“We need you to speak Spanish to the guy,” Tien-Ying tells me. Ahh yeah. Me talking Spanish? Sure I took two years worth of Spanish courses, but it’s not like I actually remember any of that. It’s not like I even cared at the time.

Of course now, I wish I would have cared. I just didn’t at the time. I took Spanish for a year in college because I had to. Plain and simple. I crammed for the exams, and promptly forgot most that I knew.

But in Spain, I wished I remembered just a few more phrases. The bits of Spanish I remember are embarrassingly simple.

We were at the train station; the girls trying to buy tickets from a middle-aged man who didn’t speak any English. Unfortunately, he didn’t speak Chinese or Turkish either. So I was supposed to buy four train tickets to Madrid. I had to fly back earlier than my travel companions, due to a certain pain-in-the-neck course, but they were staying for a couple of extra days and spending that time in Madrid. Of course, they need to get to Madrid. That’s where the train tickets come into play.

I grabbed Kwang-Ying’s common phrase book to remind myself of a few things. After studying for a few minutes, I felt reasonably confident that I could order the tickets, so we walked back to the ticket office and join the queue - only one man was ahead of us.

Then the power flickered. The lights dimmed and the scheduling computer rebooted. Or it maybe didn’t reboot, because five minutes later, we were still waiting for the computer to function. A few more minutes passed.

Finally, we decided to come back tomorrow. Possibly someone who spoke English would be around. We devised a plan for the evening and left.

The next day, the girls bought four tickets to Madrid by bus.