Travellers' tales.

Yesterday we travelled very efficiently from Delph to Oporto, with a slight hiccough going through security at Manchester airport. After that it went just mildly pair-shaped. We finally reached our flat at 1.00 in the morning, some eleven or possible twelve hours after leaving the house in Delph.

Bus from Delph to Oldham; a two minute wait for a tram into Manchester, alighting at Deansgate Castlefield to change for a tram to the airport (a minor moment of confusion there as it was not clear which platform the airport tram left from) and eventually to the airport. Oh, and a long trek on moving walkways to get to Terminal 2!

 Getting through security at Manchester airport was a lengthy and, in my view, unnecessarily complicated affair. Shouted instructions abounded:-
Put all creams and liquids in plastic bags!
Get out your electrical items: laptops, iPads, large cameras, kindles, hair-driers, straighteners, curling wands! (Oddly enough not electric shavers - or maybe Phil's just slipped under the radar!)
Take off jackets and belts!
Empty your pockets!
Do all this in advance and save time!
Wow, so many things to do as you shuffle along in a queue winding to and fro, with some people getting grumpy as others overtake them while they juggle electrical gadgets and take their jackets off at the same time.

 When we finally got to the actual security check they insisted that almost every item went in a separate tray. So my small rucksack could not go in the same tray as my even smaller handbag. Each electrical gadget had its own tray. At the last moment someone spotted my watch and insisted I take it off, grudgingly allowing me to put it in the same tray as my hoody!

At the end of the line, as trays arrived there was total confusion as each person's myriad trays arrived, not in a group but intermingled with other people's. How belongings are not lost, I do not know. Perhaps they are.

Our flight was smooth and trouble free, arriving on time, prompting boasts about their airline having the highest percentage of on-time arrivals!!! For a brief moment we thought we might be able to dash through Oporto airport in time for the 7.00 pm bus to Vigo. What a silly idea. It must have taken at least twenty minutes to fix stairs to the aircraft so that we could get off. So an almost three-hour wait for the next one it was!

In the process of leaving the plane, we got into conversation with the young man who had been sitting next to us. Initially he spoke to us in rather halting Spanish. He had spotted that I was reading a Spanish novel and jumped to conclusions. Briefly I considered keeping up the charade but eventually I took pity on him and admitted our Englishness. He too was going to Vigo but managed to find something on line, an app offering places in a car going to Vigo at 8.00pm. All our hopes rose. And then it turned put to be just one place. So we resigned ourselves to our long wait.

Talking to this young man, we discovered he is a software engineer (hence his ability to find an app for a lift), travelling to and fro at the moment as his Spanish wife is in Vigo for the summer with their daughter. The child is being brought up bilingual. Excellent!

I thought of him as I read my Spanish novel and came across an apt quotation: Al que no aprende idiomas el cerebro se le convierte en puré de coliflor - If you do not learn languages your brain turns to puréed cauliflower!

Quite so!