October 1, 2014. 4:00

After our vist to the Reina Sophia art museum we raced back to our hotel to check for our suitcases. They still hadn’t arrived and although we had a phone number for the aeropuerto, we couldn’t phone them because we hadn’t yet gotten around to purchasing a sim card.

Earlier all of the shops had been closed down for two or three hours for lunch.

But the first sim shop we went to, the one that Al had researched as having the best deal, was completely out of sims.

As was the next. Everywhere we went, “no hay sims”. (We later found out that there had been a rush on sim cards when the English teachers had arrived in Spain enmasse for the beginning of the English class term in the beginning of October.)

Finally we went into Orange and were made to take a number. We had been through this before and when we finally got served there was the usual ‘no hay’.

We bugged the guard – did they actually have sim cards there or were we waiting for ages for nothing?

The photo is from the Orange shop while we were waiting for our number to come up. While we were waiting, I chatted with a number of people who were all waiting to get their own SIM cards. The problem, according to one of them, was that he, and all the other teachers of English, had all just arrived in Spain to begin the new term, and in the process, had created a run on SIM cards.

Waiting to buy a sim card in an Orange store in Madrid

At any rate… YES! Sim card success! And only 10 Euros for 30 days and a gig of data plus a few minutes of talk time.

Now it was time to race back to the hotel and see if our suitcases had arrived…

More on our October 2014 trip to Northern Spain.