The first days

I meant to take the 8:00 bus from Madrid, which would get me to Huelva with enough time to find a hostel, get to know the city a little, and hopefully meet some people.  But I slept badly--Madrid is among the world leaders in noise pollution and my bed was on the second floor, right next to the window--and dawdled a little bit at the hostel, so by the time the taxi (once burned, and so forth) dropped me off at la Estación Sur it was 7:58.  As I got to the ticket booth, praying it would leave late, I saw the 8:00 Madrid-Huelva bus disappear from the departures board.  I have two full-size suitcases and extremely full backpack.  I am tired, I haven't eaten breakfast, and I am marooned in the Madrid bus station for three hours, until the next bus leaves at 11.  I'm standing in the middle of the station, wearing the backpack, a hand on each suitcase, watching the swirl of motion around me like one of those artsy scenes in modern movies where life seems to be passing the main character by.  To be honest, I kind of felt that way too.

Thank God for baggage checks.  Turns out the bus station was willing to hold on to my stuff, relieving me of their burden until the bus left--for a small fee of course, but when one is in dire straits, it's amazing the financial lengths to which one is willing to go (much like the time I paid twenty euro for a bottle of contact solution on the Champs-Elysées, but that is another story).  So, free of the luggage for a while, I went to the café, had an overpriced and underwhelming breakfast sandwich and Coke (judge if you must; it was cheap).  I passed the next threeish hours listening to my ipod, reading, and glancing at the departure board to see if my bus had arrived yet.  About a half-hour before departure time, it pulled in.  I closed my book, retrieved my luggage, flung it into the belly of the bus, and settling in for the seven hour trip to my temporary home.

I once endured a five hour bus ride back from Cedar Point on a bus whose air conditioning was broken and whose seats were uncomfortable, witnessing my friend throwing up the whole way back into the bus toilet.  This trip was worse.  Not because of the fault of Socibus, the coach company: they were perfectly competent and, as coaches go, reasonably comfortable.  No, it was me; a combination of missing the morning bus, regret about the location I had chosen, uncertainty about what the hell I was going to do when I got there, and hanging above it all the million dollar question: "what if I'm not cut out for this?"  That bus ride, and the rest of that day, was undeniably one of the worst periods of my life.

It wasn't the uncertainty about where I would stay and where I would live that was killer, though it was daunting.  But I know I can handle situations like that.  It was the loneliness.  I missed my girlfriend, I missed my friends, I missed my family, but most of all, I just wanted there to be someone, anyone, who I knew.  Later, after I'd met people, I couldn't help but think about the book and movie Into the Wild, in which the main character leaves it all behind and goes, alone, to the wilderness of Alaska.  I barely made it to Huelva, and all I had to contend with were quiet alarm clocks and interminable bus rides.

We rolled in to Huelva, at long last, at 6:30 PM.  I was tired from the long bus ride and feeling sorry for myself, but I nevertheless hitched up my bags, shouldered my backpack, and... found another taxi.  I poured my bags and myself into the taxi and said to the taxi driver, "take me somewhere cheap where I can sleep."  He  took me Huelva's sizable hostel.  I wearily exited the taxi and went to ask the concierge if there were any beds in the 200-bed hostel available.  Imagine my surprise when he said no.  So I returned to the taxi and asked for the next best thing: a cheap hotel.  There turned out to be one very nearby, the Hotel Virgen de la Cinta.  And so it was in a private double room, paying twice what I'd hoped to pay, that I spent my first night in Huelva.  I tossed my suitcases onto the second of the room's twin beds, read Psalm 139, and cried myself to sleep.