rtw365

Can you give us some picks?

After all the craziness that came with changing everything in my life on very short notice to travel the world for a year, there was an enormous amount to do, and things that were left undone.

When I arrived in Madrid, I expected to spend a little time unwinding, I guess having a vacation before I started traveling. I knew, however, that I needed to get one of the final shots in my series of vacinations and that it was actually due the day I left San Francisco, so we needed to find a clinic to provide it. (Kathryn actually needed another shot for hers as well.)

I thought this would be the simplest thing in the world. I had no idea that it might take three days and provide adventures all over the city.

Some highlights:

-The hotel staff directed us to a hospital where the front desk guy was reading a Spanish Playstation magazine. He spoke no English. (Actually, no one in Spain seems to speak English. We found out later that all their movies are dubbed, whereas Portugal's are subtitled, so it is much easier to find someone in Portugal who speaks English.) Anyway, he eventually pointed to Kathryn and I, and waved his hand over his belly, pantomiming "pregnant." We shook our heads, then looked around more closely and realized that we were in a maternity hospital.
-We found another hospital where we eventually conveyed what we needed. A kind nurse (or some kind of employee), walked us to another wing of the hospital and spoke with someone there to hand us off. The new person took us to admissions where they wouldn't talk to us but gave us the address of a clinic. That clinic told us we were at the wrong place, and we gave up on that route.
-On Thursday, our friend John (go to Malaga, Spain, to the city square, and ask for John the Australian -- they'll find him for you) served as an interpretter while we went to other clinics. One told us that there was no doctor until Monday. We asked if we might get a referal to another doctor and were told that there were no other doctors who could do it before Monday. In all of Madrid. A city of 4 million people.
-After the fifth or sixth Farmacia that we went to, finally a pharmacist gave us the vaccines we needed. Now we just needed needles and syringes and we'd be set. I asked John to see if the pharmacist would give those to us, and he said there was no way, but maybe he could go find a needle exchange and ask if they could give us some picks.
-We went to other clinics and asked elsewhere, and couldn't find anyone to just give us the damn shots now that we had the vaccines with us. Someone finally had the sense to look in the packages we'd been given only to find that they included miniature syringes and needles along with the vaccine.

So we went back to the hotel room and gave each other injections.

posted by Dale L. Larson @ 10:10 PM