Our love affair with Madrid

We never quite figured out what made us fall in love with Madrid. We hadn't heard much about it before we landed there, a fate secured by cheap airfare. One night we met up with some fun people from couchsurfing and worked through a handful of bars in the colorful Malasaña neighborhood, ending up at an illegal bar [meaning open all night and accessible by unmarked doorbell] in the sketch-bohemian neighborhood. Early in the night two of the guys, a long-haired, film geek pair from Venezuela, divulged their obsession with London. “Why do you like it so much?” we asked repeatedly. All they could do is shake their heads wide-eyed and say again and again, “It's just London. London. Londonnn.” At the time we figured it was because they met some sexy ladies there, but when we left for Barcelona after 5 days in Madrid, our feelings were similarly giddy and inconclusive, and were most likely caused by the great people that we met there.

It's also hard to separate my impressions of the city from the travel-induced excitement and freedom that overtook us. I know I am living abroad, so I should feel this daily, but there is something about uprooting yourself and falling into an easy pace that makes you especially perceptive and brings you in contact with new people, things and flavors at every turn. The amiability and color of Spain, despite many people's open crankiness at the CRISIS, only enhanced this.

After the first couple of days in Madrid I noted in my journal that the city, however solid and uncomplicated in layout, seemed to shift under me. I felt unable to create a coherent picture of it in my head and my experiences floated around ungrounded. After three nights we decided to change hostels to get another viewpoint from the hipper, more artsy area of Madrid. Minutes after arriving in the new Malasaña hostel, a single floor, tight knit space, I started making sense of things. And loving what I found. We walked in the door and Leon, the desk guy, rearranged the furniture so we could both sit around his little table. He was cheerful, very English and very sweet, and told us he would make Christmas dinner for everybody (Spain celebrates on Christmas eve). That evening we tried to get to a couchsurfing christmas dinner, but only made it half way before the metro started closing. We ran giggling through the station and caught the last train back to the hostel. Because it was Christmas eve we picked up a bottle of Absolut and I made a killer fruit salad. We stayed up until 6 in the morning playing cards and talking with the silly hostel crowd in the kitchen (the best place for late night conversation, in my opinion).

The next morning we tromped around in the sunshine with our new found BFF, Karim, a reggae party planner from Lyon living in Madrid, watched a man make giant bubbles over the pond of the egyptian Templo de Bod and took a cable car over the piney slope of Casa de Campo. We ended our night in the hostel kitchen again after eating our real Christmas dinner at a delicious Indian place that was cheap enough for us to stuff ourselves uncomfortably.

Tapas, tapas, tapas!

We also did many things besides walk aimlessly and hang out in hostels:

• Exhausted ourselves in the spacious, confusing concrete of the Reina Sofia museum of modern art. The idea of getting lost while viewing abstract, theorhetical art sounds more meaningful than it actually was. The museum was full of interesting multimedia pieces, but there was something lacking in the curration. Afterwards we went to El Brillantes traditional diner across the square and ate bocadillo de calimari (baguette sandwiches) which lived up to their reputation as the best in the city. So good.
• Ate tapas every couple of hours, it seemed, almost every evening. Our first were at 100 Montaditos, a Madrid McDonalds we were told afterwards, but sooo cheap and yummy to foreigners and young drunks. And everything was a euro on Wednesdays. We also went to the traditional tapas streets a couple of times and ate our spanish tortillas and pan con tomate under heat lamps. This was perfect for our main Madrillian pastime: people watching. Our best tapas experience was with our Couchsurfing crew at La Blanca Paloma in Malasaña where we paid 4 euros for a pint and our table began overflowing with little plates of crispy meat and fries, papas bravas, fish croquettes, other meat and potato things, and a fried egg for each of us, dashed in paprika. Drinks + Dinner. Yesssss.
  
  
• Visited the Prado, a museum that claims to hold more masterpieces that any other museum in Europe (or something like that). Despite our preference for modern art, we immediately enjoyed the atmosphere of the Prado more than the Sofía. Each painting was accompanied by a description in multiple languages and the progression of the rooms made so much more sense. There was interesting connections, too, between some of the paintings and the Prado itself. My favorites were the giant Bosch panel paintings and Goya's enigmatic “black paintings,” which were done when he was exiled to Bordeaux. 
• Ate churros con chocolate at the infamous Chocolatería San Ginés. Mmmmmm.
• Went to a late night flamenco show with our first hostel, which was surprisingly intimate and entirely un-hostel-like. It was in a brick basement bar, painted in lit oranges and pinks. The dancer was passionate and even more interesting was the idea that the dance was improvised, the singer directing the dancer and vice-versa when they got feisty.

Street art; Dali in the Reina Sofía

Barcelona soon, xoxo.