Madrid: Our love affair with wine

We arrived in Madrid on Christmas eve. I was a bit nervous about everything being closed down. One of the couch surfers told me it is a family holiday and there aren't many places open. Far from the truth. After paying our 60 dollar taxi fare, we were able to find our hostel after a very kind English-speaking woman drew us a map. We got in, paid and settled down(aka peed and were ready to go out.)

We wandered around and spotted some awesome lights, and some lit up Christmas trees. We stopped for some beer and tapas at a bar that looked decent. It was clear from the beginning that Spain was known for it's wine, but we are beer fanatics. The beer sucked so we moved onto some wine and just continued to walk around before eventually deciding it was food/bed time. Luckily, we were able to find a mexican place with delicious burritos. It took a little effort to find our hostal, but eventually we did.

The Green Tree that always helped us find our way.

Sound sleeping for me until about 8:00 am the next morning. I was anxious to see what would be open on Christmas day. Eventually, we found what we assumed was a chain restaurant "cafe e te". We saw several of them throughout the day. Breakfast consisted of some delicious coffee and a croissant, before heading out to see what we could see and find what we could find. We kept getting lost, but eventually we figured out where our hiatal was in the map, and which way was north and south. This came in super handy as time went on. We also happened to stop by another expensive bar to try some more beer.

Loved these roads that we kept walking on and getting lost on.

Things to see in Madrid: churches and museums. Successfully, we didn't go into a single one, but we did get a whole lot of pictures. The best part about Spain is that everything you get a drink you get served a food. Most commonly it is bread or olives, and we were lucky that most of the time it was vegetarian. We also found out we are multilingual  While speaking, we would combine french, and sometimes even hebrew and albanian with our spanish. At one point I said "yo parle espanol" for "no speak spanish." I had combined albanian, french, and spanish. Crazy!

This area reminded me of fall at the U of M.

The majority of the day was spent walking around finding cheap places to drinks. We stopped at "Broken Hearts "low cat bar and the ham museum (Museo del Jamon.) In between places we would have a coffee or a water. I kept being amused by all the American restaurants, such as taco bell, KFC, and burger king. It has just been so long since I have seen any of these pales. Eventually we got hungry for real food and ate some simple but incredibly delicious sandwiches and had the best vino we had ever drank. Each glass only cost us a whopping 2 Euros! We ended the night at our favorite bar called "Remember." Daryn kept commenting that no one wants to remember a bar, but upon entering it became clear we would. Of all the spanish beer we drank they had the best, and they combined it with some rocking tunes including Primus, the Talking Heads, and many others. Daryn was, of course, jet lagged, and was ready to stay up for another beer, but I wanted to sleep. So, we split a beer as a compromise and headed to bed.

Daryn taking a picture of yet another cool looking building

The second day started with croissant and coffee again. We knew that the following morning we had to get up quite early, so we wanted to head to bed early. Therefore we allowed ourselves a beer and a wine when we made our noon stop. We headed, again, to get a baguette con queso at the ham museum, which we found out was famous. We loved their 1 euro food and drinks.

A beautiful church filled with tourists.

The day before we had found a sherry bar that a friend recommended to us, but it had been closed. We successfully found it again and went in to share 6 sherrys and of course, tapas. This place had the best olives I have ever had. I believe they were soaked in balsamic and oregano. So, and the man who ran the place was very kind to us, except that he yelled at me for taking pictures.

I want to go back just for these olives: round one of Sherry

After the sherry bar we were in need of some serious water, so we headed back to our hostal for a siesta, some water and some luggage organization. Daryn also took some time to talk to the guy at the front desk about getting to the airport the following morning (our flight was at 6:15am.) The man assured us he would have a taxi outside the hostal for us at 4am. We just couldn't get over how cheap and delicious the wine was at the place we ate dinner at the previous night. So we headed back to the same place to try different and even better kinds of wine. This was followed by a Guinness  because we decided we needed to try one on tap in Europe to compare. More beer and an early bedtime. Overall this portion of the trip taught us the 5 food groups necessary for survival: wine/fruit, beer/bread, cheese, veggies, and coffee. The following morning we had a taxi driver waiting outside the hostal for us at 4am. We were ready to head to Belgium.

Super cool!