This is my other cousin, Maria, at her office in The Conservatory of Music, where she teaches piano. I´m going to spend this weekend in the suburbs with her family (my aunt Nana and uncle Felipe, Maria´s brother, Santiago (my cousin) and his wife, Yolanda.SUCCESS:
Last night, Maria drove into the center of the city, so we could hang out at the internet cafes at night and plan our possible trip to Rome. I´m going to leave for Rome next Monday and Maria is going to meet up with me next Friday, for the weekend.
We found cheap tickets for her, and decided on a cheap hotel to stay in. We were very excited and happy that we were planning a spontaneous trip to Roma!
FAILURE:
Meanwhile...while we were buzzing and giddy about our Italy adventura, Maria´s car was being towed by the evil Madrid policia. When we finally came out of the internet cafe around 11:30PM and I walked Maria to her car--yep...you guessed it. It was gone. Christ!
And as you might imagine, finding and retrieving a towed car in Madrid is as big a pain-in-the-ass as it is in a big city in the United States. The irony and good news of the whole fracso was that Maria illegally parked her car, right on the corner of an alleyway of a police station.
Nice, Maria! So her car had probably been towed within minutes of her parking there! And yep, the cops were in the office, waiting for us!
So at least we had an easy time locating which pound her car had been towed to, and during the whole exchange with the police, I was learning all sorts of fun words, like la matricula (license plate number), la denuncia, (parking fine), el propeterio del coche (owner of the car) que mierda (that´s crap!). Actually, I already knew that last one...
Anyway, the cops were very nice to us poor young females, stranded in downtown Madrid--especially considering the fact that they were the ones responsible for towing Maria´s car. And by the way, the cops here in Madrid are all very young strapping good-looking chicos, who all wear these form-fitting black and neon yellow jumpsuits, that say, "come to me, I will rescue you!" Just a little cultural detail...
We did finally get Maria´s car back, at 1AM in the morning! My only regret is that I didn´t have my camera with me, or else I would have taken pictures of the whole "retrieving of Maria´s car!" adventura...
