Drunk on a plane (but not me!)

          I was at the end of a long day of traveling. Not long because it had to be, though most internationals are, but long because I had made a mess of my flights. I'd only noticed my error a few days previously while at my friend Stumbles' house. I'd been sitting around vaguely reviewing my game plan to hike El Camino de Santiago (finally), a 500 mile trail in Northern Spain when I realized I'd messed up. This was the third legitimate time I've had the plan and goal to hike El Camino, but it is also the third legitimate time I have been thwarted in my attempts to arrive at the starting point. The first time I missed hiking it because I couldn't bring myself to leave new friends in Ireland, the second because I stayed in Northern Europe instead, and now this time because I'd booked a flight to leave for Barcelona while I would still be in the air to Oslo. Whoops. When I tried to rebook another flight from Oslo they didn't have any more flights to Barcelona that day, so I decided to go to Magala in Southern Spain instead. It was the next best option. This was the second part of the mess I made, I hadn't realized there were two airports that come up as 'Oslo' and I mistakenly booked the flight departing from the airport I would not be arriving at. This means I had to take a 3 hour train ride to get to the correct airport just so that I could arrive in Magala at midnight and sleep in the airport anyways. These are the reasons why it had been a long day of traveling. 

        It was on that last leg, the flight from Oslo to Maaga, that I had a sort of funny flight. Somehow I am nearly always in the aft of the plane. Wait, let's back up a second, somehow my gate is nearly always the farthest gate from me and I am nearly always in the aft of the plane. While in the aft of this particular plane I learned that if ever there is someone who is causing a ruckus during the flight the attendants place them in the aft of the plane to be able to manage them better, at least they did so on this flight, right across the aisle from me. 

          I was sitting on the left side of the airplane, in the aisle seat, with one other guy in my row at the window. He was nice, young, tatted, and on his way to a skydiving convention in Sevilla. On the right side of the airplane, across from me, was a buisness looking man enjoying his empty row of three seats. Not even halfway through the flight one of the stewardesses came back round the back and asks this business looking man if he would mind moving to a different seat because they needed to put a wasted passenger back in that area. They were doing this in hopes that the passanger who was drunk beyond belief would lay down in the three seats and go to sleep. Of course the business looking man complied and so enters a Spanish man who has had way too much to drink. In fact, while the stewardess is guiding the man to the back he can't even walk properly enough to stay up and manages to face plant into an armrest on an aisle seat and those things ain't soft. The male steward literally picks the guy up and drops him in the seat across the aisle from me where the guy proceeds to slide down into the floor space between seats. Again he gets picked up but this time they buckle him in so he can't move. Not a guy you would really have to worry about going anywhere right? Wrong.

         Maybe 10 minutes later the guy comes to, but he is certainly not coherent. He looks around hazily and then down at the seatbelt, says something inaudibly, and then begins to fuddle with the latch. It takes him a little while to figure it out, meanwhile a few people around him have seen him doing this and are telling him 'sientate' but he doesn't register much. He manages to get up but the stewardess pushes his back down and gives him a bit of a telling off in Spanish. This goes on and on for a couple hours, like literally every 5-10 minutes the guy tries to get up and wander off and someone has to get him back into his seat until it is finally time to land... 

          The stewardess comes up to me and asks 'Tu hablas espanol?' to which I reply 'Un poquito'. So she asks 'Ingles?' and I say 'Si'. She tells me then that we will be landing soon, but the stewardesses and the steward must take their jump seats for landing. Which is like a 10-15 minute process. Okay, so that's dandy but...? Well then she asks me if I can hold down the drunk guy should he try to get up during landing since I am the one right across the aisle from him. I guess that's also dandy, and of course I say I will help them. 

         Long story short, I get to hold down a drunk guy by myself on an international flight because of course he tries to get up during landing. He was off his face wasted so it wasn't very difficult, just a little bit funny and not at all what I expected for this flight. As soon as we landed the police got on and took him away and then I was off to find a corner of the airport to sleep in. Oh travel, how I have missed you. 

Welcome to Spain!