Being sleepy in Madrid - 4/30/11

Link to pics!

By 10:30 I was getting hungry, so I asked at reception if there was a bakery nearby. She looked at me blankly and said, “You mean like bread?” Well, I meant more like pastries….. She sent me to a nearby bar instead. (At 10:30? Apparently the bars never close.) I scanned the little room as I walked in, and saw a picture of a blue pitcher.  It made me laugh out loud - my mom has the exact same picture in her kitchen in Florida!! 

I decided on a vegetable sandwich, with some words I understood and some I didn’t. It turned out to have white asparagus, lettuce, tomato, and hard boiled eggs. Pretty good. I wasn’t sure about tipping, so pulled out the Frommers as I sat there. They recommended 5%, so I left some change as my sandwich was only about 3 Euros to begin with. I think I left 70 cents.

I returned to the hostel to catch the 11:30 tour, but the tour guide never came. I was falling asleep by 11:50, so I gave up on the tour guide and wandered out into the cold rainy day by myself (I later learned the tour guide did eventually arrive). I decided to make my way to the biblioteca, or library. During the short walk, I passed two Starbucks (I turned around at the second one to see if I could still see the first one), as well as a Taco Bell, a Burger King, a Tony Roma’s, and the “American Restaurant”, which had been there since 1971.

At the library I learned that there was a library museum as well. There was security at the door and I had to go through a scanner (like at the airport) and put my bags through the x-ray machine. I asked the guard if the museum was free (“Esta libre?”) and he said yes. I don’t know whether it was actually free, as I found out later that libre means available (as in, “is the bathroom free?”). I should have said “esta gratis?” But I thought it was free, and so I didn’t actually stop at the desk on the way in. Hopefully it really was.

Not that I saw much of the museum, as I had now been up for 24 straight hours. My eyes were glazing over. And then I turned a corner, and there was a room with a movie playing. Probably about libraries. I couldn’t tell you. I happily sat down in the last seat of the last row, wrapped my arms around my backpack, and proceeded to fall asleep. An hour later a security guard found me and woke me up. I was probably snoring. J

I wandered back through the spitting rain to the hostel, hoping they would let me in at 2. Finally, at 2:30, the girls cleaning the room radioed to the desk that there were finished, and I could go up. Even though I was really really really tired, I decided that I should take a shower instead of waiting until the morning and needing to fight the other 3 girls for it. As I was gathering my things, the girl who was sharing my bunk walked in. We introduced ourselves - her name is Rebecca, she’s from Austin, and she’s spending the next 4 months in Spain to learn Spanish. She also just got back from teaching in Thailand, so we have a lot in common. Rebecca is a couch surfer too, and she invited me to go out to dinner with her and some local CSers. I asked her to wake me at 8 (dinner is super-late in Spain), and went off to shower and then to sleep.

A little after 8 Rebecca asked if I wanted to come or to sleep more. I sort of wanted to sleep, but I didn’t want to be wide awake at 2 am either, so I got up and got dressed for dinner. I forgot my camera (darn lack of sleep!!) so don’t have pictures unfortunately.

Rebecca and I didn’t know what any of the people we were meeting looked like, only that the organizer was a Spanish lady and she was hosting a guy from New York. So every couple that loitered on the street got scrutinized by us. “Could he be from New York?” “He looks more German, but that doesn’t really mean anything.” “Well, does it look like they just met, or like they know each other well?” Finally though, we met up with the right group. There ended up being 9 of us, including Spanish, American, Portuguese, Chinese, and Irish, and Italian.

We went to a tapas place for dinner called La Bardemcilla. The organizer took the menu and ordered in Spanish, so each dish was a surprise for many of us. We had fried potatoes and cheese (which were amazing), meatballs in sauce, grilled veggies, salad with fried onions and tuna fish, skewered beef and peppers, sliced potatoes (sort of like au gratin), wrinkled potatoes (small boiled potatoes), and, the piece de resistance, something called “between the legs”. We three Americans asked them to hold off on telling us what it was until we’d eaten it. It tasted like burnt beef. Like, if you were grilling hamburgers and burnt them and scraped the burnt part into a dish and ate it. Not terrible. Just not something you’d usually actually eat. It turned out to be curdled cow’s blood mixed with flour. Mmmm!

When we left after 11 the place was packed and people were waiting to be seated! The nine of us met up with three more, and the 12 of us somehow found ourselves in an Irish bar listening to a band called Sheriff Warren sing songs like “Proud Mary” and “Sweet Home Alabama”. I had planned to duck out after dinner, but was enjoying singing to songs that I knew. Most of the people wanted to find a club though, so we eventually went back out into the rain to find somewhere more upbeat. After stopping at several clubs and not going in due to lines or cover charges, we finally ended up at a club. Their repertoire of songs included “Mambo Number 5” and Spice Girls tracks, but it was apparently a step up. J I didn’t actually have any interest in clubbing though, and as it was 1:30 in the morning and I had only slept 4ish hours in the past 36, I thought maybe I should go to bed. Rebecca’s eyes were looking droopy too, so we said good-bye and made our way back to our hostel. The streets were just as crowded as they had been during the day - the bars never close and the city never sleeps!

On the way, we passed by a sweet shop (with the slogan “Good sweets for big kids”.) There were a couple of people on ladders taping sheets to the front of the store. The sheets had been spray painted - it was some sort of protest. Rebecca doesn’t speak much Spanish, so I tried to translate it for us. I got that the protesters thought the owners were frauds. And then the other sheet…. “Son los finlandeses…” They’re, what, Finnish?? “No son suecos!” I asked one of the on-lookers if he knew what “suecia” meant in English. “Sweden.” Ooooh….the protesters were mad that the shop was passing its treats off as Swedish!! What a funny thing to protest.

Rebecca and I arrived back at our hostel at 2 in the morning and tip-toed around in the dark as our other two roommates were already fast asleep. I kept my computer up in my bunk with me so I could check the time in the morning, put on my sleep mask to block out the sun that would be coming up in four hours, and tried to go to sleep myself. Of course, since my body thought it was 8 at night, this wasn’t the easiest thing to do, but I finally managed.