To Madrid

February 20:

Today was an early morning. My alarm was set for 8:30 this morning because my stuff was a mess and I had a lot of packing to do before I was ready to leave. I slowly packed and sorted for an hour before grabbing breakfast at my usual 9:30. Breakfast was a glass of orange juice and 4 slices of white bread. After breakfast I returned to our room and finished packing all but my day bag. During this packing the lid of my locker happened to swing down to bonk me on the head giving me quite the bump. Once we were both packed we headed to the train station. Fortunately there was a section for today’s tickets that we found. There was no line when we got there so we got served quickly though in the few minutes it took us to get our tickets quite the line had developed behind us. It was then 11 and we were able to get tickets for 12pm train. We had an hour to kill so we went to grab sandwiches for the train and read for a while. The train gave us no issues, though after about half an hour of reading I was soundly asleep. Two hours later I awoke. I tried to read some more but was only partially successful because I was distracted by the gorgeous Spanish countryside flying past me. Rolling hills and red soil interspersed with farms and forests made for a beautiful sight. I attempted to take some pictures but it was flying by and I doubt I did it justice.

Our train pulled into the station and we used the station wireless to figure out where our hostel was and how we get there. Turns out it was only three stops down the metro line and then a two minute walk. Super convenient. The location of the place seems really good but despite the high ceilings of our room the bunk beds only rise to my sternum giving my bottom bunk a good 3 feet of clearance. Only gigantic sums of luck will keep me from adding more welts to my forehead to match the one I gained earlier today.

After a time getting acclimatized to the hostel and doing blog posts I decided to check out the rest of the hostel. This one actually has a public kitchen and refrigerators which is nice and definitely gives us different options for food. We were getting hungry and decided to go out to pretty famous place called El Tigre, that pat had heard about online. At this establishment you get free tapas with purchase of a drink. Being the thirsty young’un we are we opted for a large beer and were greeted with liter glasses of beer and plates of tapas. Done our initial 2 plates and beer we were a bit hungry still and thought about going out to get more food when the waiter brought us more tapas! We started into it but could use something to wash it down so we got small beers, approximately bottle sized. Large beers were six Euro and smalls were 2.50 Euros. We ate our fill and had about 4 bottles of beer a piece in equivalency for 8.50 each. Not to shabby. Heading back to our hostel it was still pretty early and we considered whether we would like some drinks for the evening. We picked up some discount brand wine.  Liter tetra packs were 98 cents and we bought some cups too and then headed back to the hostel to drink and watched tv for a bit. After a while we split off to do our own individual things before heading to sleep.