No Habla Usted engles?

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So, the plan was supposed to be simple. Get ourselves to Seville, find our hostel and eat tapas. We lined up at the train station to make our reservation, only to have the ticket man say something in spanish about having to buy a ticket and handing us our railpasses back. (Unfortunate Event #3) - Our railpasses were not valid. It is a long story, but back in Italy when we got them validated they were filled out with the wrong date. No one noticed until Luxembourg when a train conductor crossed out the date and put the correct date. We thought it was odd as he didn't sign it or stamp it or anything. But everything was fine up until today. The man told us to go to information. Frustrated, I asked the lady if she spoke english. No such luck. At least my five years of spanish class came in handy for something! I explained to her what had happened and that I didn't understand why all of a sudden we couldn't use them anymore. She was telling me that the crossed out date made them invalid. What else was I to do? I asked if there was anything they could do because we didn't have a lot of money and still had 2 months travel on them... and then of course I cried. Because what else do you do when you are in a foreign country, can't really understand what is going on, and have something really bad happen to you? I think the lady felt sorry for us, as my crying turned into my sister crying, and who wants to deal with 2 crying girls?! She ended up with 2 other conductors at her desk asking what had happened, and then she walked away with our rail passes. One of the men just said ''Esta bien'' - Its OK. We waited and in a few minutes the lady came back and sent us to a different window. They had made the proper correction on the back of the ticket and validated it with their train station stamp. And they said that if we had any more problems just to show the conductor the back.
After a lot of tears and stress, we got ourselves to Sevilla and found that our hostel was more like a hotel. It was definately a pleasant surprise. We searched for tapas as they are claimed to have originated in Sevilla. The restaurant we found is one of the oldest in the city and we had their selection of 8 tapas between the 2 of us. Once again, the food was absolutely amazing, all topped off with some sangria. It was a good end to a bad day!

Amie

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Comments

[Cathy]

You know we could have helped you...
so guys, I can totally appreciate why you would get upset over that however, you know we could have always got you new ones by mailing them to a hostel close by. :) But hey, them fixing it works too!!! I LOVE YOU GUYS Cheers, Cathy