Madrid

I´m back in Madrid for one night after a weekend in Venice! Tomorrow I spend the whole day flying to Cairo. It´s not that far from Madrid, but I somehow booked myself a trip with a SEVEN hour layover in Athens. I have a backlog of things to blog about:

Madrid
Venice
The Quest for an Ipod Shuffle Charger

I´ll start with Madrid for now. The thing about Madrid is that I don´t have a ton to say about it because I really really liked it. I´m also very tired, which means I have even less to say. So, um... here is a list of things I like about Madrid:

1. It´s not all that touristy compared to Barcelona...
2. ...but there are still a lot of cool things to see as a tourist, like the Prado!
3. The Metro runs really frequently and seems clean...
4. ...but I also didn´t have any trouble walking pretty much everywhere I wanted to go.
5. There are tons of cute bookstores, and they even sell books in English!
6. The food is really good. One night, Josh got bull´s tail and it was amazingly tasty. Another night we went to this tapas place where we ordered 12 different pieces of french bread covered in... stuff... and each of them were good. I´m not sure what we were eating though. Imagine, like, seafood salad, or cream cheese, or something like that.
7. There are also like 1000 places to sit outside in a plaza and drink a beer.
8. In the summer it gets dark at like 10 PM. Yay for being really far west in the time zone.
9. That means the stores and museums and stuff are open until like 8 or 9!

However, in the interest of fairness, here are some things that happened in Madrid that were less cool:

1. Josh and I agreed to meet in the Prado at the entrance at 8 PM, when it closed. But I couldn´t find my way back to the entrance on time and got physically escorted out of the building by a security guard! I tried to explain that I wasn´t exiting because I had to meet my friend at the other side of the building, but the only word in that sentence I knew in Spanish was amigo, so I just kind of said amigo and flailed my arms around. She wasn´t convinced. I ran around to the front of the building, where Josh was inside, looking around exasperatedly. Luckily I got his attention by jumping up and down, and disaster was averted!

2. Then, we ate dinner at what our guidebook claimed was a favorite of the king. I went to the bathroom and was walked in on by a very well-dressed woman because the lock didn´t quite work right. We were both very embarassed. I´m going to pretend she was royalty because that makes it sound cooler :o)

Actually, getting walked in on in the bathroom by royalty can go on the list of cool things about Madrid, so this isn´t a very long list at all.

Finally, here is one weird fact about Spain:

1. They are REALLY into KFC here. They are all over the place. Way more prevalent than anywhere in the US I can think of. I found this more amusing than Josh did.