viaje a madrid!
Today is day 2 in Madrid. I'm currently sitting at the "lounge" area in the hostel. My first day in Madrid has been rather eventful. I touched down at about 2 plus. The 4 hr flight from Istanbul to Madrid was noisy. While I was unlucky enough to be surrounded by a bunch of rowdy Turkish boys and a crying toddler, I was also lucky enough to have a cute spanish guy on my left, in deep slumber. Of course he eventually woke up (cos the noise certainly didn't allow anyone to sleep in peace) and we had a good chat. His name is David (pronounced as dah-vid) and he's 26. I realise the spanish guys here aren't very discreet when it comes to asking for a girl's age! Anyways, he was working in Iran for a while and is on his way back to meet his girlfriend in Madrid. So plane ride to Madrid was pretty good.
When I touched down and cleared the customs, I lugged my big haversack half my size and looked for the metro to get me to the city. I had only then realised the impact of my 9kg backpack and made a mental note to try and discard some things later on. The journey in the sardine-packed metro didn't take too long even though I had to make 3 changes to get to Anton Martin, my destination in the city.
I had a bit of a problem searching for the street of my hostel despite the map given but it didn't take long for me to resolve it. When I finally reached the hostel and checked into my dorm, I was greeted by a cheerful guy from France staying in the same room. He was about to leave to walk around and sightsee for a bit, so he asked me along and since i've got nothing planned for the afternoon, i joined him. We walked and talked so much it was good fun. We entered Palacio Real and even though I didn't know much about the history behind the rooms and ornaments, it was good fun exploring the palace and trying to figure out why the palace had so many redundant rooms (Henri's got a great sense of humour so I had quite an entertaining tour around the palace).
So that's Henri acting stupid in front of the cathedral across Palacio Real
Then we walked to the other side of the city to check out Parque de Retiro. took a break along the way and sat on the grass. we did nothing but talked and enjoy the sun. i loved the weather! when we finally got to the park, we were greeted by what I thought were hedious looking trees (henri called them testicle trees HAHA). after that, we decided were so tired from walking and headed back to the hostel. On our way back, a lady stopped us and asked us in broken spanish where the Atocha train station was. Well i'd just been there for 3 hours and Henri is BAD with the map. Nonetheless, he took out his map anyway and tried to look for it but of course nothing helped and the lady thanked us and left.
Me: I don't understand why she asked us of all people.
Henri: Yeah! You don't look spanish, I don't look spanish. Fuck off.
Well that last bit was spoken with a thick french accent so it sounded really funny. At that point, our poor feet was so tired we just slacked around in the hostel premises doing nothing. An hour later, we left the hostel and looked for an eatery with a big tele cos I wanted to watch the champions league semis. Well pool ended up losing to Chelsea so bleh. When we finally returned to the hostel, I immediately took a shower and thought of heading to bed because I was beat. After the shower, i met some other roomies (it was an 8 bed dorm) from Romania - Patrik, Vlad and Ramona. Coincidentally, the hostel has a pub crawl on Wednesday nights. I was too tired to go but Ramona and Henri were going. The former managed to drag me along and off we went. We paid about 20 euros to enter 3 different clubs and lots of free drinks in each pub. Met some other people from the hostel (it was a group of about 8-10) as well as some locals in the clubs. We partied till 6am that night.
So that pretty much summed up my first day in Madrid!