The Spanish clocks tick a little differently to ours. A typical day consists of starting work at 9am, shutting up shop for lunch and siesta from 2pm to 4 or 5pm, businesses opening again from 5pm to 8pm, and having tea at 10pm or even later. Even walking around at midnight, the tables on the footpath outside restaurants were full of groups of families and friends, and children were playing on the play equipment in the square.
Also, no one is in a hurry. People stroll slowly and leisurely down the street in a way that would make the average harried Londoner's blood boil. Drivers often don't even honk their horns when they have to wait because someone has temporarily blocked the street by pulling up in the middle of it! The only people we saw in a hurry during our entire time in Madrid was a group of about a dozen African salesmen (a common fixture at many tourist sites in Europe) who were bolting around a corner carrying their sacks of illegal merchandise (fake branded accessories, pirated DVDs etc), evidently having seen some police in the distance!
Madrid is a vibrant city with lots of amazing architecture and huge lush, green parks. Although some parts are fairly run down and rough, it's also quite cultured - there are lots of important art museums (Prado, Thyssen and Reina Sofia are the big ones) and many buskers. Sadly, we also saw a number of beggars and homeless people. The public transport system (underground trains like London's tube network, but called the Metro) is fantastic - frequent services and easy to navigate - very similar to London. It's also well set up for tourists - our three-day, unlimited travel tourist passes came in a little plastic pocket with a map of the city and tube network that we referred to endlessly.
We stayed right in the centre of the city, in an area with a lot of restaurants, shops, theatres and cheap hostals (yes, that's the correct spelling!). Our hostal was on the fifth floor of a building with a fairly unappealing entrance and stairwell, and that also housed a second hostal and presumably a few floors of residential apartments. It was the most basic accommodation we've stayed in yet, but having read many customer reviews on the website when investigating accommodation options, we weren't expecting any sort of luxury!
Ben and I arrived in Madrid on an EasyJet flight around lunchtime on Thursday (Matt and Kat arrived a day later), and after having lunch and wandering around for a few hours, we headed back to our hostal with the intention of having a belated siesta and going out again later for tea. The next thing we knew, it was 15 hours later and we were getting up on Friday morning... so that was a pretty good way to feel extremely refreshed and energetic right at the start of a holiday!!!
On Friday morning we happened across an enormous street parade preparing to start. There were hundreds of police and armed forces personnel wearing many different styles of uniform, most on foot and carrying guns, but also some on horseback and some with musical instruments. We had no idea what the parade was for, but we figured it was pretty significant due to the crowds waiting for it to start and the fact that we could see four snipers from where we were standing!!
After standing on the footpath for about an hour waiting for something to happen, all we'd seen were the uniformed parade members wandering up and down the road and milling around fairly aimlessly. By almost midday it was time to head back to our hostal to sort out our next booking with the extra room for Matt and Kat, and the parade had still not started!
An hour later we had sorted out the rooms and were wandering around the Plaza Mayor, one of the town squares. An Egyptian band was performing and there was a sign advertising performance times for various events in the square over the next couple of days. The sign said "Madrid 1808", so we figured that had something to do with the parade and general public-holiday-atmostphere. Since getting home we have established via the Internet that the celebrations were commemorating 200 years since the Spanish uprising against the French occupation.
While we were in the square, there was a flyover of 7 jets in a "V" formation with coloured smoke trailing behind them in the colours and layout of the Spanish flag (horizontal red at top and bottom, and yellow in between). Very awesome! The only reason I had time to take a photo before they were out of sight again was because I already had my camera on! :P
After leaving the square, we saw another flyover and then the end of the parade, which consisted mainly of the various groups of police and armed forces marching or riding down the street to the applause of the crowd. The precision of their marching was a huge contrast to their earlier milling about!
After Matt and Kat arrived, the next couple of days passed in a lovely blur of relaxing in parks, shopping, hunting for just the right tapas restaurants, eating delicious gelati or icecream cones, and a great deal of just wandering the streets and enjoying the atmosphere and sights. Some of the "living statue" buskers we saw were the best we've ever come across. There were also plenty of piano accordian and two-stringed Chinese violin (erhu?) players, and even a 9-piece Spanish band with sombreros and all!
We saw the Royal Palace from the outside, but couldn't do a tour as we'd hoped, because we happened to be there on one of the few days it is closed each year! We enjoyed strolling through Retiro Park and relaxing on the grass across the lake from the Crystal Palace. There were black swans, ducks, large fish and turtles in the lake. We'd also planned to look through the Reina Sofia art museum, but ended up seeing a couple of free temporary exhibitions (Otto Dix and Alfonse Mucha) at different galleries we came across, so gave the Reina Sofia a miss.
On Sunday we went to the meeting in Madrid and stayed for lunch afterwards. Thoroughly enjoyable! That afternoon we walked through a hilly park criss-crossed with mountain bike tracks, en route to the Teleferico cable car ride that would take us across the city to another park. From the top of the hill, there were great views of the city, including a distant rollercoaster and a Tower of Terror-type ride - we could hear the screaming even though we were miles away!
That night the four of us took the same flight home (EasyJet again) and then travelled from Gatwick back to our place via local bus. Yesterday (Monday) was a public holiday, which we hadn't realised when we booked the Madrid trip months ago or we would've extended it - but it worked out for the best anyway as it gave us time to recover and study!
Well, that will be all for this entry - I'll put most of the photos in a separate post as otherwise this one will be too long! Hope you enjoy them!
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