After dinner, we went to the bar in the hostel and got a couple cheap beers. Most people went out to Madrid’s famous club, Kapitol, but Annie, Jess, and I stayed back to avoid spending money. We ended up avoiding spending a lot of money because we met two Italian friends who took us out to a jazz bar and bought us a bottle of champagne, haha, it was pretty fun. After we got back from the bar we headed right to bed (it was 4am, or so).
The next morning we had to be up for breakfast before 10, and it was definitely painful for the whole group. We were all exhausted from the night before. We left our luggage in the hostel’s luggage room, and checked out by 11am. We first headed to El Rastro, the flea market, which was HUGE. There were SO many people there. We wandered around for a while, then got Doner Kebap (a favorite here in Europe). We also stopped in a Dunkin’ Donuts, where Annie and I got AMAZING dolce de leche donuts (mmm!).
After we had some energy from the food, we went to El Museo de Reina Sofia, a modern art museum. We wandered around and got to see Picasso’s Guernica (so amazingggg) before they started to close and kicked everyone out. I was really disappointed we didn’t get to the Dali rooms before they closed L. We made our way to a park where we proceeded to play homeless and take a siesta on a grassy knoll.
Refreshed, we started to make our way across the entire city to the Palacio Real (the royal palace…their “white house”) to meet up with a lot of the group. Along the way, we stopped at the Prado (found out it was free after 5pm), the plaza mayor, and a couple other places. At the palace, we just relaxed on the stairs for a while, then everyone decided they wanted to go back to the Prado (all the way back across the city…), so we definitely got some exercise walking. The Prado was worth it though (and free!). I got to see El Bosco’s Garden of Earthly Delights, and Velasquez’s Las Meninas, which were both a pretty big deal to me. They were literally huge!
After the Prado, Annie, Jess, and I headed off (halfway) back across the city to El Tigre, a tapas bar that was supposed to be good. It was packed!! We weaved our way through the crowd to the very back corner where we found a little bit of space along the wall. We each went up one at a time for a drink. When you buy a drink; they give you tapas for free! I ordered a Mojito (6euros for 1L mojito…cheap!) and the bartender handed me a huge plate of tapas. There were prosciutto on bread slices, these cheesy, fried mashed potato-y, delicious tapas, and a lot more. It was definitely well worth the 6euro for the drink, because the plate of tapas I got filled me up (and made up for our interesting dinner the night before)!
We headed back to the hostel, where everyone was sitting in the bar trying to kill time until we had to go to the airport. We went out and got some gelato (hazelnut and nutella flavored), and then found an irish pub that was playing NFL games to hang out in for a while.
At about midnight, we caught the last metros to the airport, and curled up on the floor with the other hundreds of people waiting for Ryanair flights (miserable). I managed to get a good 4 hours in before we boarded the plane and headed back to Antwerp.
I’ve decided that I LOVE Spain. I definitely want to spend a lot more time in the country travelling around and seeing all the other coastal towns. Madrid was great (I feel like I know it well after walking so much), even though I enjoyed Barcelona better. I loved that I could use the little bit of Spanish that I remember and people could understand me, and I could understand them! It’s definitely inspired me to get back into Spanish at some point. A great fall break!
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