Plaza Mayor
I spent my first day wondering around Madrid somewhat aimlessly. It was a little stressful knowing that I only had 2 days to explore Madrid and I was really worried that I wouldn’t have enough time to see everything I wanted to. And of course it wasn’t enough time to see everything!
It was rather cloudy and grey the on day #1 and I spent most of the day finding my bearings. I started off by taking a bus to town. The hotel concierge said, “… yes it’s very easy, you just take bus 27…” I walked to what I thought was the right bus stop but there was no 27. So I decided to take the 5 to Plaza de Cibeles. Before the bus had reached its destination, the driver announced that this was the end of the route and that Plaza de Cibeles was a 5 minute walk down the road. It turned out that there was some sort of protest going on, what for I never found out.
So I walked parallel to the protesters and finally made my way to my next destination of Sol which the hotel reception had indicated on my map, was the town centre. I walked around Sol, went into shops, but the greying sky and tiredness from waking up so early that morning didn’t do much to pique much interest in exploring Sol. I decided to walk along to Plaza Mayor. All this without an itinerary/route in mind, just my hotel-given tourist map neatly folded to the area that I was currently in.
Plaza Mayor was cool. It was one of the venues that Bea had mentioned that she really liked when she lived in Madrid. It’s a big square with shops and restaurants along the four walls. And in the middle of the square was a myriad of street performers and people selling little art & craft things like paintings, pictures and necklaces that spell out your name. I took a lot of pictures with my G1+Nokton combo because it’s a great portrait camera with amazing depth of field capabilities.
Madrid is really colourful, vibrant. The mix of new and shiny and grungy and decrepit exist hand in hand.
People are really chilled and relaxed. I met up with Milli a couple of times over the four days that I was there and she’s really chilled out since having moved to Madrid. People eat at hours totally different to our as well - breakfast is before work starts so at about 8 or so. Then at 11 there’s a snack and lunch is at about 2 or 3. There’s another snack at about 6 where people eat little sandwiches and dinner is typically at 10! Unless you’re a family with kids the evening starts doesn’t end till the next morning!
I made my way back to Sol (and bought a little snack along the way) and took the Metro back to Santiago Bernabeu. The Metro opened into a little shopping mall where I bought the yummiest almond dark chocolate and whilst I could see the green neon signs of my hotel beckoning I walked around in circles for a good 20 minutes or so stressing that I’d get mugged before making it back but then I reached ground level walked into a crowd, felt better and actually made it back!
It was early, not even 8, when I got back to the hotel. I didn’t want to go out for dinner but I decided to anyway since I was in Madrid. I walked around and went into a tiny tapas & tostas bar that only had one patron in it and had some dinner. And on the way back, decided to have a little biscuit. Then I spent the rest of the night watching episodes of Mad Men. :)
