Madrid!

Finally, after two back-to-back red-eye flights, we arrived in Madrid on Sunday morning at around 7. Despite two nights of really uncomfortable and insufficient sleep, I was wide awake. We easily found our way to the hostel. It was Sunday morning, so the whole city was very quiet. A handful of people were up and hanging out in the place just outside the Tirso de Molina metro stop, where we got out.

Our room wasn't available just yet, so we locked up our luggage and went to the kitchen to grab breakfast. I was surprised at how many people were already up. Who is up by 9 am on vacation? We chatted up a Dutch guy who was in Madrid for a weekend with the boys. Dennis (or I?) said that our trip was kind of like that too. And then Dan strolled into the kitchen right past us.

After our toast and cereal (which apparently is not a good enough breakfast for Adi, as we later found out), we decided to go see Dan's mom and sister, who were at a hotel just a few blocks away. They had plans to check out El Rastro, the city's biggest and most well-known flea market. Since I wasn't able to go to it the last time I was in Madrid, I was happy for us to join them.

At breakfast, we had gotten into another "world issues" discussion. It dragged on through our walk to see Dan's family, paused for the half hour we spent in their hotel room, and resumed in full force on the walk to El Rastro. This discussion was mostly about inequality and relative vs. absolute poverty. Dan and even his family joined in. Adi insisted that a very skewed distribution of power and economic resources didn't matter as long as the poorest people achieved a certain standard of living. He also thought that it wasn't necessarily a bad thing that a small percentage of the population controlled a majority of the wealth in a country. He insisted that because we each had the right to vote, the rich were limited in their influence.

Anyway, this isn't about what Adi thinks. I should also add that these are my own recollections of the discussions that took place, and memories are always flawed. Feel free to start up your own discussion with him. The point is, he didn't think that economic, social, and political inequities within a society were a major concern. The social justice advocate inside me cried a little. I really did actually cry a little later. Again, I have to clarify: it's not that he thinks that the rich should control the universe. He just doesn't think that the huge gap between the average citizen and certain elites is the biggest problem we have, which is a much more defensible position. In any case, you should ask him too.

The flea market was crowded and noisy, the way you'd expect a flea market to be. Dennis and I "buddied up" to get away from Dan and Adi, who were still debating. We lost Dan's mom and sister pretty quickly--they probably wanted an excuse to get away from us as well.

We wandered around the flea market for a while and then walked to Plaza Mayor, a big square in the center of the city and a hub for tourists. It's a large plaza enclosed on all four sides by buildings. There are shops and restaurants on the ground floor and apartments above them. On a gray, rainy day at the end of March, it looks like this:

Streets (alleys?) lead up to the plaza and feed into it via these beautiful arches:

We decided to go explore the Chueca neighborhood and grab lunch. I had noted it down as a "local flavor" neighborhood but had no idea what to expect, since I had really done very little research and had no particular sights or experiences in mind. Chueca, as it turned out, was the gay neighborhood. Unfortunately, as it was Sunday, there weren't a lot of people around, nor were there many shops or restaurants open. Dennis wanted to watch the game while we had lunch, so we had to find a place that had a TV.

My limited Spanish got us to such a place. The bar area was filled with locals and cigarette smoke. Adi blindly ordered something with "verdes" and got gray, boiled vegetables. This was the first of several occasions on the trip when he ordered food and got something other than what he expected. (He thought it was going to be a green salsa of some kind.) He and Dan got really fatty meat and were so disappointed that this meal was mentioned for days. Days. I think I was the only person happy with my selection. I realized that boys complain a lot about food. 

After lunch, we went back to our hostel to get into our room and to take a nap. (And a shower. It had been a while.) We ventured out in the evening for a drink and another World Cup match. Our mojitos and beer came with the requisite second-hand smoke. For dinner, we decided to look around the Calle Cava Baja area, which is famous-ish for nightlife and tapas bars. Unfortunately, famous-ish means lots of tourists. It took us a while to pick a place to eat. The boys often deferred to me for decision-making on this trip, which was actually kind of annoying because I didn't want to make all the decisions. We finally settled on a place that was around the corner and just a little bit away from the crowds of Calle Cava Baja.

Dinner was pretty uneventful, except for near the end. Adi got up to go to the bathroom, but instead of asking someone where it was, he just picked a direction and walked with conviction. Unfortunately, he picked the direction of the kitchen, and when one of the waiters asked him where he was going, Adi just stood there and flashed that adorable smile. And said nothing. Somehow he eventually found the bathroom. When we were walking out, the waiter who had intercepted him asked me if Adi was drunk. Sadly, he probably had half a glass of wine at dinner, the least of any of us.

Since we were being kicked out of our rooms the next morning at 8 am, we came back to the hostel after dinner, but not before stopping to pick up Dan's bottle of cream liqueur. We hung out in the common room at the hostel and played Big 2 with some Canadians that we chatted up. Dan's deck of cards got a lot of use during this trip, but I have to admit that card playing was a nice break from ridiculous hypothetical questions, macho talk, and debates about world issues. I'm never again going on a trip with just three other guys.