Madrid, at long last...

Barcelona train station is staffed entirely by the only five people in the whole city who don't speak English. Noticing that there was no platform number for my supplement-paid super-high-speed-tilt-train to Madrid, I tried to enquire in my limited Spanish of the information person where the train left from, before giving up and asking if she spoke English (a tirade of Spanish in return was taken as a no). She pointed me to someone else, and 40 minutes and four different staff later, I was still none the wiser. Eventually I found some American tourists to follow, who overcame the language barrier by just TALKING LOUDER. They hopped on a bus, so I did too... and two buses and two hours of American whining about first class bus seats later we finally climbed onto the super-high-speed-tilt-train.

At the start of my backpacking journey, I would read up on the plane/train about where I was going - how I should get to the hostel, what the different areas of the city were, how the public transport system worked and what kind of ticket I should buy, a few phrases. Now the seasoned backpacker, I jumped off the train without even the address of the hostel I was going to. I knew the hostel was called Los Amigos Sol, and there was a Sol station on the metro map, so I just headed there. Navigating ticket machines is now a breeze, even when English translation means changing the words "por favore" to "please" and leaving the ticket names as "1 viaje" and something random that I think meant zones. I happened upon the hostel in the street next to the metro station when I was just about to get out the Lonely Planet and find an internet cafe. Backpacking? Too easy.

Madrid is a very chilled city - I haven't done anything since I got here except shop and wander around. I think I could live here, if it wasn't for the bane of every tourist's existence, siesta. The shops are open from 10am until around 2pm, when everything that isn't a souvenir store pulls down the roller door and closes up until 4:30pm, when they open again briefly until around 7:30. It reminds me of Saturday afternoons in Brisbane, when someone would realise at 5:30pm that the supermarket closed in half an hour. Of course, being a fully-fledged Sydneysyder now, I can't understand why anything would close before 10pm, unless it´s Gladesville Coles, and let's not talk about that.

The problem with siesta is that I hate mornings, so I´ve been cruising out of bed at a leisurely 10 or 11am, having a lazy breakfast, and heading out... but of course, this would leave with me an hour or two before everything closes, rendering the afternoon, my prime time of day for Doing Stuff™, effectively useless. Not that there´s much to do in Madrid it seems - a few art galleries, a palace and a garden with a statue of the devil.

Yesterday evening I followed a roommate to a pub, where we watched the Real Madrid vs Olympikos game while being chatted up by a random Venezuelan chef who presented us with a red rose each as well as a number of free drinks, and invitations to visit his restaurant for dinner, and to stay on his couch whenever we happened to be next in Spain. Seriously, I was just trying to watch the football...