We got into Madrid around 8AM Thursday morning. Our first stop was to pick up two Metro tourist passes at the airport. For about 8 EUR / day per person, these give visitors unlimited access to the main zone of Madrid’s excellent subway system, including access to and from the airport. We planned on using the subway a LOT in Madrid, so this was a really good value. These little buggers would take us everywhere, from the hotel to the palace to the museums to the shopping areas to brunch to parks… you get the idea.
From the airport, we took the metro to our hotel next to Alonso Martinez circle. 10 imaginary points to the first person to figure out how we got there!
Feel free to refer to the above map throughout our Madrid posts! For those of you map aficionados (and I know there’s a few in the family, especially where rail is concerned), you can find the original PDF here: https://www.metromadrid.es/export/sites/metro/comun/documentos/planos/Planoesquematicoingles.pdf
It was still pretty early in the day, so we dropped of our bags with the front desk and walked down to Puerta del Sol, a sort of hub for most downtown attractions. It’s *crazy* busy, and very touristy. It made me very glad we *didn’t* book our hotel in the middle of the hubbub. But by the time we managed to evade all the pickpockets, pick up a few things for the girls, grab some groceries, and sample some authentic jamon (man, Spainiards know their ham), we could walk back up to our hotel to check in and take a *really* long nap.
A word about Spanish ham (or jamon): they’re nuts about it. It’s practically the national food, and comes in a huge number of varieties (much like wine, organized by what the pigs were, where they grew up, what they ate, etc.). The above is a stock photo, but believe me, the real thing looks just as good and is delicious. You can live on it–and not only does it *not* taste like sh*t, it goes really well with bread, cheese, olives, and of course a glass or two of vino.
That night we took the subway down to La Latina, a younger and less touristy district with some theaters and a lot of dinner selections. We were anxious to get our tapas on, but what might have been a stroll between three or more establishments turned into a pleasant sit-down dinner at La Ilusa. Mercy picked up a few tips for good local dancing clubs, while Brian sampled some Spanish beers and we both helped ourselves to copious amounts of amazingly-fresh and delicious seafood.
This is where we first learned that what we call calamari in the United States, even at its best, is in fact a poor imitation of the real fresh and steak-like stuff you get in your average basket of fried rings in the Mediterranean. We’d go on to order it every chance we’d get, and I’m not sure we’ll be able to eat it in the States again for a while.
We headed back up to Alonso Martinez after dinner and a stroll, but decided to wander around our hotel’s neighborhood for a nightcap and to see what we could find. Glad we did! We stumbled across La Chocita Succa, a low-key local bar that clears their tables off the floor after hours for a very young and casual dance scene, less than a block up from the Bilbao metro station.
Someone was *very* happy to find some dancing our first night in. We stayed up until 2 AM that morning (going to bed relatively early by Madrid standards), gettin’ jiggy with it.