We got through the airport in Madrid easily enough. They gave us a long and fairly detailed form to fill out at passport control, but the customs officers didn´t really look at it, just tore off a portion and waved us through. I have a card somewhere that I´m supposed to surrender when I leave Spain, I have no idea why.

Once outside the airport we got onto Madrid´s excellent subway system, called the Metro. Will has a guidebook that said something about a station called Nuevos Ministerios, so we cavalierly headed there. Once there, I was under the impression that that´s where all the hostels were, so we headed topside. Once above ground, we realized that wasn´t the case.

We busted out the guide and found the numbers for some hostels, but the first few we called were full. Filled with a great sense of foreboding, we kept going, and eventually we made contact with the Hostel Orly, where we somehow managed to get the only staff person who spoke English.

The hostel itself was awesome. It was a small affair, on the seventh floor of an old building that housed at least two or three other hostels, run by a nice older Spanish lady and her family. She spoke French, so Beinta did most of the communicating, since my French is poor, and Will´s goes downhill from there.

We stayed just off of a major street called Gran Via, and the first night all we had the energy for was a quick meal, a quick email check, and then sleep.

It´s only been a week, but so much has happened that I have a tough time picking out what we did and when. The first day we just sort of wandered around the neighbourhood, a busy commercial district. The particular street that our hostel was on also seemed to be the place of business of a good number of Madrid´s hookers, so we generally avoided eye contact with anyone, for fear of accidental soliciation.

The following day, Saturday, we went to Reina Sofia museum, home to a lot of modern art, a big chunk of Picasso, and a really cool painting by Goya. I saw Guernica, which I recognized from a textbook from school. A postage-stamp sized picture does not do justice to what had to be a 15´x25´ painting. It was interesting to see such a famous work, but I much, much prefer straight up representational art. To be honest, I think most of the modern stuff is pretentious garbage. Fortunately Will and Beinta shared my opinion, and we didn´t linger over-long.

On Sunday we went to the Museo del Prado, a much more classically focused gallery, and saw a lot of beautiful paintings. Sadly, their sculpture collection (my favourite section of any museum) was a lot less extensive. The only painting that really stood out to me was called "The Triumph of Death," a work from the 16th or 17th century that depicted an army of skeletons attacking a bunch of people, some of whom were trying to escape through a tunnel with a cross on the door. I don´t even remember who painted it, and won´t pretend to say what it might mean, but it was so compelling that I bought a print (which I nearly left at a restaurant on the way home) and mailed it to myself back home the next day.

Sunday night was the World Cup final, a fact of which I was entirely oblivious. When I eventually found out what was going on, I was pretty sure it was too late to actually catch any of it, not that I was terribly interested to begin with. Will and Beinta stayed in the hostel to read, and I went out to see if my friend Mark had emailed me his address yet.

When I got to the Internet cafe, which is above a restaurant, the restaurant was packed. I didn´t make anything of it, since I had no idea how busy it usually was. I was just about to put some money into the machine when the most amazing cheers came up from the restaurant below. I looked at the TVs and got to watch the final penalty kicks that decided the match. We were in Spain, and the cheering for Italy was still unbelievable.

Madrid, as near as I can tell, never sleeps. Looking out of our balcony we at least a dozen people walking around outside at any hour of the day. That night it was even busier, as I watched a couple of different processions walking around, waving Italian flags and shouting "Italia!" over and over. I also saw, off in the distance, no fewer than three different fireworks shows, two of which put Edmonton´s Canada Day fireworks so shame in terms of both duration and quality.

Monday was, as I recall, a lot of killing time, except for our trip to the train station. Will and I went out in the morning to check our email and mail the aforementioned print, as well as a few postcards. When we got back, we found Beinta talking to a couple of other Canadians who had been to Pamplona the previous week. We got a few tips on the bull running, and were advised that if we wanted to actually get on a train, we had better make reservations early.

Proceeding to the train station, (Which, incidentally, is the same way a lot of sentences in the Greek text of Mark start. Not so much the train station part, I don´t think that particular set of words occurs in the New Testament, but the participle. Of the remaining three words in that sentence, one is an article, I think the other one is a preposition, and the other one is the participle.) we made our way through a couple of different lines trying to figure out how to get reservations. In Spain, if you ask anyone "¿habla ingles?" they tell you no, and then proceed to help you in fairly decent English. It´s kind of annoying, and kind of funny at the same time.

Once we found the right line, we were two thirds of the way to having reservations, when the guy asked for our Eurail passes. Now, I had thought of this on the way over to the train station, I think it even crossed my mind as we left the hostel, but for some reason I thought I remembered someone saying we didn´t need them to make reservations. As it turns out, this is not the case. Beinta is only traveling with us for three weeks, after which she´s moving to the Faroe Islands, so she was buying her rail pass right at the train station. We left her to eat some lunch and buy her pass, and Will and I made the trek back to the hostel to get the passes. The round trip was only about an hour, I think, and even at the time it was more funny than inconvenient. In the end, we were out 2 Euro, but ahead one funny story. Oh, and the train we wanted from Pamplona to Barcelona was sold out by the time we got back.

We tried to go to bed early that night, since we had been sleeping fitfully until early afternoon up til that point. I still haven´t fully adjusted to a European timetable, I think we´re about 8 hours ahead of Alberta. Will set his travel alarm clock, and we settled in for a hot, restless night. I neglected to mention that we arrived in Madrid in the middle of a heat wave. Temperatures got as high as 44, and even at night they didn´t drop below the mid-twenties. Beinta tells me that our hostel was planning to install air conditioning in 2007.

Our train left at 9:50 AM, and we wanted to get up at 6:30 to give ourselves plenty of time to get ready and get to the station. I woke up, looked at Will´s alarm clock and read 7:50. We still made it to the station with time to spare, but it was a bit of a heart attack moment when I first woke up.

All three of us were hot, tired and grumpy when we arrived at the train station.

Current Location: Barcelona, Spain