On arriving at Charmartin, Ted & I made our way to the metro, trying to find our way to our previously booked Pension. After a ten minute hike up a small side street, only witnessing a couple of muggings, we located the Pension Antonio only to discover that our host spoke little English (which was more than enough, considering that by now I had learned at least three Spanish swearwords). Our hostess though welcomed us to her home by delightfully spitting on the floor when I explained 'no hablo Espanyol'. Having dumped our backpacks and aired my feet, we decided to explore central Madrid.
It was decided that the city was not the world's safest, after a walk towards Placa del Sol. The street that we took was obviously THE meeting place for dodgy pimps, syphilitic transsexual whores and donut salesmen. On later perusal, the Lonely Planet guide revealed that we were living a minute's walk away from Madrid's hard drugs centre, and advised us to steer well clear. After thoroughly examining this street, we decided that the people of Sol were 'out to touch our special places', and we headed down a more impressive, but strangely less populated street. We passed by many Adam Sandler-a-likes with silly hats, and after a while came face to face with the Prado, and, er, the post office. Two Maxibons later, we decided that the acclimatisation to this unfamiliar city had left us in need of some shut-eye.
By the way, for those unfamiliar with Maxibons, they can be revealed to be the National dish of Wales. Indeed, the word 'Maxibon' is Welsh, and comes from the ancient dialects of the North. The verb 'to Maxibon' is to eat frozen chocolate wafers and perform in the style of the ancient emperor, Tom Jones.
Ah, a day where Ted and I reached our zenith as tourists. Having awoken at about 8:20 (as seems to have been the norm on this trip), the estadio Santiago Bernabeau was calling our names from afar, we were off to see the home of Real Madrid Club de Futbol. Giggling at the Spanish pronunciation of Bernabeau ('burn-yah-byuwe' - teeheehee!), we exited the metro and stood agog in the shadow of the monolithic juggernaught stadium.
Childhood dreams of wanting to be a professional footballer were rekindled as we stepped inside to the pitch and stands, basking in their full glory. A walk through the trophy room saw us grow envious at the size of this club when compared to our own beloved Arsenal (we still beat them 3-1 in the Lee Dixon testimonial though!). But alas, it was time to say goodbye to this magnificent club, and purchase our train tickets for Barcelona on the Saturday.
I have never been so stressed! One can see why the Spanish have such a reputation. They are without doubt the laziest race to have ever walked the Earth. When there are about 200 people waiting for train tickets, surely it makes more sense to open more than one booth. It's not as if they were understaffed either; there were at least 20 members of staff, all milling about and smoking. This was probably their conversation.
Juan: "Jesus, I got up at 11 this morning!"
Jose: "You poor thing!"
Juan: "Yeah mate, I need a coffee, but I'm too slothful. Will you get it?"
Jose: "Nah, I'm on my lunch break until 6, get it yourself"
Juan: "I can't be bothered then."
Maria: "There's quite a big crowd wanting tickets, maybe I should serve them?"
Jose, quite disturbed by this thought: "ARE YOU CRAZY? You've still got 7 hours of lunch break left!"
Maria: "Ah, but I did 15 minutes of work yesterday, so I don't need to do anymore this month"
Juan: "So why don't you go home and have a sleep?"
Maria: "It's a whole 5 minutes walk away. I'll just sleep here."
Juan: "Fair enough."
All: "ZZZZZ" - A cacophony of snoring as all staff fall asleep.
Two hours later, we were assigned to a closed booth to buy our tickets. We thought it was empty, until we saw a middle aged Spaniard, curled up asleep on his chair.
"Tickets?" he said, then fell asleep again. After about 10 minutes if vicious bitch-slapping we procured some tickets, and made our way to the Prado. Again, we reluctantly had to fight our way through the crowd of beautiful, buxom 17-year-old Italian Schoolgirl temptresses, and we were confronted with an American Rodney Dangerfield look-alike.
"Even in Spain I can't get no respect." he told us.
"Okay" we retorted. The museum was very interesting, and absolutely full of culture. Not as interesting (to me anyway) as my case of, what I like to call 'Madrid burning bum', a result of too little water, and wearing the same pair of pants for too long. Bored of all the fine paintings and tapestries, we decided to 'do Madrid' - tourist style! With that we hopped onto the reasonably priced tourist bus - away from the nasty Spaniards. We had already seen pretty much everything Madrid had to offer, but the trip did allow us to work on our white-trash tans. After dining at Donald's (of the Mac variety) and a session of listening to good music in a shop on Gran Via it was time to rest, as tomorrow would bring much amusement at Madrid Movie World.
Please read about our day of hot roller coaster action here.
Waking up at 5:45 wasn't my idea of fun, but it had to be done (that could've been done by one of them rap fellas!). Our train was more like a plane (I must stop this!), and the spectacular journey took just over six hours.