Our Experiences from Corte Ingles...

The first time we went into Corte Ingles was a disaster, but we thought we would try again.  When we arrived in Barcelona the first day, we set out to Corte Ingles to purchase some new bedding and towels.  No one spoke a word of English, and I still needed to brush up on my Spanish...needless to say, I was speaking broken Spanish to the employees.  After about an hour there (just to buy a blanket and towels) we finally got out of there.

This time we thought we would go in and buy some school supplies.  One thing about Corte Ingles that differs from American stores is that you have to purchase your items based on what section you are in.  If you are buying dishwasher soap and detergent, you have to pay for it in one section, and then when you want to buy school supplies you have to purchase them in another section.  I mean g-d forbid something would be easy around here, especially when all of these things were on the same floor.  Well, not knowing that we needed to do this, we walked around with our shopping carts grabbing things from all different sections, we finally walked into the school supplies section.  Let me first say, why are all of the notebooks graph paper and not lined paper?  We got passed this issue and started putting our supplies into our shopping cart, then this grumpy old man started yelling at us in Spanish, and then this cute French guy helped us.  He tried explaining to the man that we did not know, however, this guy did not care and started signaling handcuffs towards us and told us that we would be arrested!  We did not know what to do, so we purchased our notebooks and then we got yelled at again! We ran out of the school supply section hoping not to get caught and ran towards the supermarket.  The man followed us and started yelling at us again...he watched us pay for everything and I overheard him saying to another employee 'watch them to make sure they do not steal'.

I just really hope that from now on our experiences at Corte Ingles will be much more enjoyable, because so far we have not been impressed.

London trip is booked for this weekend...stay tuned for our trip to London.  I will tell you how we traveled there, how to pack, and what we saw, ate, and more!