Apparently I haven't been blogging correctly.... according to Ryan I am suppose to be posting something daily or else people will become disinterested (is this true?).
Here's my daily ramble of our Madrid adventures...
Days 3-4:
We've been having some difficulties adjusting to the time change.... we will randomly wake up in the middle of the night unable to go back to sleep.... lucky for us we watched Phelps get his fourth gold medal live! I guess it's a good thing that the Spaniards like to sleep in, take naps, and stay up late... we fit right in!
These past few days have been just a bunch of wandering around checking out the "must see" sites...
Our breakfasts have been comprised of the same basic ingredients... bread, cheese, and salami. Ryan actually looks forward to breakfast every morning.... I on the other hand am getting sick of the same old things but we didn't want to get anything that needed to be cooked.
This might be silly.... but I have NEVER made coffee in one of these devices before, so like any educated incompetent person would do.... I googled it. It's called a coffee percolator... all you do is add water to the bottom twisty portion, coffee in the filter part, and when it heats up the water is pushed up into the top part and VOILA you have coffee!
Ryan REALLY wanted me to get a video of the apartment elevator, he thinks it is the coolest thing ever...for some reason I can't get the video to work
Here are the places we went the last few days:
Royal Palace
One of the streets we walk every day
Highlight of the day... getting a selfie stick
Statues everywhere
Temple of Debod
Temple of Debod... couldn't get any shots without people
Gardens and Parks everywhere also... usually you can find a statue nearby
Plaza Mayor
I thought I had more pictures of Plaza Mayor... but this is the only one I can find from the other day... here's another from our first day at night.
Plaza Mayor
People like to come here and hang out. There are restaurants lining pretty much the whole inner perimeter.
Felipe III Statue
Again.... a statue. This statue sits in the dead center of plaza mayor. The cool thing about this statue is that sometime ago the statue had a terrible smell for unknown reasons. They moved the statue for a short time to build an underground garage... they surprisingly found that the statue had a bunch of dead birds inside. Apparently they flew through the horses mouth and couldn't get out. They have now sealed the mouth so this couldn't happen again.
Mercado de San Miguel
Mercado de San Miguel
Mercado de San Miguel- Paella
On our first day to Madrid we were told we HAD to try the paella, so when we walked through this market we gave it a shot. We absolutely LOVED it! This place was a little more pricey for their tapas...I'm guessing because it's a huge tourist trap, but dang that paella was worth it. We also tried the churros con chocolate but we weren't huge fans.
Casa de Campo
Ryan wanted to check out this park, its HUGE.... over 4000 acres. We obviously only saw a fraction of it, but it contains a zoo and an amusement park. We decided to try the cable car ride that takes you from one park over to this park. It was a 11 minute ride and you can see the whole city.
Cable Cars
Amusement park in Casa de Campo
Madrid. You can see the Royal Palace
We aren't sure what those buildings are, Ryan wanted a picture.
So just getting to this park is about FIFTY minutes to walk to from our apartment(it actually took us longer to get there since we were stopping for pictures and to buy a selfie stick =P ) .
Lake at Casa de Campo
When we got off the cable car there really wasn't anything in the immediate area to see so we decided to walk to the lake area. Little did we know that it was another twenty minute walk to the lake in the direction back to the apartment.
We checked the lake out, we considered renting row boats to paddle around but it was super hot and we were getting really hungry. There were restaurants around the lake but we were having a hard time reading the menus to see if there was anything we wanted to try. We were looking for the 'Menu del dia' because it's the most affordable and comes with a drink but most of the places were serving fish type items for their menu del dia (Ryan and I don't really eat fish).... so we skipped eating there and decided to eat something on the way back home.
Unfortunately for us, we bought round-trip cable car tickets that we didn't want to go to waste so we doubled back just to take the cable car again.
We ran out of water around this time.... in the park there were some 'drinking fountain' looking things.... we filled up our bottle and Ryan took a sip. He said it tasted fine.... but about 200 feet from the water spout we found a sign that said 'NO POTABLE' with a little water symbol. After some google translating we found out that we should NOT be drinking the water.........................good news Ryan is still alive and well. The bad news that day was that he contaminated our bottle so we couldn't refill it. Needless to say we started getting exhausted from all the walking, the heat, lack of water, and hunger.
On our way back home we were getting seriously HANGRY.... actually it was just me. So when we were walking through the Plaza Mayor we scoured their menus for the menu del dia at each place. We really didn't find anything we liked but this one place had a nice picture of paella and some other options Ryan thought me might enjoy. We immediately regretted coming to that restaurant when they brought us our drinks (water and coke) in tiny glass bottles. We KNEW it was more expensive to purchase water than alcohol in Madrid but I think in our delirious states we didn't care....... we seriously slowly savored each sip and stretched each drink until the end of our meals. I ordered the paella which might have been more authentic? (I wouldn't really know since I only had it once) but wasn't as tasty as the Mercardo de San Miguel paella..... Ryan ordered mac n' cheese... typical right?When the check came it was 3 euro for water and 3.50 for the coke, the food dishes were overpriced too in our opinions.... that was the moment we vowed never to eat at a restaurant in Madrid again. Again, on our first day in Madrid we were given a lot of good information.... we were told that you usually do not give tips unless you received phenomenal service.... so like any good local we didn't tip. When we left though, we basically ran for fear of the waiter coming after us for not tipping. Lol.
We were exhausted so we went home and basically crashed.
We had to change our Airbnb because we were only going to be staying in Madrid for three days but decided to extend it for three more. Mainly because we were told that the Sunday flea market is something you don't want to miss.
So here we are in our new Airbnb which has AIR CONDITIONING and TV (we're so spoiled)!
Cubo de cerveza
The only downside was that we had about a two hour waiting period before we could check-in to this new airbnb (future note.... we will also book with early check-in or schedule our times better so that we don't have to be lugging around our backpacks for so long). Lucky for us we found a place that had five cervezas for only 4 euros.... they were small, but it helped us kill time. Also the kind waiter helped us learn some Spanish. We tipped.
Side note: it is REALLY hard to find someone who speaks English.... like harder than we thought it was going to be.... so my comprehension seems to have improved a bit (when you pay attention to facial expressions and hand gestures) but Ryan's seems to be at a stalemate. We seem to be able to get our points across with single words because we apparently have no idea how to form sentences when put on the spot.
The neighborhood we are in seems to be more ethnically diverse....a lot less Spanish being spoken with more people kind of 'hanging' out on the corners... and catcalling. So we've been more alert of our surroundings and only walk the more trafficked streets. Lucky for us there are four Indian restaurants right in front of the apartment.... we will be trying one hopefully before we leave.
I'll try to be better at posting. Until next time, adios!
The sound it makes reminds me of a ray gun from a movie lol
ReplyDelete- Michelle