Madrid November 2017

Made the connection from Munich - Madrid - hold to circle Madrid for about 20 minutes due to heavy inbound air traffic, but otherwise both flights were smooth as silk. Weather was cloudy/sunny in Madrid when we arrived - supposed to rain tonight - so far so good at 7pm. Have been up for about 27 hours now - just took about an hour nap. Will be hitting the rack early tonite!

Decided on taking the metro to our apt. Puzzled over the ticket machine for a few moments but that is normal. Ended up buying a ticket that gives you 10 rides for 12,20 Euros and we’ll see how that goes. Had my. handy dandy little metro app “Transit” which directed me to the right lines and even how to walk to the apt. It took a bit to get it going because I was down in the subway and then had to go back up to get a better signal so I could get it working. Wasn’t bad getting on the metro , but at the 2nd stop the mob descended and then it was packed till we made our switch to the next line. It was interesting to listen to the high speed chatter in Spanish - think we just had a big group of kids who decided to pile into our car.

Got off at Plaza de Espana and had about a 12 min walk to the apt. Not sure why the app didn’t send us to a closer stop but no big deal and we got to see more! Messaged our host via the AirBnB app (not easy to do down in the subway) that we would arrive at 4:30pm and bingo - right on the dot. Rather amusing when we got to the building - we really didn’t realize our apt number because I hadn’t paid all that much attention to it other than the street number, so we were standing outside a tad clueless with about 50 different room numbers we could punch. We then ran in to the night manager, a nice old guy, who didn’t speak a word of English. He tried to tell us we were in the wrong building and we should go down the street to #5 and go to Apt 3c. He practically shooed us out of the place. I thought this was pretty odd, but I walked down the street to #5, checked it out - decided this didn’t look right, so pulled out my phone and looked up the address of the AirBnB again and saw what it was supposed to be, so returned to the original building and punched the right room buzzer this time and our host answered! When we got upstairs, she laughed and said he is a crazy old man who does this all the time to people trying to check in - sends them all over the place until they have to call the host! Welcome to Spain!

Got a quick run down of all the good places to see in Madrid from our host and a quick run down of the place (https://abnb.me/EVmg/bg0DZfZmMH) and she was gone - nice, but brief - could be because she has 20 apts in Madrid she cares for! Spoke good English - that was a good thing for us! :). Crashing now for a few hours.Okumaya devam et