Trip to El Corte Inglés

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We had decided to make the trip to El Corte Inglés after having been bombarded with adverts proclaiming its wonders on the TV every time we turned it on. Claire had been to one before in Madrid over the summer, and assured us that we would find everything we needed there, including beach towels, which had thus far remained elusive. We caught bus number 5 from Plaza de España which cost €1 each, we resolved to try and find a cheaper way of catching the bus, perhaps there is a student card available? Or even just a bus pass for reduced rate travel?

We arrived at El Corte Inglés very quickly, I was pleased to find that there was a Santander bank opposite, I had been in need of one as the one nearest to me only had one cash point, which was broken. I can withdraw money for free from Santander cash points using my Santander card, and I was certainly running low on money!

We entered El Corte Inglés which was beautifully air conditioned and headed straight for the supermarket inside, we bought some aftersun which was needed after the day at the beach, then headed in search of beach towels. After debating which designs to buy, the lovely children’s ones with Ben 10 and Spongebob on, or the more grown up towels, the decision was made in the end by the simple fact that the grown up ones were cheaper. Once we had made that decision we moved on to stationary for uni, the paper was really odd as it proved very hard to find normal lined paper like at home, everything was made up of tiny squares. It was so bizarre! We had a look at some books, as we all wanted to read a book in Spanish whilst we were here, but books all seemed to be quite expensive, which was a bit annoying, we resolved to share the books amongst ourselves so we didn’t all have to buy lots of books.

We decided to check out the other departments first to see if there were any books elsewhere. The first floor was all clothes, which I will certainly be looking at in more depth sometime very soon, but all of the winter clothes were in stock, I most certainly do not need a coat in this heat! Perhaps it will get cold at some point, but whether its proper cold like at home or not I have yet to find out.

We headed up another floor and found a large book shop, we had a mooch around and decided to stick with titles that we were familiar with, Harry Potter and The Hunger Games were what we were after. The prices for books seemed just as high here so we decided that we would have to bite the bullet and just pay for it. I did feel kind of bad, a university student here to study Spanish and the only Spanish novel I felt confident enough to try reading could be found in the ‘9-12 años’ section. I bought los Juegos del Hambre and the first Harry Potter book, the second one was unavailable so Kath bought the third and Claire bought the fourth. So perhaps by the end of the year I may have read the Harry Potter series in multiple languages!

After book shopping we went to the food court for some lunch, we each tried a different place, I opted for Burger King nice and familiar, apart from that it sold beer. Kath opted for Taco Bell, and Alice and Claire tried out a pizza place. After taking full advantage of the refillable drinks packages we decided to head back downstairs and check out the post office and have a quick look for some flip-flops, unfortunately no flip-flops were found and we decided that instead of trying to buy some stamps we may be better off just taking our postcards to the post office and sending them that way, so that we didn’t accidentally put too few stamps on or something. After that we decided we should probably head back to the old town as there was nothing much else we wanted from El Corte Inglés. All in all a very successful trip, I know I will definitely be returning there sometime very soon!

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