Madrid Quickie – Day One

For someone who has an alarm set to 8am to tell me the time and NOT to wake me up, the idea of being on a train at 8am required a bit of an adjustment. Let me clarify that: I do not need an alarm for anything on a daily basis. I wake up stupidly early sometimes because I just do. Even if I go to sleep way past midnight, I rarely sleep later than 7:30. And the alarm isn’t a proper one either–it’s a gentle tingle on my watch and I have no idea if it actually has enough oomph to wake me up. I’ve never asked it to. I may wake up early but I most certainly do not have to get up early and I don’t. So, after setting the real phone alarm to make sure I got up, here I was, taking the 8am fast train to Madrid.

This time I was departing from the other train station in València, the one just behind Estació del Nord, called València Joaquín Sorolla. Why they have two train stations right next to each other I do not know; all I do know is that to take a cab to the second one is a much bigger pain in the butt than to the first one, but let’s leave it at that. After going through security, I found my platform easily enough and got on the train already waiting there. I normally like to travel Premium but since food services have been eliminated due to Covid, there is very little difference between regular Tourist class and Premium. Maybe if this weren’t a two hour (actually 1’45”!) trip I’d care more but really, Tourist is just fine on AVE, the fast train. I did enjoy watching the speed on one of the monitors: for a big chunk of the trip we really did go 300km/h or near to it and it was awesome. I tried taking photos occasionally but at first it was too dark and then it was too blurry so I gave up. I couldn’t really watch the scenery so I put my headphones on and settled in to read.

The two hours went by pretty quickly and here I was, 11 year later, back in Madrid. And nobody ever asked me why I was there. Not once. Hmm, it’s as if nobody cared that I travelled across “closed” borders.

It wasn’t a cold day but it was grey and the wind was cool enough to make me glad I had my warm jacket on. I had my appointment for 11:10 at the Polish Consulate so I had a solid hour to get there walking. The passport office is on Calle de Goya, close to Plaza Colón, so directly north from Madrid-Atocha train station. This meant I could walk up Calle de Alfonso XII right past the iconic park El Retiro. If you’re not familiar with Parque del Buen Retiro, it is only about a third of the size of Vancouver’s Stanley Park, but it is very large for an urban park in Europe. I will write about it more in the future, once I get to Madrid for a longer stay, I promise. As I walked alongside its walls I was able to peek in every once in a while to check if spring has arrived here yet. It wasn’t terribly obvious, I’m afraid, but I did see a few bushes of forsythia blooming so maybe it was trying.

I arrived at my destination with time to spare so I had to find a coffee shop to sit down, have a bit of breakfast, and wait. Promptly at 11:07 I presented myself at the passport office, at 11:09 I was called to the window where I offered my form, pictures, and old passport to a very nice lady, put my fingers in the fingerprint scanner, paid my money, was given a tracing number, got my old passport back (because it’s still valid and I will need something in the meantime), and amazingly, I was out of there by 11:15. Yes, I am not kidding. The whole process of renewing my Polish passport took all of six, count them: six! minutes. I don’t think I have ever taken care of a bureaucratic business in less time than that. I walked out, still somewhat stupefied, wandering what the heck I was going to do with so much free time. Theoretically, I could have been on the next train to València and back home by lunch!

As it was, I had time to kill. I couldn’t check into my AirBnB room until 3pm and I had to do something with myself. I decided to walk down to my favourite museum, Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, to visit some of my favourite paintings. I took my time strolling back down Paseo del Prado, the beautiful wide avenue along which you can find all three of the major museums: the Prado, Thyssen-Bornemisza, and Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía. But before I got to the good stuff, my route took me from Plaza Colón where there was some interesting pubic art, through Fuente de Cibeles (a famous fountain), and then Fuente de Apolo y de las Cuatro Estaciones (another fountain), down almost as far as Fuente de Neptuno, yet another famous fountain. This is where the Thyssen-Bornemisza museum is. When I went inside I was happy to discover that not only was the admission price reasonable (€10), they also had somewhere for me to drop off my rather heavy (if small) backpack which was wonderful. I will write all about this in the next post so, for now, let’s do a jump forward to about two and a half hours later …

… quite tired but very happy, I was done looking at art and needed nourishment. My AirBnB was very close to Plaza Santa Ana, the very same plaza Ori and I stayed next door to back in 2013 so I knew the area well. I have to be honest, after over a month of no restaurants being open, I was so happy to see people enjoying their meals and drinks outside. I wasn’t going to have to find takeout food for a change! I did find a place right in Plaza Santa Ana, and I was even more excited to see they had callos a la madrileña, the delicious tripe dish that’s a specialty here. I enjoyed it very much so before you turn up your nose at this delicacy, if you didn’t know what it was you’d have loved it too 😉.

Having been nourished adequately, I headed for the AirBnB which turned out to be more a hotel than a true AirBnB. I was given a bunch of codes to enter the building and then the suite, with yet another one for the room key. It all seemed very confusing. What was even worse was the fact that there were two separate digital lock boxes on the front door. I had tried both but it wasn’t clear to me how they worked. In my naïveté, I thought all I had to do was press the number and the door would open. Repeatedly trying that didn’t work so I did the next best thing: I snuck in when someone else walked in. I was inside. I then took the world’s smallest elevator, and by that I mean THE smallest elevator ever: there was barely enough room in it for me and my backpack. I hate to think what would have happened if I had a suitcase, there is no way we would have fit. I reached the apartment door to find yet another digital lock and the same problem I had downstairs presented itself. After numerous attempts and urgent but so far unanswered WhatsApp messages to the contact number I had, I was starting to get a little worried about being stuck in front of this huge locked door. Fortunately for me, however, my luck was holding and a very nice young woman came and opened the door with ease. I had to get her to show me how she did that because I had plans for the evening and needed to be able to get back in with equal ease all by myself. She was very kind and showed me the tricks not only with the lock but with the door as well because of course there was one. Once inside, I had another puzzle to solve: the room card was in another trick box in which I had to toggle some buttons because this wasn’t an AirBnB, this was a reverse Escape Room. And, if you’ve been in an escape room with me (and very few people have), you’d know I’m not a fan 🤨. To totally finish me off, when I finally got inside my room, there was no power. None, dark, dead. Another panicked message to the hosts, and I was directed to insert the room card into a slot on the wall and voilà, I had electricity, something that is now a thing in hotels/hostels, it seems. Live and learn, I guess, though I swear, I have never had to work so hard to be able to take off my boots and put my feet up for a bit. It was more exhausting than all the museum walking.

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After a bit of rest, it was time to go to the theatre. Hmm, have I mentioned I had theatre tickets yet? Because yes, I most certainly did. There is a theatre on Plaza Santa Ana I wish I had gone to when Ori and I were here before so I didn’t want to miss the opportunity. The cool thing was the play was quite a bit cheaper than any of the ones I’ve seen in València which made the experience even better. I got seats up in the boxes too, so the costs could have been lower had I chosen less fancy seats. Before the play itself I walked around the area a bit, doing a mini-walk-down-memory-lane, but the street we had stayed on was very different now, the bookstore was gone (that made me very sad), and only a couple of the establishments still there looked familiar. The weirdest thing was seeing the bars and even a place that looked like a club open late, something that hasn’t been a thing for a long time in València. The whole street had a weird vibe.

The Teatro Español is really beautiful inside. It has four! levels of box seats, and the rich red of the seats plays well with the dark wood finishings. The play, Nápoles millionaria, was about a war-time and post-war family in Naples surviving with the help of the black market. It was very good but I have a suspicion I had missed a few things here and there–my Spanish if getting good enough to enjoy this type of entertainment but there is always something that makes things tricky for me. Sometimes I sneak a peek at my GoogleTranslate to help me along but this time I didn’t. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed the play, but perhaps it wasn’t the topic that really speaks to me. I should probably pay better attention to descriptions but then again, it’s not like I had dates and locations to choose from. Sometimes you go see whatever is there just because you can.

After the play, I went to grab a snack from the Carrefour around the corner, still amazed at the number of people still out and about, especially outside the bars and clubs that looked and sounded awfully busy. It made me understand why Madrid continues to have high Covid numbers: their leadership is simply not prepared to do what is necessary to stem the rate of infections for the sake of keeping businesses open. I didn’t hang around, to say the least. It may be strange to say this but I felt safer in the theatre (where there was distancing) than out on the street. It was also surprising to see so many restaurants still open late but at least that was just a sight I had missed and needed to share with the girls back in València. The restaurants were opening on March 3rd there so they would be able to go out again too, just not until late in the evening.

Just in case you’re wondering, I didn’t have trouble getting back inside the building nor the apartment, and the room was actually quite comfortable. I was dead tired, however, and I couldn’t wait to hit the sack. I had a whole day to fill so needed to rest those very wary feet.