As we had been so successful with the knives in Argentina, we decided to see what we could find in Spain. We had heard that Toledo has great knives.
As we love history as well, we decided to take a day trip to Toledo (on our own) and tour the old part of the city (which is a historic castle) and look to see if we can find any knives.
Finding the Knives
We found a shop owner in the castle, but they didn’t have enough knives. We then discovered he had another shop that had some of the same knives. He promptly had someone go to get them. Once we had all the knives, we negotiated a bit on the price to get a volume discount of around 15%. In Spain (most of Europe). Americans don’t have to pay the value added tax (VAT), but some business owners still charge it at the point of sale (which this owner did), forcing the tourist to apply for a refund on the tax.
Wildly excited that we got the knives early during our trip, we settled in to our normal schedule, going to great restaurants, and other tours.
A couple days later, we went to the train station as we were headed to Barcelona. They had a security station set up. Never having had security for a local train before, we were a little surprised. The luggage was required to pass through the x-ray machine. Of course the security guard pulled us aside to discuss the knives. After some discussion with broken Spanish and hand gestures, the guard let us proceed. However, we realized that we would unlikely be as fortunate on our return trip from Barcelona back to Madrid the following week.
Bringing the Knives Back
Once we got to Barcelona, we located a post office. It was within walking distance of our hotel. We packaged the knives in a small box and set off to mail our package. We filled in the paperwork and were ready to pay. This is when the topic of the contents of the package was question by the postal workers. This is where it got interesting as they understood as much the English language as we did Spanish, so it was somewhat difficult in our communications.
We explained that the package contained souvenirs, which then became gifts for our children. When queried as to the actual contents, we hesitantly stated they were knives.
This is when his eyes got REALLY big and he exclaimed –
“Gifts for the Children? You got knives for your children?”
We quickly explained that all our 5 children were grown, had significant others, and we had extras accounting for the almost 30 knives. This ultimately eased his mind. Then we all had an awkward laugh about it.
The knives came right on schedule (15 days exactly), but somewhere along the way (assumedly US customs), there was a large U shaped cut that was taped back up, indicating that the package was completely opened and inspected, but nothing was missing.
In the future, we’ll be taking pictures of things like the box to show how things work.
In the meantime, as alluded to earlier, this is the second of 3 knife stories. You can find the predecessor story “Finding Souvenirs in Argentina – Knives Chapter 1” in the Spain section. The third story, “Finding the Knife Shop – Knives Chapter 3” is in the Italy section.