Toledo

We got up and made our way to the Madrid train station. Before we got in, however, there was something across the street that stuck out.
 [baby heads]

I have no idea. None. But I'll have nightmares, I promise you that much. I actually refused to go near them and Ang took one for the team to get the shots of these, telling us "they were so much worse than you thought."

We got on our train and took our obligatory 30-minute nap. I don't know what is with vacations and not sleeping, but the naps prettymuch died in Barcelona. We arrived in Toledo and were greeted by a gorgeous train station. It was old, and pretty, and...yeah, old.

[picture]

We went inside and looked for any indication of where to go. We had once again failed to plan beyond the stage of "get there" so when we saw the sightseeing open-top bus sitting out front, we basically instantly decided that was what we were going to do.

This tour bus was different than the ones in Barcelona, however, in that you had 5 or so different "plans" you could buy. All we really wanted was a scenic (or, really, any) way to get into the city, so we looked at the board and then approached the harried woman selling tickets. We asked her if she sold any tickets that just gave us the bus tour plus access to the castle, and she gave us a surly "no, we don't sell that."

Fortunately, we excel at reading comprehension and told her that the advertised yellow plan was exactly what we had just asked for and she went, "oh, yeah. You can buy tickets for that."

Thanks.

We bought tickets and got on. I hid in the middle to avoid the sun, and we were off. As it turns out, the tour bus was (once again) worth every penny as it took us around the circumferance of the city with a stunning view of the outside. It was a straight-out-of-the-textbook medieval walled city. There was one stop-off point for pictures, and a group of girls asked us to take their picture. An eye for an eye, they took ours, and we basically took their exact pose:

[picture]


The bus dropped us off at the "castle". Unfortunately, they had carved out the whole thing and made it into a terrible museum, so it wasn't nearly as good as the one we saw in Segovia. We gave it a solid chance, too. When we went through the massive exhibit of plastic figurines that they made to fill out the rest of the exhibit in the museum, we decided that it was officially the worst museum we had ever been to and that we had to leave. We tried to go to the bathroom, and the security guard kept shoving us toward the patio where cannons and trebuchets were. Angie eventually just told the guy she had to pee and marched past him. The best part of the castle was the gift shop, where I got a sweet miniature mace. Not the oh-god-my-eyes kind, but the spiky-ball-on-the-stick kind.

We left the castle as fast as we could, and immediately began hunting for food. We found a misty awning place and sat down in front of a fan. The fan seemed like a good idea at the time, but really, all it did was blast you with hot air while dispersing all of the mist in such a way that you didn't feel it at all. We ordered our food and drinks, and after the waiter put his little automatic order-taker thing away, Tracey asked for a glass of water. Apparently, this was akin to asking for his firstborn, because he gave her a look of death, sighed, took his order-taker back out, and asked if we were sure there was nothing else we wanted. Wanker.

The food kinda sucked, forreal. It was the worst croquetas and sangria to date.

We started shopping, because we had all basically failed at the shopping thing and this was the last chance to get souvenirs. One of the first stops we made was a jewelry store. It was cheap, the jewelry was nice, and no one item was the same.

We were there for over an hour. At first, we felt rushed, and kept edging towards the door. But then we decided that fuck it, we like shiny shit.

At one point, I found this giant disco ring that was amazing and I loved it and it was gaudy and oh my god. Ang and Tracey took one look at it and told me to put it back. I snuck it into my little basket, and when neither of them were looking, bought the shit out of it for 2 euro. Best. Purchase. Ever.

I spent the rest of the day waving my ring around as Ang and Tracey groaned and told me that they couldn't concentrate on anything but my ring when they saw it.

[picture of my ring] I DON'T KNOW WHAT THEIR PROBLEM IS

We continued shopping, melting, and coming up with almost no success in the souvenir department except for some porcelain bulls that were actually really pretty. We did find a delicious chocolate place, saw a lady with a ridiculous hat, and then found that the entrance to a castle or something was closed. We were tired, shopped out, and hot so we decided to figure out ahead of time which bus to get on before getting food.

As soon as we walked up to the bus area, an old man heard us trying to figure out which bus we should take, and pointed to the bus that everyone was currently climbing into. Since it was easier than trying to figure it out on our own, we climbed on (after yet again being shoved aside by people that refuse to even look at you as they streamed into the bus).

Turns out that old guy saved our ass again, because we were sitting there absently watching out the window, and he tapped us and pointed to the train station that we were about to miss. Had we not followed him onto the bus and been alerted to where we were supposed to get off, I doubt we would have figured it out. The problem, however, was that we had accidentally arrived nearly three hours early to the train.

We start walking, decide to see if there is any coffee place nearby or something. Failing that, we ducked into a little convenience store to pick up some booze to drink. The ladies in there were not happy to see us, and followed us around as we browsed. If we picked up a bottle to look at it, she'd be there to carefully move it a millimeter to the side to make the label perfectly facing out after we put it back. Eventually we picked a few bottles of wine, some chocolate, and headed to the door. There was a little old quarter machine sitting at the entrance and it had pokemon something or other inside. Naturally, Tracey and I freaked out and bought two of them.

We wandered to a bench in front of an empty restaurant, and opened our prizes. They were little cellphone screen wipers, and I won pikachu. Score. LIZARD!

Eventually we got bored (or, they got tired of me waving my disco ring and pikachu) and we decided to try and see if we could get an earlier train out at the station.

We walked into the train station, asked the man if he spoke English, and he angrily replied, "no." We know that you're not supposed to do that, but everyone is nasty to us no matter what we do, so screw it.

No problema, senor. We're practiced at this. Angie starts pointing to the train schedules, and he yelled at her, "NO! NO! Look! LOOK! You not look, is too late, no." while stabbing his finger at the schedule.

Ookay, thanks for the help. We had just missed the train, so now we were stuck there. Fortunately, there was a little cafe with shitty wine and beer so we sat at a table outside and waited for the train for about a year before it arrived.