So this was a pretty long day. Anna and I left Cairo at 11:40pm on day twenty four, got maybe a couple of hours of sleep on Iberia’s putative business class seats (pretty much identical to normal Southwest Airlines seats: six across on an A319), and arrived in Madrid at 3:30am. The airport was, of course deserted. But with more than eight hours before our flight to Tangier, we had a choice of camping out in the airport or heading into town. Even though we were both a bit tired, we opted to venture out. And, fortunately, immigration and customs were quick and easy.
I had spent just a tiny bit of time on the Internet the day before, and had learned two important things: first, the metro in Madrid runs to the airport, but the whole system is closed from 1:45am until 6am. And, second, there are couple of breakfast places in central Madrid that specialize in Chocolate con Churros, which dish is pretty much what it sounds like: hot churros and a hot chocolate dipping sauce. If you know me at a all, you know I was pretty thrilled about this prospect. So Anna and I grabbed a cab at the airport and directed him to… um. Le Chocolateria? He didn’t know it. He spoke no English at all. Anna has some Spanish but was struggling. I remembered that the places in question were near the Plaza Real de Madrid, and tried to get us taken there. He didn’t know it. Finally we settled on Central Madrid, mercifully almost the same in English and Spanish.
With some communication difficulty, we gout ourselves dropped in central Madrid, a town neither of us were familiar with, at around 4:30am. Surprisingly, there were quite a few people out, most of ‘em at the end of their nights rather than beginning of their days, as far as we could tell. We wandered a bit before finding an Internet cafe that was open until 5am and using the 10 minutes before their close to identify our breakfast spot (Chocolateria San Gines) and its approximate place on a map (surprisingly close to our Internet cafe).
From there it was just a matter of orienting ourselves and a few false starts before we found what was, indeed, a heavenly breakfast place. The other clientele were clearly also at the end of their evenings, many of them drinking beer or liquor and smoking while enjoying their coffee and breakfast. We settled in and ordered food; Chocolate Con Churros for me (of course), and Cafe Leche con Churros for Anna. It was just after 5am, and the place was getting progressively more crowded as nearby bars and nightclubs closed.
Despite being pretty tired from the weeks in Egypt and only having gotten a couple of hours of sleep, it was a pretty great breakfast. Let me tell you: if you ever have the opportunity to dip churros in hot fudge and call it “breakfast,” do so at once. It’s tasty.
Revived a bit, we paid up and left my new favorite breakfast spot around 6am. We still had hours before we needed to get back to the airport, and we’d be able to use the metro going this way, so it was easy to budget time to walk around. We decided to visit Plaza de Espana and promptly got turned around and headed the wrong direction. Several times. It didn’t help that my Timex Expedition, so trustworthy until now, apparently didn’t like something abut the urban area, and its compass would occasionally bounce between wildly different directions even when held still (“so that was is north, no wait, that’s southwest, no, wait, it’s east”). We did eventually figure the lay of the city; the lightening sky around 7am really helped there (“that way is definitely west, I mean east”).
As we’d learned in Vancouver, both Anna and I prefer learning new cities by just walking around, so that’s what we did. On our way to Plaza de Espana, we found Plaza de Mayor, a couple of great churches and buildings, and some good views. And we only had to stop for Anna’s by-now literally gut-wrenching pain a couple of times. That wasn’t good. (NB: yes, I had been strongly encouraging her to see a doctor for the past week or so).
Once the sun rose for real, it became apparent that Madrid really is a beautiful city. Twice before, I’d spent between eight and sixteen hours around the trains station for connections and really hadn’t liked the city. This time, it seemed like someplace worthy of further exploration. Either in spite or because of the massive amounts of construction going on, it’s a remarkably clean city with great architecture and very walkable streets.
As 8am neared, we found ourselves in the Retiro, a large park at the east end of the city (yes, really east, not south or something). The park had a ton of paths, a huge lake, and a pretty adorable cat family hanging out on one of the statues. Anna risked the mother’s obvious readiness for violence to take a bunch of pictures of kittens, and who doesn’t like pictures of kittens?
Finally, 8:30am arrived, and the city was pretty vibrant and alive at this point, the sun was up, and we were both really glad we had chosen to head downtown rather than just killing time at the airport. The metro was pretty easy to figure out (hint: buy the supplemental airport fee when buying your ticket, but if you don’t, it’s ok because you can buy it at the airport), and we found ourselves back and the now-much-busier airport around 10am.