Madrid
Hola and greetings from Spain! (or late greetings I should say). I arrived in Spain May 23rd and once my flight landed, I got to take the metro a good 45 minutes to my hostel in the city center. The metro was incredibly similar to the one in Lisbon (or any metro for that matter) but the big difference was the price. Lisbon had an incredibly cheap metro, I put fifteen euros on the card originally and I think I only spent about eight euros worth even though I used the metro often. Madrid was not that cheap.
The metro charges a surcharge of three euros if you use the airport stations. If you don’t know which tickets or passes to buy, you end spending much more than you need to. For instance, there’s a tourist pass they offer, and it has different prices depending on how many days you’re there. I was going to be there for three days but for three days it was going to be about thirty euros. Thirty euros??!! I quickly exited the menu and found the option for a reloadable card that I can add money to. The card works at all metro stations so if you take a train line that is not the metro you would have to buy a different ticket (as I discovered later).
By the time I made it the hostel I was sweating and tired but of course not able to check in yet. I met my friend Chase outside the hostel. He had flown in from the US that morning and had been hanging around since 6am. I didn’t get to the hostel until around 1pm. Chase was going to travel with me for almost the whole trip minus a stop or two.
To be honest, the Madrid hostel has so far been the worst hostel of the trip (out of Lisbon and Dublin. You’ll get the scoop on Dublin in a later entry). That’s not to say the hostel was terrible but compared to the place I stayed at in Lisbon, this hostel is much lower rated. The first thing is that the hostel did not have free bag storage, so Chase and I both had to pay to store our bags until we could check in at 3pm. I also discovered that there was only one common area that doubled as both the “kitchen” and bar. The common area was underground and, frankly, smelled like dirty feet.
The “kitchen” consisted of two microwaves and two electric kettles. There was what seemed to be a toaster oven as well. There wasn’t even a sink. I was hoping for at least maybe a hot plate to try and cook but no dice, microwave was the only real “cooking” equipment. There was also no pantry to store food, only a fridge. When I asked the lady at reception where I could store food, she said the fridge. I asked about items I didn’t want cold, like chips and bread. She looked at me weirdly then said I would have to keep it in my locker in my room since there wasn’t anywhere designated in the common room. This seemed odd to me since they had a strict no food in the rooms policy but who was I to judge?
Since I hadn’t eaten breakfast my first goal was food. Chase and I walked around until I settled on a café that I liked. After that we continued on and ended up in Retiro Park, a massive park set behind the Prado Museum. We chilled for that afternoon and then when we could finally check into the hostel we went back and settled into our room. For this hostel we happened to be put in the same room. Chase laid down for a quick nap then went in search of buying a lock for his locker while I sat down to write about Lisbon.
Our room was a six-bed dorm and there was only one other person staying in the room when we entered, a guy in his late twenties from England. With him was girl who was not staying at the hostel (this is important) and had come up to the room with him for a little while to book some stuff. A little while later the other people in our room checked in, a mother and father with their older daughter (think like thirties). They put their stuff down then immediately left and about ten minutes later a person from reception walked into the room. She got really intense asking who was staying in the room since there was only supposed to be six people in the dorm. When she found out the girl was not staying in that particular room, she demanded the girl leave (her name was Nadia I believe). It got worse when the worker found out Nadia wasn’t even staying at the hostel. She said Nadia and the guy needed to leave immediately or she would call the police and kick the guy out of his stay at the hostel.
Apparently, the family had complained that there were more people in the room than beds. By this point, Chase had made his quick exit and I was left sitting on the bed watching the drama unfold. The guy was refusing to leave right away because he was trying to book something on his computer and the worker was getting more and more aggressive and rude. What annoyed me about the whole situation was why the family went straight to reception instead of asking if everyone in the room was actually staying there. I also was annoyed that the guy wasn’t leaving like he was asked. The worker almost called the police until thankfully they left. That whole situation definitely soured my mood towards the hostel.
That night we ate dinner at a great little market that was quite literally a hole in the wall. It was an Asian street food market with multiple different vendors. The food was amazing and well-priced. After dinner, I slipped down to the common room to finish uploading my blog posts and figured I’d grab a drink at the bar. Only the bar wasn’t open, and the common room was pretty much dead. Turns out, the bar was only open Thursday-Sunday (though I would later discover that the bar didn’t have much hype. They probably had a combined total of four different types of liquor). That night upon returning to the room, I found the family was still there and so was the guy who had Nadia in the room “illegally.”
The next morning, we booked tickets to go to the Prado museum around 2pm. We took the metro over to the palace first. The palace was cool but honestly a little underwhelming architecturally speaking. Tickets for the palace had sold out the night before so we didn’t go inside but we did see the inside of the Almudena Cathedral which was right next to the palace. The cathedral was beautiful, just like most European churches. The white stone made the place feel bright and warm. The fresco on the ceiling was gorgeous and colorful. Instead of a traditional fresco of people or a biblical scene, the fresco was ornately patterned.
We continued walking around the city, stopping in a park to relax for a little while. Before the museum, we made our way over to the town hall which looked far more impressive than the palace did. We were fooled into believing that we could go up to the lookout for free because a sign out front said free public access and listed the balcony lookout. Once up top, however, you couldn’t through without a ticket. Lame. We made our way back down and stopped at a free exhibit on one of the floors. It was called “Excuse me, I’m Speaking,” and was a collection of graphic novel/comic strips by female artist from all over the world. The topics ranged from all different themes but the consistent one was the struggle of be a woman in a man’s world. Some of the comics were in Spanish and others in English, but it was really cool to walk around see the different art styles that were showcased.
From the town hall we made our way over the Prado Museum. The Prado is massive. With three floors and an incredibly confusing layout, I walked around for two hours (Chase and I split off and decided to meet back at the hostel later). There were some incredible works of art and sadly I have no pictures because they weren’t allowed in the museum. I got lost multiple times, but it was still enjoyable. Afterwards, I wandered around until I found a nice café to have a glass of wine. While there, I witnessed an interaction that irked me. The waitress at the café only spoke Spanish. I had no problem with this was able to order my wine and, later, a sangria with no issues. An American couple who sat down after me a table away were not happy with this, however. They kept speaking to the waitress in English, the American lady getting annoyed that the waitress would not speak English. She was acting very intitled that someone would speak the native language of the country they are in. People should not expect everyone in Europe to cater to the needs of Americans and always speak English because they are too lazy to be respect and attempt to learn some of the language of the country they are visiting.
Chase and I met up for dinner that night at little Italian place that served amazing pizza. We made plans that night to go to the city of Segovia the next day. We booked our train tickets and made plans of what we would see. That next morning, we had no problem getting to the train station, we took the metro to Madrid Charmartin and walked out of the metro system and into the train station. Then came the problem. Our train was not on the board of departures. We found a different board that had Segovia listed but there was not time or train platform. It kept getting closer and closer to the time our train would leave and still no platform.
I asked a worker at the Renfe desk (the train company we were using) and he said to just keep watching the board. When I questioned about the time, since the train would leave in ten minutes, he said just keep watching the board. Very helpful. I decided to ask another employee who only spoke Spanish and from him were able to figure out that our train was listed as Ceredilla-Segovia because we would have to change trains in Ceredilla. This would have been helpful to know earlier since our ticket only said Segovia and when we booked it there was no mention of changing trains. By the time we found the right platform on the board, we had three minutes to get to the train.
Chase and I hurried down to the platform and the train pulled in right as we got there. It took a good hour and a half to get to Segovia because we took a suburban rail line that stopped at about ten-fifteen stations on the way. We easily changed trains in Ceredilla and made it to Segovia. We walked into the city center where the main attraction, the Roman aqueduct, stood. We got lunch then walked to the aqueduct to admire the structure. It was pretty impressive and in great condition. Supposedly it is one of the few left fully intact after WWII since Spain didn’t get bombed to the extreme like other countries. It was unfortunate that there wasn’t much to do in terms of the aqueduct besides look at it. You can’t go on top and there’s really only one or two viewpoints.
We kept walking and went to see the cathedral. It was four euros to enter but we ended up paying because there wasn’t much else to do in the city. The cathedral was pretty but not really spectacular compared to others I had seen. We then walked to the castle that was in town but again, it didn’t seem like anything super special. The views around the city were pretty, Spanish countryside at it’s finest. By this point, Chase and I had exhausted all there was to do in Segovia. Multiple people had recommended the city to us, and it was super cute but we booked our train tickets with too much time between.
Our first idea was to take an earlier train and hope they didn’t check our ticket. We were leaving out of a different station than the one we arrived on. The one we arrived on had no one checking tickets at the station and no one had checked our ticket when we boarded the train in Madrid, there wasn’t even an automated kiosk you had to scan through. Our hope was that the train station we were leaving out of was similar. There was a bus that ran from the aqueduct to the station, so we wasted away a good hour and a half at a McDonald’s (for the free wifi) and another café. We got to the station around 7pm hoping to take the 7:30pm train back which was a good hour before our original time. Our hopes were crushed when we saw that you indeed did have to scan your ticket before proceeding to the platforms. They had security and everything. This was disappointing because it meant we had another hour and a half to waste.
This was probably because our train going back into the city was a high-speed train that would get to Madrid in thirty minutes. We had seat assignments and everything. The train going to Segovia was a suburban rail line that was more like a metro that went farther than the city limits. We didn’t get back into the city and to our hostel until around 9:30pm since the metro ride back from Charmartin station took forever. I decided to call it an early night and finished packing up my stuff. Our plan was to leave by 6:30am, (7am at the latest) to take the forty-five-minute metro ride to the airport for our flight to Dublin the next day.
I somehow turned my alarm off when it went off at 6 and went back to bed until Chase shook me awake at 6:30. I quickly finished packing, we checked out, and then walked outside to find it was raining. Great. Luckily it wasn’t too far of a walk to the metro station. Our maps were telling us to take one of the suburban lines because it would be twenty minutes quicker than the metro. This is how we found out our metro card did not grant us access to these rail lines as well. We quickly bought a different ticket (it was only two euros and worth cutting off twenty minutes of travel time) and made it to the airport. This is where we discovered we needed to pay yet again to get out of the station because the airport has a three-euro fee. Incredibly stupid.
I was annoyed by the time we found our check in counter. We weren’t able to check in online, so we had to wait in the Iberia airlines queue for a good thirty minutes because there was only two people working. We did all this only to be told at the counter that we couldn’t check in with Iberia because the flight wasn’t operated by them. The lady told me this like I was the dumbest person in the world. Only be booked through Iberia airlines. When I told her this, she said it didn’t matter, the flight was being operated by Aer Lingus so we had to check in with them. Great, another queue probably. The lady also didn’t know where the counter was, so we had to check the board and finally found it. At the other end of the terminal.
This really pissed me off but luckily, the staff at the Aer Lingus counter were much nicer and got us checked in quickly. We were even able to check our bigger backpacks for free. After that it was just security and then we were home free. Only security took forever because we somehow chose the slowest line full of older people who each had four bags and didn’t know how to place things on the belt. I also then had to take out all my electronics (in Lisbon I didn’t have to and same when we left Dublin). So there went all my nice packing. By the time we made it through security, I was super annoyed, and Chase left me so I could be alone and recover.
I loved Madrid so much and wish I had longer in the city. What I liked so much about Madrid is how green it was. There were so many parks and trees lined almost every street. The city had a very livable feel, it was clear that this was a city where people lived and not just visited. Lisbon felt a little more like a visited city but in Madrid, I fell so in tune with the movement on the streets and daily displays of life around me. Madrid is definitely a top city for me and maybe one day it could be a future home.
