Now That Is a City

As soon as we got close, it became readily apparent that Madrid is for real. This is a legitimate city. It reminded me a lot of New York actually, the outskirts started as suburb kinda places then turned into dozens of identical tall brick apartment buildings. A few laps around the neighborhood my friend Guillermo recommended we stay and we had a parking spot. It was a very cool place, no worries about our next task (food finding). We rang the Olé Hostel bell. Like ten times. Then finally they let us in. It was a dark and narrow stairway and nothing was really marked. I rang the first doorbell a few times, knocked on the door and yelled let me in. To no avail. They were not open. Apparently I had let myself in somehow...We decided our time would be better spent eating at this juncture, so we went to a hip little tapas restaurant across the street and got some delicious Asian-fusion tapas. It was a trippy place – the bathroom had a half dozen of those hippy door beads one right after another and it kinda felt like you were walking through an automatic car wash.

After refueling we reluctantly started looking for a place. We found three equally unideal options. The first was a hotel for a hundred euros. The second two were Spanish-style hostels…we went with the cheaper of the two, which once we had escaped from the next morning, we lovingly referred to as Antonia’s closet.