Most Hilarious Blog Yet

All I can do is laugh when I think of last night. Lets just hope that last night will be the only night like it. As stated in the previous blog, my friends and I had plans to go to a salsa place to dance the night away….well that didn’t exactly happen. Dave, one of our friends from Wisconsin, has been having troubles with his foot and last night it was to the point where he could barely walk so he no longer wanted to go, which meant the other guys weren’t going to go either…sooo our salsa night was canceled. Joy and I still wanted to go out and do something because after all we had prettied ourselves up and didn’t want to waste away that effort. So our friend Ish said he was having friends over to his place, so we decided to go there. Ish lives in Algorta which is a suburb of Bilbao, so we needed to obviously take the metro. The previous night I had taken the Deustro metro and told Joy that we should take that one instead of the Casco Viejo one because even though it would take a tad bit more time walking to it, it would be a shorter metro ride. We started walking and I was pretty confident in where I was going…Joy and I, as usual, got into a very in depth conversation and when we both came up for a breath I realized that I wasn’t recognizing anything around me….I figured that I should recognize things from the night before since I had taken that same path home, but I didn’t remember anything I was seeing…So without saying I was lost I just told Joy that if I didn’t recognize something in the next couple minutes we should probably turn around….yeah….the next couple minutes were not successful in finding anything remotely recognizable. At this point it wasn’t much surprise that Joy and I were turned around, because this happens quite often….but at this time it was already 10:30ish and we just wanted to get where we were supposed to be. I called our friend Michaela and she said we could just take the bus to get to the metro station and then go from there. We both agreed this would be the easiest thing to do and so she told us to go back to the University and wait at that bus stop for bus number 71…..we waited….and waited….then it started to rain….and we waited some more….we took pictures…..we laughed….a lot….we saw bus G8 pass by…..three times….half an hour later….still no bus 71. At this point we had text Michaela and said to go on without us because we were going to call it a night. Joy and I then decided to walk to Casco Viejo and get Chocolate y Churros and sit and chat like old women would probably do. So we are walking to Casco Viejo in the rain with may I add the crappiest umbrella ever...when we arrive to Casco Viejo all, and I mean ALL, of the churro places are closed….this made us pretty sad….but we were determined to find some place that served some kind of something with Chocolate. In all of Bilbao we found a Burger King…..yes a Burger King. We both ordered these Chocolate cake ice cream things and sat down and talked. After being there for awhile we decided that we at this point might as well take the bus home considering it was still raining and getting cold. We then headed to the bus stop and saw that the next bus wasn’t for 25 minutes but we decided to wait because we knew that it would take us longer than that to walk home anyway….so we sat under the bus shelter on the cold bench and again chatted and waited (at this time it was close to 1:30am). The plan was to use my bus pass for both of us because Joys had run out of euros and so that was no problem…when the bus pulled up I got my wallet out and went to open it…just jokingly I said “this would be a really bad time to not have my bus pass”….well I apparently I can see into the future because I opened my wallet….no bus pass…I then remembered that I had left it in my jeans pocket from the night before. Joy and I haven’t laughed that hard the whole time we have been in Spain…we just sat there on the bench and watched our bus that we had waited for for 25 minutes pull away as we were trying to hold back the tears from laughing sooooo hard. We then looked up at the sign to see when the next bus was to come….30 minutes….haha , just awesome. So we decided that it was enough time to go get both of ourselves new bus passes at the metro station and find something else that consisted of chocolate since this night has gone from rough to bad. We got our bus passes and then found this deli /bar place that we thought may have something…after staring at the menu forever we spotted some chocolate cake on the counter….so of course we both wanted a piece. When we went to go order the guy asked us what we wanted and we couldn’t remember the Spanish word for piece so we pointed at the chocolate cake and made a triangle with our hands to indicate we wanted a piece of it. He looked at us and in plain English, he said “You want a piece of cake?”….haha we felt soo dumb lol…but how were we supposed to know that he spoke perfect English? We both nodded and he served us our cake. We sat down at the bar and ate it…when we were finishing up I said we should probably get a move on it so we didn’t miss our bus….we walk out of the bar and we had to walk around this larger round -about and then down the street a little to get to the bus stop. We got around the round-about and I saw down the street that a bus had pulled up….yep…it was our bus. We both just looked at each other and took of sprinting down the street to catch it….and we did, right before it took off again. We get on the bus both laughing and trying to catch our breath. Joy just looked at me and she said at this point I doubt this bus will even take us to the right stop. At this point of the night we should have learned not to say stuff like that because with our luck it would come true..and you guessed right it did….our jaws just dropped and we again laughed hysterically when we just passed on by our apartment building at the stop we were supposed to get off at. A couple in the bus started to laugh too….they much have thought our faces were pretty priceless when we realized that we weren’t stopping where we needed too….I then pressed the stop button on the bus thinking maybe he would realize that we needed off, and would pull over….not the case…..We were then dropped off a couple blocks away at another bus stop we didn’t even know existed. We got off the bus again in the rain and started to back track to the apartment….at this time it is close to a quarter till 3 am…Joy and I are both freezing, I have to go to the bathroom like no other, and we both just wanted to get home since we had been trying to do that for the last hour. And this is where our incredibly uneventful and at the same time eventful night ended...
So all in all….. chocolate cake icecream,2.80 euros….new bus pass, 5 euros….piece of chocolate cake,3 euros, waiting for buses, hour and a half wasted…..tons of laughter and a great story to tell the grandkids…priceless

Love and miss you all,
-Mel

P.s. Continue prayers for Haiti.