Jet Lag and Random Profiling

We’ve been in Madrid for a few days now. Both of us have overcome our fatigue, but now we must confront the time difference. My body did not respond too well to the time difference and I ended up awake until 4 in the morning. When I was finally able to sleep, I woke up to the sun beaming in through the window. I was sure that I had woken up in the morning and that it was around 10am. When I checked Anthony’s watch, it said 1:30pm.

So the time change is taking its toll. We arranged to meet with a man Anthony’s been working with to figure out all of our documents in Spain. We noticed that the meeting place was a 40 minute walk. Anthony and I, still thinking of ourselves as the pompous New Yorkers of ages past, decided to embark to the meeting place on foot. The heat was harsh and the morale was low-especially when Anthony said he “thought” we were going the right way. Fortunately, we came across the meeting place without much of a hitch.


Here's a picture of a beautiful fountain decorated with dolphin statues. I was ready to ignore the threat of bacteria in the water and jump in.

We arranged to meet at the bus station. This proved to be difficult to find, since we were at a metro station that had several levels. As Anthony and I descended into the hot stations, we were stopped by a policeman. He began to speak quick Spanish to Anthony. All I heard was that he wanted to see our passports. Anthony and I had decided earlier that we would not carry our passports with us because we didn’t want them to get stolen. Besides, where do we need to show our passport other than in the airport? So, Anthony decided not to attempt to speak Spanish and explained that we didn’t have our passports, but we did have our US driver’s licenses. He took both of our licenses and began to inspect them. I was a bit worried that he was going to steal them, or maybe this was some kind of scam. However, there was nothing I could do as I started at the gun he had in a holster on his thigh. After a brief inspection of our IDs, the police officer was content with our information and let us go.

When we finally met up with our documents guy, we told him what happened. Let me quickly note that this document guy is originally from South Carolina, but is married to a Spanish woman and now lives in Spain. It was quite a surprise to hear a southern twang in the middle of a Spanish bus station. Anyway, he informed us that the police in Spain are allowed to stop you on the street and request your documents. In the US, you can’t do that without a warrant, but here, profiling is fine! We plan to be more careful in the future.

We’re now getting down to business to get all of our documentation in order. We hope to make it over to the police station at 8am, but we just realized that we don’t have an alarm clock. Oh well, maybe I can stay up.


Here's a picture of an actual construction sign. Anthony thought it was hilarious that the sign seems to show that it's ok to scoop up people in a construction machine. I hope to add more in the coming days.