. . . and we didn’t have a good experience with her cab driver.
Last summer, my mom and I arranged for her to meet me in Madrid on my last day as an au pair, so I could show her around the city that I called home for the summer and introduce her to a bit of the Spanish culture that I had fallen in love with after living in Spain for the last two. I was so excited that she was finally coming, since she couldn’t come to Sevilla the previous summer.
I told her that once her plane landed in Madrid, the easiest way for her to get from the airport to where I was staying was to just take a cab. I couldn’t meet her at the airport because it was my last day watching and entertaining the girls.
Now, my mom does not speak Spanish (just ask her to tell you about when she used to quiz me on my vocab lists before Spanish tests and quizzes if you don’t believe me), so I made sure that she had my host fam’s address written down beforehand. I wanted to make sure that she wouldn’t have any trouble telling the cab driver where she needed to go, but if she did, she could just show them the piece of paper (and since her phone would only work on WiFi, she wouldn’t be able to get in touch with me once she left the airport if she had any problems).
She texted me when she was about to leave the Madrid airport, so I walked out to the curb to meet her when I expected her to arrive. But after waiting for 15 minutes on the side of the road, she still had not arrived.
I was waiting and waiting when I finally got a WhatsApp call from an unknown number. I’m glad I answered it because it was the cab driver telling me that his GPS couldn’t locate the address.
So, I repeated the address to him in Spanish (the one he already had) and told him the area of Madrid that it was in. He understood and hung up.
A few minutes later, I got another call from the same number. Ugh! This was not a good sign. I really just felt bad for my mom, since she had just gotten off an international flight, was tired, and couldn’t communicate with this man.
He told me that he had taken a few wrong turns but that his GPS had finally found our address, and he would arrive in about five minutes.
Sheesh, this was annoying, especially because I had been using cabs all summer, and not one ever had a problem locating our address.
When I finally saw her cab pull up, I ran across the street and immediately hugged her when she got out of the car. I was so happy to see her.
The cab driver then tried to take advantage of us and charge my mom for a 40 minute ride, instead of what should’ve been a 20 minute one. I wouldn’t stand for that, so I told him in Spanish that this was his fault and we wouldn’t be paying the cost of a 40 minute ride. He was defiant and rude, so I pulled up Google Maps and typed in the distance from the airport to my address and it said 20 minutes.
I showed it to him, and with a huff, he agreed that this mess was his fault. He accepted the fare for a 20 minute ride.
I may not be fluent in Spanish yet, but I’m near fluent, strong and sure as heck wasn’t going to let that rude man think he could walk all over me because I’m a woman and not Spanish. Not then, not ever.
Showing my mom Puerta del Sol and all of the other MAD “must-sees.” Despite her rude cab driver in the beginning, we had a great weekend in Madrid before we flew to Ireland to meet the rest of our family.