usually I have more patience with things like this, but at this point I just wanted to sit down and could care less. The plane was full and I wasn’t going to force someone else out of a seat that didn’t belong to me. I also didn’t want Emilie to have to sit by this jerk.

Finally, a flight attendant had to come over to get the guy to move (after about 5-10 minutes of him arguing further with her). This was definitely one of the more awkward flight moments that I’ve ever had. For the majority of the other passengers, who had absolutely no clue what was going on, I was not only the guy who showed up late but was also the one who wouldn’t sit down so we could all take off.

In the end, we made it to Granada more or less as scheduled. It was late, though, so after taking a cab to our hotel we basically called it a night.