Crazy travellers’ tales and stereotypes!

Yesterday we left a surprisingly sunny Northwest of England and travelled to the Northwest of Spain. Well, first we travelled to Porto and waited around for a couple of hours for the bus to Vigo.

I was convinced at several points in the day that we were travelling with crazy people.

First there was the case of the mother and daughter who got on the bus with a baby and toddler, both in separate buggies, one pushed by each adult. The children were surprisingly cherubic: chubby cheeks, big eyes, long lashes and golden curls - too long in the case of the older child, who was clearly ready for his first big-boy haircut. Maybe his mother was reluctant to cut off his curls. He must have been at least three, quite articulate and protesting loudly because they would not let him out of the buggy to sit on a seat. To pacify him his grandmother fished about in her bag and produced one of those compacts that ladies carry around (I don’t so maybe I am not a lady), the sort with a fancy enamelled outside and two mirrors inside. Mother meanwhile was busy with her mobile phone and ignoring both children.

The ploy worked. The child was delighted, explored it, decided it was a special pair of glasses and declared himself to be Darth Vader. Grandma gave me a wry look and told me the child was obsessed with all things Star Wars. She only wished he had not gone to the dark side. I resisted the temptation to ask what a three year old was doing watching Star Wars. Surely the main story line must have gone right over his head. I was strong, however, and joined in the game, and as we got off wished them, “May the Force be with you”. The little boy had clearly understood enough of the story to appreciate the wish and rewarded me with an angelic beam.

The tram was fairly sane, apart from the woman, another grandmother, with a child of perhaps ten who kept teasing her by getting hold of grandma’s phone and videoing her. She also had a baby in a very odd baby-buggy, one and a half times the usual width. Alongside the baby’s seat there was a sort of container for transporting shopping, the inevitable “baby bag” for carrying nappies and bottle and such, and presumably anything else you might need. I am sure it was very handy but oh, so unwieldy. I remain amazed at what they produce for carrying babies around!

 Despite the recent train chaos, we managed, without further craziness, to catch a train from Manchester to one of the Liverpool stations and then straight onto bus to Liverpool’s John Lennon airport.

It was on the plane that the real fun began. First there was a pair of elderly sisters, overexcited and perhaps just a little tipsy. Throughout the flight they kept up a loud, giggling conversation, uninhibited and unabashed.

But they were outdone by the Portuguese lady who provoked an outrage from the cabin staff by getting up and walking around during take-off. Maybe it was because we taxied a good way before take-off. Maybe she was just odd. Shrill requests for ALL passengers to remain in their seats with their seatbelts securely fastened producing no result, one of the crew had to almost manhandle her back to her seat and tell her firmly, “Now fasten your seatbelt!” All was well for a while, although she did keep changing seats; unusually there were empty seats on the flight. And so it went on until the crew started moving up and down the aisle with food and drink for sale.

She ordered lasagne and made a big fuss about it being heated. When it arrived a short while later she demanded that it be opened for her. Then she wanted hot chocolate and got cross because they would not give her more than three sachets of milk to put in it. A good ten minutes was spent on this one passenger. All of this went on in Portuguese, broken English and equally broken Spanish. She grew very agitated because the cabin crew did not understand Portuguese.

Observing what was going on, I decided that she probably wanted to take some kind of medication with food and a hot drink but she was having clear difficulties with communication. At one point she shouted down the plane to a companion who came and helped sort out the problem of how much she needed to pay. When she was on her feet, blocking the aisle, preventing trollies from moving, stopping other passengers from getting to the toilet, a sort of chief stewardess arrived to remonstrate with her.

Now, SHE was a bit of Nurse Ratchett figure, from “One flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest”, and she calmed things down and sat for a while with the poor woman. However, as we made our descent into Porto, nothing and nobody seemed able to persuade the by now rather tearful woman from fastening her seatbelt. And no further fuss was made. Very odd!

As we would be arriving late in Vigo, too late to purchase supplies of any kind, I was persuaded by Phil that I should try to buy milk in the arrivals lounge at the airport. This was too great a challenge for my very basic Portuguese, so I asked the young man in the coffee shop, in Portuguese, if he spoke English or Spanish. Both, he told me. And so I successfully bought a paper cup of milk which I equally successfully decanted into an empty water bottle. Job done!

I wonder how many coffee shop employees in Liverpool, or even Manchester, airport could deal with three languages. No doubt in the cosmopolitan centre of Manchester itself you can find them, but I suspect that they might be among the EU nationals working in the city!

This morning I woke to the sound of car tyres swishing on a wet road. it was raining! I went out to buy bread and fruit for breakfast. In the fruit shop one of the customers was saying how she was bored with rain and gloom and so I asked how long the weather has been bad, explaining that we had just arrived from a reasonably sunny Northwest of England. Several weeks, she told me, and not much of improvement this week. One of the other customers, ignoring my remark about bow nice the weather had been in our part of England, commented that as I was from England I would be used to horrid, inclement weather!

I love these stereotypes. In the UK I know people who assume that Spain is all wall to wall sunshine all year round, while here in Spain there are those who believe that all of England is covered in fog, that the sun never shines and consequently we never go to our beaches.

In just under two weeks we go to Sanxenxo, where Phil will play in a chess tournament. For the last I don’t know how many years we have done this and there has been a heatwave. We have told the organisers that we expect no less this year. Good weather has been ordered! We shall see.

My daughter tells me that the sun is shining today over Greater Manchester!