Greatest City Ever

Pain on arriving in Madrid. Some sort of ugly bus station with concrete and some very sore legs from the cramped bus. And my bag had never felt heavier.

But without too many problems we found the Opera Metro stop and located the hostel, Los Amigos. (Well, Ange and Rach did while the rest of us sat around looking grumpy.) They also found us somewhere for a nice breakfast, one of those egg+ham+cheese sandwiches where the egg pokes out through the top of the bread. Though this one had lettuce and white asparagus in it, for some reason.

Good hostel, too, so it all became all right after a nice siesta.

Madrid was nasty hot as well, but so much drier than the coast that it seemed more bearable. It seems a really nice city, another good metro and very pleasing old buildings, at least around the Palace where we were. (The outskirts are pretty arid and featureless but that's probably true of everywhere.)

The shape of the city is plazas with small, winding streets linking them. Easy to get lost even with a map, and without - well, even a Spanish Madrid resident guiding us around at one point seemed to get a bit lost. But that's all part of the charm. The main point of Madrid is the nightlife; sure, there are some sights but not like some other cities. The Prado especially, which I saw only the outside of, cause it's free on Sundays and the line was immense and worse, in the sun.

Actually, a fun sight was the Bernabeu, the stadium housing Real Madrid, the greatest football team in the world. This is probably agreed but boy do they tell you, throughout the tour and especially in the museum. You get to go to the top of the ground, then sit on the bench and have a look at the visitors' dressing room, and have a seat in the corporate box. Just another stadium, really, at this point, cause until you fill it up it can't really impress. But the museum, full of the hundreds of trophies Real have won over the years, is where the history of the club hits home. They've been around a long time and won everything, had the greatest player ever, Alfredo di Stefano, and the greatest president ever (!), Santiago Bernabeu. Though Pele might put up a case against Di Stefano, it's probably pretty close to the mark. So that just fired my resolve to get to at least one game somewhere, maybe France...

What else of Madrid? Some of us did a bit of shopping, some of us saw the Prado, we did a walking tour of some of Madrid's important and seriously old buildings. This was good, interesting history about Madrid becoming the capital and the enormously rich families who shaped the city. And the convent where, once you enter, there's no contact with the outside world, though you do make envelopes for banks to pay the bills. Don't ask me. The only sour note was his pimping of the "oldest restaurant in the world" which, while it may have been true, looked a little like a tourist trap. But hey, I guess we're tourists even if we don't want to be.

And we met some nice Spanish people, including an especially nice boy... though that's really not my story to tell. And we were introduced to some summery drink where you mix vino tinto (red wine) with a light lemonade. Very good for post 40 degree temperatures. Which we got in Toledo.