Madrid 5/1/11

In the morning Rebecca’s alarm went off at 9:30, but no one in the room was ready to get out of bed. After the first time the snooze alarm went off, our two French roommates roused themselves. After the second snooze alarm Rebecca and I managed to get up as well. We hurried to pack and get ourselves ready so we could eat breakfast at 10:15 before it closed down at 10:30. We had toast with butter and jam, packaged pastries, corn flakes, OJ, water, milk, and the worst coffee ever. I even made it with half coffee, half milk, some sugar, and a spoonful of hot chocolate mix. And it was still bad.

Pictures!!

We hurried back to our room and I grabbed my bag and the sheets from the hostel and we exchanged contact info and said our good-byes. I had told Tricia I would meet her between 10:30 and 11, and it was already 10:30, but I thought I’d make it by 11. Honestly, it would probably have been a 25 minute walk, but my directions were for the metro and I would have gotten lost had I tried to walk it. Even though the metro station was very close, I had to walk for a long time to get to the correct line. I got on the metro and went to the first station, Nuevos Ministerios. Then I looked at the next direction and realized I needed to go right back where I’d come from - my directions were from the airport, not my first hostel. So, I needed to get to the other side of the tracks, which is the single most difficult thing to do in a metro station. It involved several flights of stairs, up and down, and more walking to accomplish it. Three stops later, I needed to make another transfer, and there was another long walk and more stairs to get to the other line. By the time I finally reached my stop, it was 11:20. Luckily, the hostel was right near the metro station. I rushed in, interrupted the people checking in and asked for Tricia Welly, and found her set up in the kitchen where the wireless signal actually worked. She was quite happy to see me, as I’m usually a fairly punctual person!

Since check in wasn’t until 3, we stored our bags behind the desk and went out to see the city. It was beautiful today, nothing like the rainy cold of yesterday. The sun was out and it was quite warm most of the time. We tied our jackets around our waists and wondered if just doing that was enough to mark us as tourists.

Sundays in Madrid there is a giant street market called El Rastro. We went up and down streets crowded with people shopping and selling everything from clothes to nail clippers to swords. We considered scarves for 1 Euro and tops for 10 Euros. I tried on a light jacket, but they didn’t have my size. Near the end of the market, I decided to buy a Pashmina wrap for 2 Euros. Tricia and I were there for about 15 minutes discussing the pros and cons of the various colors at length. My jacket is pink, and my nice top is black. We finally decided to ignore the jacket, as the only things that go with pink are black, white, and grey. It then came down to light blue or rust. I wrapped a black pashmina around me like a shirt, and then wrapped the blue and rust around me to see which looked best. We finally decided on the rust. The saleslady was quite patient throughout this process.

Since Tricia had only had a granola bar for breakfast, we decided we should find something to eat. We wandered into a little pastry shop and considered the chocolate covered scones and biscuits, but finally decided on “real” food. There were a kind of savory pie in the case, and we asked the lady what was inside. “Jamon y queso, y espinacas y mozzarella”. Okay, so one is ham and cheese, and the other is mozzarella and something else. Tricia took the ham and cheese and I took the mozzarella and mystery Spanish word, and we paid 1.8 Euros each ($2.70). Espinacas turned out to be spinach, and they were very good. J

It was almost 3, so we went back to the hostel to get our room. I was debating wearing my pack correctly or just heaving it onto one shoulder, so I asked the guy which floor our room was on, and he told us it was on the sixth. With no elevator. I sighed and buckled the pack to my waist. He says, “no no no, I’ll carry it!” I told him I wasn’t going to have him drag my 30 pound bag up 6 flights of stairs. I also told him to see if Tricia would let him carry hers, and he said he could carry them both. I told him we’d switch with him on the third floor, and we headed up, with him grumbling that he’d never had to beg to carry someone’s bags for them. It turns out the building only has two floors, so we realized he’d only told us we were on the sixth floor so we’d give him our bags!

Our room had 4 bunk beds, but we were the only ones there. We crossed our fingers that the other 6 beds would remain empty for the night. When I left the room, my key wouldn’t work to get back in. I finally knocked so Tricia would open the door, then tried her key too. Hers wouldn’t work either, so I finally went downstairs to ask at the desk for new keys. Back upstairs, the keys still didn’t work, so I went down again (at least I’ll have strong calf muscles). The guy finally realized that the batteries were dying on the card reader, so he followed me upstairs with a screwdriver and a package of batteries. As he took the entire gizmo apart, we left him to his work and went out to see the free evening at the Prado Museum of Art.

Unfortunately, it turns out that May 1 is a holiday in Madrid, so the Prado was closed. There were a lot of people relaxing on the grass in front of the building - probably having planned on going to the Prado as well and deciding to make the most of the sunshine since they were already there. We chose to walk to the Parque del Retiro. This is a huge and beautiful park, which was packed with people taking walks after their siesta. We saw jugglers, dancers, puppetiers, and magicians performing on the street. We stopped for a while at the Copiara dancers, which is basically a sort of choreographed fighting. One person swings a punch as the other ducks, or one person kicks as another jumps. We walked along a tree-lined path next to a rectangular-shaped lake filled with row-boats. All along the lake people were selling various wares, from DVD’s to watches to jewelry to underwear. I stopped and bought some twisty earrings for 1 Euro and Tricia bought a Magnum ice cream cone.

On the way back to our hostel we stopped at a chain called Museo de Jamon (Museum of Ham) and picked up sandwiches for 1 Euro each. Tricia got a chorizo sandwich, and I had a sort of unprocessed ham and cheese on a croissant. We took it to the Plaza Mayor near our hostel to people watch and eat. The Plaza Mayor is an extremely touristy public square, filled with restaurants where you sit outside, shops selling traditionally kitschy Spanish wares, and people trying to make a buck dressed as living statues, Mickey Mouse, or Spongebob, or Flamenco dancing or playing instruments.

By this time it was after 8, and we hurried back to the hostel to get ready to see Flamenco dancing at 9. It is a special event put on by the hostels, so everyone in the audience was a tourist. By the time we’d collected people from the various hostels, we were a group of about 15. We were led into the basement of a building, where there was a small stage and strange stools of varying heights and, for some reason, mannequin legs hanging from the ceiling. We all got a free drink with admission, so Tricia and I sipped on red wine and chatted with some Londoners (everyone’s a Londoner - between the holiday and the royal wedding, people there have a lot of time off work right now).

The Flamenco dancer was stuck in traffic, so around 9:45 her band and a singer took the stage to occupy us until she could arrive. They played guitars and one kept the beat on a box drum. The dancer finally made it at about 10:30, and showed us the traditional Flamenco dances (which, it turns out, are leftover from the gypsies who lived here in the 1400’s).

Afterwards we went back to the hostel - it was well after 11, and though some people were doing a bar crawl, we decided to head back and save the party for another night. We spent some time in the lobby eating and checking our computers before heading upstairs, and when we finally did go up there were two other girls in the room already asleep. So we tiptoed around in the dark with flashlights gathering our pajamas and toothbrushes and putting our computers away in the lockers. We laid down and listened to the people in the street below still partying in the city that doesn’t sleep.