Marlon’s World

First of all, HAPPY NEW YEAR! I hope this year would be better than the last and as I have always said, I wish everyone lotsa love, happiness, health and prosperity. Life is short and at times absurd, so must live it as best as we could.

That said, I’d like to post a blog entry on how my New Year’s eve has been. It was in every sense unforgettable, partly because of the fun, and partly because of the post-midnight hassles. I spent New Year in Madrid with a group of friends from Valladolid: Luisa, a Filipina who is studying the same Master I did last year; Angelo, a Brazilian physics student; his girlfriend Celia, a psychologist; and Joanna, a Bulgarian classmate of Luisa. It was the first time for me to spend the Nochevieja in any capital city, since in the Philippines, it’s customary to be with your family on this evening. Besides, when everything smells of gunpowder, you wouldn’t want to be caught in Manila and its horrendous traffic.      

So we arrived around 11:30 AM in Madrid from Valladolid onboard the intercity train. The Spanish capital comes to life in the evening, so our morning was spent visiting the historical places, like the Royal Palace. Well, yeah, what’s left of the Palace after we blocked it out of the cam focus. 

After we exhausted ourselves and drank kegs of coffee, we decided to meet up with people: Juan, a Colombian engineering student from Valladolid who came to Madrid posthaste after a week of vacation in Belgium, and Joanna’s friend Ana who came with her brother Niko. We ate dinner afterwards. And joked about sacred cows falling down from the sky. And took pictures.

The next logical step was to go to the Puerta del Sol to secure our places for the midnight countdown. Because of the tight security (the main international airport of Madrid, Barajas, was bombed the day before), the security was very tight. No glass bottles were allowed in the plaza, so we had to drink our champagne before going in.

Well, the Puerta del Sol has always been the place to eat the traditional a grape of luck for each of the 12 seconds before the stroke of midnight. (We came prepared with canned grapes in disposable cans especially packed  for this event.) Given such reputation, it’s not strange to find all kinds of people. These English and Dutch guys in the next pic, for example. We also met a group of Mexican students who are studying in Madrid. They were able to bring their wine in since they had brought it in sheepskin containers. Nice.

So it struck midnight, and we all went berserk. There’s something so magical about New Years. I mean, after all bad things that happened and would happen, that one unique point of celebration and fun with friends and family still fills anyone with joy and hope.

That was the happy part. The sad part of my New Year’s eve happened about 12:10, just when everyone was ready to party. A man, a gypsy judging from his looks, suddenly went down as if to clean my shoes. Of course, I got surprised and told him there’s no need to worry in case he had stepped on my foot. It turns out it’s his modus operandi. In a blink of an eye, his friend got my wallet out of my front pocket.

My blood pressure rose at that point. I was angry, then worried, then sad, then stressed out. It was a good thing Luisa was with me because I would have collapsed. The whole story is shitty and to make it short, I managed to blocked my two Mastercards about an hour after the robbery. No thanks, though, to the Madrid police on Gran Via who did nothing but procrastinate and tell me to wait until morning for the blotter.

I was spent. I wasn’t so worried about money since I only had five euros in cash and the cards were blocked immediately. I wasn’t so worried about my student visa card, since I would get the new one within two weeks in Valladolid. The old one is expired. I was more worried about all the IDs. Securing IDs in Spain is very difficult because of the all the fees and papers that people ask for. Besides, the mere thought that after travelling in many places, I was robbed in the city that I have known from the very start. It’s insane.

But fate is mysterious sometimes. Just when I was ready to call it quits, the police located me in my hostel and told me that I could pick up my wallet and that all the IDs were there. It was found in the outskirts of Madrid, in a barrio known as Vallecas, about 15 kilometers from the city center.       

That pretty much sums up my eventful New Year celebration in Madrid. We got home at 8:30 PM in Valladolid. I ate turrones, met Tyler, an American guy from New Mexico, and took more pictures in which I looked like a beached whale.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 2nd, 2007 at 4:58 am and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.