Lost taxi drivers, gay old men and Edu--chalk it up to a good night!

I’m starting to consider my tendency to fall into bizarre situations a talent.

Enter taxi driver from the other night.

If you ask me, it takes some skill to flag down the one taxi driver in all of Valencia who is 1) Pakistani and 2) a resident of Valencia for a whopping 15 days.

I have been in Valencia for 17 days, and I can assure you, you would not want me as your taxi driver.

I can also assure you that after about 5 minutes in a car with said Pakistani, my roommate, Hannah, and I did not want him as our taxi driver either.

“Where are you going,” he asks in Spanish.
“36 Poeta Mas y Ros,” we respond in our best attempt at a Spanish accent. We were meeting our friends there at a bar.
“Donde?”
“Po-Et-Ah Mass E Ross.” Why do all streets in Spain have impossibly long names?
“Que?”
“Pooo—eta Masy Ros” “Poeta MAS y ros” “Poetamasyros”

Nada.

No problema, we had plan B ready and waiting just in case of such and occasion: written communication. I reached forward and handed the now scowling taxi driver a scrap of paper with the street name written in large, neat letters.

He looks at the paper, looks up, looks back at the paper—blank stare.

Crap.

Plan B had never failed. Come to think of it, Plan A had never failed before either. Welcome to uncharted territory.

Hannah and I exchanged shoulder shrugs and crinkled foreheads as our little taxi jutted blindly through Valencia’s midnight traffic. Our driver looked annoyed with his two clueless American passengers and fumbled for something in the front seat.

“So…what brings you to Valencia?” I ask, trying to ease the mounting tension.
“Work,” he snaps.
“Oh, well how do you like it so far?”
“I don’t.”

OK, not a talker. Poeta Mas y Ros remains a mystery as I watch the red digital numbers of the taxi’s meter climb: 3.10 euros, 3.20 euros, 3.30 euros…

Mr. Jolly finally stops fumbling and next thing I know he’s handing me a 2-inch thick manual of the streets of Valencia and instructing me to start looking.

Me as navigator in the US—bad idea. Me as navigator in a large foreign city with an atlas written in Spanish—estupido.

Frantically, I flip pages as our taxi makes costly U-turns. At a red light, Mr. Jolly grabs for the book, and I hand it over willingly.

Green light—the book is back in my lap and it’s game on.

Red light—I sit still and watch my money disappear.

Green light—I’m flying through the pages and miraculously, wait, could it be…

“Aqui!” I exclaim marking the street with my finger and thrusting the book to the front seat.

Mr. Jolly takes the book and stares. He turns the map clockwise a quarter and stops. Another quarter turn. And another. Then to my horror he shakes his head, closes the book and throws it on the seat next to him.

5.50 euros, 5.60 euros, 5.70 euros…

We make another U-turn, and I feel the car slow to a stop. For a brief moment I thought we had arrived, but then I realized our driver was rolling down his window to ask two Spaniard guys for directions.

As luck would have it, they had never heard of Poeta Mas y Ros. And judging from their snickers as we pulled away, they had never seen a taxi driver with two wide-eyed American girls in his back seat pull over to ask for directions either.

That’s when Hannah and I saw our salvation standing obliviously on a street corner. His name is Mark. Mark is in our program. Mark speaks English. I have never been so happy to see Mark as in that moment.

Without even needing to ask each other, Hannah and I screamed at the taxi driver to stop, willingly paid 6.70 for a taxi-ride that should have been free, and jumped ship.

We burst from the taxi with fluttering hands and bulging eyes and thus thoroughly confused Mark who thought the taxi was stopping for him and as such, was doing everything in his power to shoo it away.

Hannah and I break into uncontrollable laughter. Mark is looking at us like we just beamed in from a space ship. We get it together enough to fill him in and take the next few minutes to regroup.

Then it’s back to the situation at hand. Poeta Mas y Ros. Bar. Friends waiting.

Mark recognizes the street name (for the first time that night) but unfortunately can’t remember how to get there. To his credit, he sends us in a general direction, and we set off on a mission.

After about five minutes of wandering down the road, Hannah and I realize we better enlist some help. She flags down an elderly Spanish man to ask for directions.

The old man wants to help but says he needs a minute to orient himself. He turns in a full circle, stops, and then looks side to side as if he’s taking in the scenery for the first time.

Turns out Hannah shares my talent for getting into odd situations.

“Just go straight ahead and then take a left,” the man says pointing right.

Hannah is not ready to give up on this one.

“So is that a left or right?” she asks.
“Uh…”

Time to back-pedal. We both start saying “gracias” and backing up but the old man is having none of it. Reaching behind him, he snatches two unsuspecting club promoters who were walking past and pulls them into our little circle.

“These people will help you,” he says without asking “these people” if A) they will in fact help us or B) they know where the street is. The old man walks off and we are left standing face to face with “these people”—a guy and girl that looked Spanish and about our age.

Before we can even begin to explain ourselves, the old man turns around and pops back into our circle as if he forgot something.

“I’m gay,” he declares in English. “But this man,” he says pointing to the young Spaniard, “is very, very…sexual. He is very sexual.”

Satisfied, the man proceeds to give us all besos before leaving again. I stand like a statue with my face stuck in a scowl as he plants to large kisses on both of my cheeks.

With the man gone, our circle stands stunned and staring at each other on the sidewalk.

“Uh…loco?” the apparently very sexual Spanish guy says pointing in the direction of crazy old, gay man.

I like this guy already.

He introduces himself as Edu (short for Eduardo) and the girl as Mirella. They ask where we are trying to go and for what seems like the millionth time we respond, “Poeta Mas y Ros.”

Maybe it was the lost looks on our faces or perhaps the possibly of getting a group of Americans to come to their club, but for whatever reason, Edu and Mirella gave the best answer we had heard all night.

“Okay, we will walk you there,” Edu says.

And then, completely breaking the trend of the night, he did. He walked us there. I probably wouldn’t have believed it had I not seen the street sign for myself. “Poeta Mas y Ros,” it said. It exists.

That simple street sign would have been enough, but Edu didn’t stop there. Before parting, he gave us his number and about 30 little coupons for free drinks at his club—coupons conveniently printed with a map on the back.

I wish I could say that coupon was the turning point of the night; that we went into the bar, handed out coupons to our friends and danced the night away with Edu and Mirella in their discoteca.

Not exactly.

There was more walking, more hidden streets and even a pair of lost keys thrown in the mix. But between Mr. Jolly, the gay old man, and Edu, I chalk it up to a good night.