I went to Spain! If you didn’t already know, the plan came together super fast. In a nutshell, Danny’s cousin was getting married in Southern Spain. None of his sisters (who are much closer to this particular cousin than Danny) were going tho because they’re all having babies/it’s expensive. So nine or ten days before the trip was starting, Danny’s dad calls us to ask if Danny wanted to accompany him to the wedding because his date couldn’t make it.

Danny, being awesome, was all like NOT WITHOUT MY GAL/”Can Ansley come if we pay for her ticket?” Bam! We’re going to Spain.

Then, given the days and days of mostly-paid-for-Spain-trip, we were like “LET’S SPEND EXTRA DAYS IN MADRID!!!!!” so we got to Madrid Friday (Valentine’s Day, btw) and spent three nights in a hostel in Madrid to explore.

Here’s some stuff I saw in Madrid on the first night.

This bookshop actually folds up in the walls of that building every night. In the background you can see the famous chocolateria, San Gines. People flock there until 4am or later for churros and hot chocolate.

Getting into a few more photos I took in day two as a taster… here’s Danny in front of the Department of Communications.

That’s right, their department of communications has a palace. Because they’ve really got too many to know what to do with, so like… government offices.

Here’s the Department of Agriculture:

Here’s the Banca de España by night.

The train station has a rainforest:

Danny in a park!

Danny looking over there!

Danny spent a semester abroad in Madrid and, very modestly, was super worried about his Spanish, but he is much more conversational than I ever was in either French or Italian despite taking more semesters of both. Foreign languages just aren’t my thing it seems.

But let us start from the beginning. And there are lots of photos involved. Also, I went into detail, so I’m not offended if you don’t read this. I won’t quiz you.

Our flight out of New York was cancelled. And, oh yeah, they didn’t bother to tell us. Fortunately I like to check flights before I head to the airport, and upon checking this one, found that “it did not exist.”

Not “it’s cancelled” or “delayed” but simply there was no record of the flight at all. So I call Swiss Air and I’m like WTF. And they’re all “oh yeah it was totally cancelled because of snow” and I’m like “when were you ever going to let ME know” and they were like “ha, we weren’t.”

Fun. SOOO the blasé lady on the phone said “well we can get you out on the same flight tomorrow.” Problematic since hostels in Europe work in such a way that if you don’t check in by a certain time you forfeit your whole reservation, so we’d have basically been out $200 AND needed another place to stay for 2 nights.

I said “oh, is there any way we can still get out tonight?” and she was like “oh yeah I mean there’s another flight tonight if you want it” and um, yes. So YAY!

I’d intended to sleep for most of the plane ride, but then the plane had the ENTIRE new season of Downton Abbey (which isn’t even out in America) on their inflight entertainment, so how were we to sleep?!

So we got to Spain without sleeping a wink for 25 hours but we were so very excited that we rallied and went right back out after dropped our stuff off at the hostel, which turned out to be a really nice little place where we had a private room and our own shower and sink. We felt up to it, so we did some walking around/site seeing and then ended up at the San Miguel market — a large glass structure with many food booths inside. We bought a couple glasses of 3 euro wine and wondered around the food market, buying a few tapas here and there. We had small portions of ham croquettes, octopus, paella, more wine… but then we were about ready to just die so we went home and went to bed.

One thing we did see that night before we got to the market was the outside of the Monasterio de las Descalzas (the Convent of the Barefoot Nuns, apparently) which is a convent started in the 1500s where the nuns take a vow of silence and stay inside for all their lives. I thought it was so strange since it’s it the middle of a city, but really, the convent was there before Madrid was the capital or a major metropolitan area.

Being in Europe very much throws into sharp relief how recently the human race really settled things. I’ll get to more extreme examples in a bit.

Apparently the door to the convent will open about once a month, well after midnight, for food deliveries. Danny claims to have seen the door ajar once — a very rare sight indeed. He lingered a while, but saw no habit.

So our second day in Madrid was more tourist and food oriented. We went to the Templo de Debod which is basically… no EXACTLY a 3000 (??) year old Egyptian temple dropped onto a hill in Madrid. Apparently Egypt build a dam that was going to flood a large temple complex, and they were all like “HEY wanna temple? We got extras!! We’re just gonna flood them, so… Come and get it.” It seems there is also one of these in New York, but I have no idea where.

We did go inside, but not so many pictures came out great because of lack of light and no flash allowed policies.

There there was a nice view of the city.

Afterwards, we moseyed over to Casa Mingo — a restaurant famous for the waiters pouring cider over their heads and behind their backs into cups to aerate it. Sadly, they apparently don’t do that anymore, but we did enjoy some of the best roast chicken we ever did eat.

Stuffed, we walked off some of our food babies wandering the city. Here’s some other stuff we saw while the weather was super grey.

Day three was our most exciting in Madrid. Fully recovered from our jet lag by now, we headed out for breakfast at the train station Atocha — the train station with that rainforest I mentioned.

And on to El Rastro, the Sunday market that stretches for blocks and blocks and apparently grows a little larger every week. I picked up a leather backpack there that I somehow managed to haggle down 3 euro in Spanish! Danny helped.

Then, perhaps my favorite thing of all: Juanalaloca, a modern Spanish restaurant with some truly inventive food. First we had their Tortilla Espanol, a very traditional egg and potato dish that I have had many times at tapas places in New York or Boston, almost always to my great disappointment. It’s always dry and bland with overcooked eggs and grainy potatoes.

Not here! It came out looking like apple pie, with slow-fried, almost juicy potatoes, caramalized onions, and very soft egg. YUM.

We followed it up with duck ham on toast, beef carpaccio, duck spring rolls (Danny’s favorite), truffled egg confit (both of our least favorite but still pretty good). Our last dish was the craziest and most delicious: a whole fried softshell crab on a soft Chinese bun. OM NOM.

We managed to clean ourselves up off the floor and head over to Retiro, one of Madrid’s two big parks, for a little walk. We walked through Plaza Mayor on the way.

We saw the Esplanade (big lake), the memorial to the people who died in the 2004 train bombing, and the Palacio de Cristal, which is a large see-through glass structure in the middle of the park. Vurrry pretty.

Here’s some photos of all that.

After that we enjoyed a quick nap, and despite waking up still full from lunch, decided we needed to do some more eating. Obvs.

We turned to Yelp to find us a good, inexpensive place that takes credit cards and came up with Malaspina. We got a large tapas sampler, which was mostly very yummy (I didn’t care for the anchovy one), and their patatas bravas, which were good but Danny said were not very traditional.

After that it really was bed time since we had to get up early to meet Danny’s dad (John) at the airport, which turned into quite an adventure.

Madrid’d airport is in two sections, and getting from one to the other is quite an endeavor. We went to the section of the airport WE’D come into, only to find that his dad’s airline must have come into the other. I was the only one between the three of us who had a working phone (both Danny’s and his father’s iPhones were too old), and we were already running late, so we paid for a 25 euro cab to the other part of the airport. So… that stung.

Luckily, we found John almost immediately upon reaching the terminal.

Ok more to come in Part II.

- A