“Call your family and tell them how much fun you’re having!” mocked the calling card I found in my purse as we waited.
After being pick-pocketed within minutes of our arrival in Madrid and walking in the cold to the police station, pepperspray in hand, “fun” wasn’t exactly the word I would use to describe what we were having.
“Well it’s shaped like a hot dog,” I heard Megan saying as she reported her stolen wallet. "Yes. A hot dog," she repeated, cringing at his reaction.
I'm not sure what the man on the other side of the phone was thinking at this point but I would imagine he thought he had heard her wrong. Perhaps there was some translation he had missed. Or maybe he was talking to a sweet eight-year-old girl who had lost her Monopoly money.
“It’s red and tan and yellow,” she said as she tried to describe it. I hoped she would talk about how the yellow was the mustard that was squiggled across the hot dog or how the hot dog looked up at her with a big smile on its face every time she used it but she said nothing more as she struggled to hold back laughter.
At this point, I imagine phone-man sitting at a desk somewhere, feet propped up on the desk, laughing as he tried to figure out how to make a stolen hot dog wallet sound like a real crime. Three hours later we finally got to sign the report and leave the police station. Apparently writing police reports in Spanish for hot dog wallets is as hard as you'd think.
Hoping they would have pity on us, we shivered out in the cold as we asked the police how to get back to our hostel. It’s after midnight. We’ve already been robbed. We’re lost. We’re cold. We're hungry. And the only word I know in Spanish is “arriba”. Surely they will see this is not a good situation and give us a ride back. That'd make sense, right? I was convinced they wouldn't just send us off into the night like that.
Instead, the man pointed up the hill and gave us only one instruction: ¡Arriba!
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