I
arrived in Madrid with Master Chief excited beyond the description of words. As
we gracefully glided off the plane in this state of perpetual happiness we came
to realize that there was going to be more to this trip than we had
expected.
Plot
twist #1 :
I
discovered I do not speak any Spanish. Who knew. Getting off the plane and
finding our luggage was a rather simple task, but trying to figure out how to
get to the center of the city near the apparent location of our hostel was a
completely different story. The simplest solution we could think of was to jump
in a cab, tell him the name of the place we were staying, and easy as tapas we
are home free. Not so simple. The only thing the driver understood from us was
the word "sol." This translates to "sun," for the scholars
reading at home, and means the very center of the city of Madrid. This was an
eerily similar situation to landing in Athens, Greece, with John Kinzer two
summers ago when the only word our cabbie knew of English was,
"Acropolis," for which the Greek word is, "Acropolis," and
we reluctantly accepted him taking us there, where we found another cab to take
us to our destination, not exactly efficient.
After
a long 10 or so hours of total travel MC and I were very hungry. We stumbled
into a restaurant which has some backwards system for ordering these tiny
sandwich things, and after about 20 minutes of staring at the menu and
expecting it to change language, 2 girls approximately 11 years old laughing at
us, and one cashier becoming increasingly frustrated with our mere presence in
the restaurant, we still had zero food. We eventually decoded something to be
this "haphazardly try a couple things" deal, so we did that, and they were ok.
Plot
twist #2 :
Madrid
is actually very clean. Contrary to what I ignorantly expected Madrid to look
like, the city was spotless. The Spanish take the cleanliness of their city, or
at least the downtown touristy areas, which we only left to see other touristy
areas like the Bernebeu, with extreme intensity. Now this may seem like a
really odd thing to talk about after seeing a city full of palaces hundreds of
years old, beautiful plazas, parks and open areas for all kinds of people to
congregate, as well a spotless metro system that could put you within 20 steps
of practically any building in the city. However, after a walk across town at
6am, a member of our traveling party found out just how serious they take this
issue. After what seemed like a perfectly safe and acceptable dive on top of a
trash can we were educated. A few bags fell out of the can and into the street
as the can fell over with a thunderous bang seemingly resonating for an hour.
Not 3 seconds later, there was what looked like the equivalent of a SWAT team
member in full gear thrusting this party member into a wall while yelling and
screaming god only knows what at him. After a few firm jabs to the chest, the
Spanish Conquistador of the plaza del Sol saw it in the kindness of his heart
to let our friend come with us and continue his travels around Europe.
Overall,
Madrid was amazing. The sites, the food, the people, everything. Definitely a
place that turned out to be better than expected. Rome update coming soon
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