Thieving Spanish Bastards

My weekend in Madrid started off, strangely enough, in Brussels. This was by far the best part of the trip, walking around Grand Place, having waffles, and having a few belgian beers with friends.

Madrid, though, is fast on its way to becoming one of my least favourite cities. Unluckily for me, this is compounded by the weather. They say the rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain; but this weekend the rain in Spain falls mainly in Madrid. Worse, ever since stepping out of the airport here I have felt uneasy. As soon as I stepped onto the metro to leave the airport, people sat next to me and asked for money, other people would stare or stand unnecessarily close. By far, it was worse on the metro (which is otherwise clean, cheap, and efficient), but there was still a bad vibe from some people on the street too. Ultimately, I did get get my phone stolen from my pocket by a group of three guys on the metro just before leaving a station. They had other teammembers on other cars in the train, so it looked to be a big professional effort. That would be unlike the Madrid transit police who could care less when I reported it to them 2min later.

Madrid itself seems only okayish. The museums are quite good, though Guernica was closed this week, which makes it a bit like going to Paris and not seeing the Mona Lisa. I would recommend against the monastery de las Descalzas. The guidebooks recommend it, but don't tell you they only let 20 people in every 20 minutes. It is an interesting place, but the wait can get quite long and I'd say if you had to wait more than 30min to get that it's not worth the bother. Some places can be rainy and still have their charms, Madrid just seems a little depressing in the rain; maybe because it is supposed to be sunny all the time here.

Day two started cloudy and worked its way toward partly cloudy. Started with a tour of the royal palace and continued from there walking around the old part of the city seeing several churches and squares. As I suspected, Madrid looks much better the more and brighter the sun gets. Finished with a dinner of Tapas and microbrews, which were quite nice on both counts. Still, in all, Madrid only gets a score of okayish. I suspect that the truly interesting parts of Spain are outside the cities.


The final day of the trip, the actual work portion was quite memorable. The meeting seemed to be ending early and our Spanish hosts informed us that they would be taking us for lunch. They made special arrangements with the restaurant to open at 1pm to serve us. That time being a bit early for lunch in Spain. What followed was an extraordinary lunch. A meat & cheese and a vegetable appetizer, wine, two kinds of paella, dessert, after meal drink, and there's probably more that I have left out. All of it was excellent and when we left the restaurant, it was 1630. That may be a lunchtime record for me that will never be broken.

Not too many pictures from the trip, but here they are.