I’ve learned that I am a bad weekend traveler. A short trip that should be a concentrated few days of jam-packed fun for others turns into a weekend of frustration and irritability for me.
This past weekend we were blessed with two days off of classes and wanted to take advantage of them. My roommates knocked the idea of spending the entire time in Madrid and decided we could see the city in two nights and one and two half-days. I wasn’t discouraged; I just set about jamming our schedule with seeing as many landmarks as we could possibly handle.
Friday morning we departed on a 9 am bus after a mere four hours of sleep. By the time we got to Madrid we were cramped and boiling from the bus that had more or less turned into a Dutch oven. We deliriously wandered around the bus station and soon hopped in a cab to take us to our hostel.
I was very excited about this. A friend has stayed there two weeks ago and wouldn’t stop raving. It seemed too good to be true—and it was. The hostel was overbooked. We still had our room but we were going to have to share it. We were all anticipating meeting some other cool exchange students. Then we opened our door and saw an old couple that was already asleep for the night. It was 5 pm.
Now, I have a very important ritual I like to take part in after hours of marathon travel. I call it decompressing, other may call it being a hermit. Either way, I need a half hour to take a zillion ibuprofen, wash every inch of my body, and sit or rest in silence. Clearly this wasn’t happening, so we set out to see what was first on our agenda. (Oh yeah, after putting our bags in some very secure safes that you could pull the doors off of.)
A short walk brought us to el Prado, a famous art gallery in the center of Madrid. It is free after 6 pm and open until 8 pm, so we had two hours to take in the artwork of Goya and Velazquez. I absolutely love classical art and was amazed by painting after painting.
We headed back to the hostel for a quick change (lights off, because our roomies were sleeping) and off to dinner. I had picked out a place called Malaspina with a little help from the Frugal Traveler in The New York Times. It was a tiny little place hidden away in a glorified alley packed with other bars and restaurants. We got a table fairly quickly and were excited to be in a place where everyone else was Spanish. The menu got us even more animated and we ended up getting scolded by our waitress who said we were ordering too much food. (Side note: Spanish people hardly eat anything. Literally next to nothing.) We pared down our order but when she brought bread to our table our eight-plus hours of food depravation made us inhale it. Again, our waitress scolded us. Soon enough she brought out our cañas (little beers) and heavenly plates of croquetas and papas bravas. She must have not hated us by the end of the experience because the bar gave us free shots.
We decided not to change again before heading out bar hopping to avoid dealing with our roommates. (This was all fine, but accounted for me going out in Patagonia fleece vest—sexy!) We spent time before in the common room meeting other students from Brazil, Germany, and Canada.
Our first night out was spent pub-crawling on a quest for the perfect mojito. We found some, and returned home fairly early. At least I thought so, until our senior citizen hall mate greeted me with a “Good morning” as I was retiring to bed. This hostel was getting annoying.
Our next day started with a tour of the royal palace, Palacio Real. Needless to say it was remarkable and so difficult to believe people actually live there under ceiling murals, massive chandeliers, and gilded everything. The rest of the day was a blur of trekking back and forth across the city. We made it to Reina Sofia, the modern art museum. Our adrenaline wore off there. We made it to see Picasso on the second floor, but were using each other as human crutches so we decided to hobble home. All we wanted were warm showers, but they were absolutely freezing so we put our cranky selves down for our naps. Our roommates were probably happy, as they were asleep already too.
Too exhausted to do anything else, our dinner that night was a very exotic kebab restaurant you could probably find at a mall. Nonetheless, delicious. That night (or again, morning, since it was 2 am) we headed to Kapital, a seven-story club where everyone says you have to go in Madrid. Not even the 18€ cover fee deterred us or the fact that I shattered my enamel bangle on the floor of the front entrance. We had fun exploring the themed floors and dancing.
The next morning all we wanted were hot showers. It didn’t happen. Instead there was frantic packing in our hostel room and a little scream-cry from me after ripping a hangnail on that stupid safe.
We headed to the Parque del Retiro. One of the roads into the park was flanked with little shacks called “Feria de los Libros.” Book fair. I was in heaven and instantly calmed. We spent nearly two hours scouring the entire street and dropping some money on books in Spanish.
Too soon we were back on the bus home, which in my opinion was another hot ride from hell that took over six hours. But we were home and had two whole days of “decompression.” Día de Andalucía was on Tuesday so we had two days of holiday to spend on the river and put serious dents in our Spanish books.