A plane ride from Marseille to Barcelona only takes an hour. I figured a quick weekend trip from France to Spain would be simple; I could get to the city mid-morning and have most of the day to explore and play tourist. I had been abroad for six months already—I guess this gave me an inflated sense of confidence in my travel skills. I assumed that if I followed the right directions, I would be able to navigate seamlessly from airport to bus to city center to Air B n B apartment.

Turns out, things were not so simple.

It all started out smoothly: my partner and I took a Saturday morning EasyJet flight from Marseille to Barcelona. Everything was on time and we got there by 11AM. At the airport, duffel bags in hand, we waited in line to get tickets for a bus ride into the city. This wait didn’t surprise me: this was Spain after all, and based on what I had been told, I expected that everything would be moving a bit slowly. Even compared to the relaxed place I had grown used to in the South of France.

At the airport bus terminal, we were surrounded by tourists speaking English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and various Scandinavian languages; the majority of the people there were young like us, and oh so hip and European. They looked like they had also come to explore one of Spain’s coolest cities and had dreams of sleeping in, seeing Gaudían architecture, experiencing a vivid nightlife, eating tapas, and taking sangria-fueled walks by the water. In hopes of having an original experience in Barcelona, we had rented a cute apartment in Gràcia—supposedly an up-and-coming neighborhood. The place was close to Park Güell, one of the city’s best sights, but was surprisingly one of the least crowded parts of the city. I felt so clever that we would be avoiding the hordes of tourists and staying in a part of Barcelona that felt authentic, but would still have easy access to the city’s major attractions.

We eventually got on the bus from the airport to the city center, and after a 45-minute ride found ourselves in Plaça de Catalunya, Barcelona’s biggest plaza. I recalled reading that the 44 toward Gràcia, the bus we were supposed to take in order to get to the apartment, stopped there. There was a bus at the curb, but when I spoke in Spanish to the driver, he replied impatiently that I had the wrong bus. After this, my partner insisted that we find someone at a nearby tourist booth who spoke English. I hadn’t come to Spain to speak English, but it was getting late, so we inquired. The person at the booth told us that the 44 stopped on the side of the street where we had first gotten off. We crossed back, got on the bus and paid five euros for two tickets. Things were looking good—we were only an hour behind schedule and we were one step closer to experiencing the real Barcelona! (A side note: this was not the first time in my travels where my stubbornness and insistence on speaking English as seldom as possible would get me in trouble—nor would it be the last.)

We were halfway to the top of a very steep hill (which Barcelona has a lot of, it seems) when the bus driver said something incomprehensible. I then realized that Catalàn is a lot further from Spanish than I had previously thought. Fortunately, he repeated the phrase in Spanish—we were supposed to get off the bus and get another one, this one was out of service. Our tickets would be accepted if we showed them to the next driver. So we got off and waited. Then I heard a group of people speaking Italian—thank God! A language that I could actually understand and communicate in, I hoped that they would be able to confirm if we were getting on the right bus. I had written down the name of the stop and the address of the apartment, but had no cell reception or wifi to help me check that we were going the right way. I was far too self-righteous about this, but I had insisted on having an authentic travel experience.

With the Italians, I talked about getting to Park Güell, where they had just been. Unfortunately, it was much too steep to walk there from where we were. Since they were going back into town, where we had just come from, we got on a bus on the opposite side of the street—for which we had to buy new tickets. After fifteen minutes, we got off at a stop that had the same word in it as the name of our stop but, unsurprisingly, was the wrong one: the street names around us were completely different from the ones in the directions on our Air B n B reservation.

Despite these frustrating circumstances, I couldn’t help but notice the way the city looked from the top of that hill, I observed the unique architecture, the elderly people arm-in-arm taking post-siesta walks, and the way the sun was hitting the water down below.

But we could not be distracted—it was already two and a half hours past the time we had told the renter that we would meet her, and I was starting to get nervous that she would leave or cancel the reservation altogether. So I asked an elderly couple that was strolling by if they knew of the street we were staying. In some strange combination of Spanish, French, and Italian, I asked for the address and tried to explain to them that we had just made a series of mistakes and needed to get to this apartment as soon as possible. They nodded, looking concerned and confused—admittedly, I probably looked extremely tired and panicked. They then proceeded to argue with each other for ten minutes, without a glance back at me. I assume the discussion had lots of: “it’s that way!”, “no it’s farther up the hill!”, “no, it’s near so-and-so’s house.” Eventually, they turned back to me to ask me a few questions. I attempted to answer coherently but lot of gesturing was required to really get the point across. In the end, I figured out that they were saying that we were supposed to go up a set of stairs and turn left and then go down that street and turn right again. So we did exactly that, hoping these last few hours of struggling since getting off the plane would finally pay off.

Fifteen minutes later, we were standing in front of Carrer de Pasteur número 25, ringing the doorbell. There was no immediate answer, just a grey cat winding himself around our legs. Had our hostess left? After a few minutes of silently willing her to come to the door, praying in my new mix of Spanish, French, and Italian that I pretended was really Catalàn, unsure of which language I should choose if anyone answered, a young woman in a white sweater finally poked her head out and asked me in perfect English, “are you Alessandra?” At last! Someone, other than my partner and the Italians we had met an hour prior, I could fully understand and talk to! My stubbornness and frustration gave way to relief at finally being able to communicate coherently. I felt proud that I had been able to get us where we needed to be, using all the romance languages in all the combinations I could conjure.

Hearing our hostess’ English at the end of that long day was a huge relief. The very cute, very modern apartment and the freshly baked chocolate cake we found on the table there were not bad rewards either.