Being An Expat Is A Lesson In Learning To Keep Your Cool
It happens so often when you’re in unfamiliar territory - something you never thought of before becomes an issue and now you’re in a bind. It can be frustrating, it can blow up your carefully-laid-out plans, but the truth is, the more often it happens, the more comfortable you become with the discomfort.
Take today as an excellent (and aggravating) illustration of this premise. I flew overnight from the US to Madrid, landing at 8 am with a plan to hop on a high-speed train to Valencia. I was exhausted from a week of travel, and very excited to get home. Passport control was a breeze, my bags arrived right as I got to baggage claim, and the path looked clear for me to make a 9:30 train and be home before lunch. Huzzah!
Only I got to the train station and put my luggage through the security belt, at which point I got flagged and pulled out of line for an inspection. This has never happened to me at the train station before, security there is much, much easier to navigate than the airport.
I was bringing home two suitcases worth of stuff from our storage unit in Atlanta, including our good kitchen knives. Or so I thought. Because as I learned this morning, knives are not allowed on trains in Spain. This makes some sense, but it honestly never even remotely occurred to me that it would be an issue.
The security agent told me there was a DHL office right down the road, and so I raced over there to see if I could ship them and make it back in time for my train. Side note - running with two 50+ pound suitcases is not easy.
At the DHL station, I was informed that you also cannot SHIP knives in Spain either. So now I was in a real pickle. My wife really wanted her knives, and I don’t blame her, they are pretty nice.
With time ticking down on my train ride (which I’d already bought the ticket for), I had to make a call and make it quick. It’s very easy to get flustered in this scenario, especially when there’s a time crunch and money already spent.
One thing I’ve learned over the years in similar (but different) situations, it pays to stay calm and make a considered decision, even if that means saying goodbye to a train ticket you just bought.
I tried several different paths to get home, including Bla Bla Car (the driver never responded to my request so that was a dud), doing a one-way car rental from Madrid to Valencia (way too expensive, and didn’t seem like a good idea given how tired I was), a bus trip (perhaps this could have worked but it was a much longer trek and I wasn’t sure if the same knife rules would apply there as well).
Finally, I decided the only realistic way to get home today was to fly, and so I trudged back to the airport to try to hop on an afternoon flight*.
*I must add here that my wife works for an airline, so that helps with the cost of such a trip, but it’s all standby, so it’s often a crapshoot.
Though I thought I was going to get home in time for lunch, and ended up spending much more time and money than I anticipated when I started the day, I have learned over time not to let these types of setbacks throw me off too much. It’s all part of the adventure, and framing things that way helps make what would otherwise be incredibly frustrating situations become just one more story I can tell about what expat life is like.
And now I know way more about traveling with knives, so there’s that as well.