Last weekend Justin and I made the brave trip to Madrid for New Year's. Absolutely fantastic! It is such an incredible city and the people there have so much fun. It's interesting though because everyone says the rest of Spain overshadows Madrid, but I think that gives it some charm. My first time to Spain...and it was quite an experience.
After getting off the plane, the first thing we noticed was the smell. Not an ordinary smell, sort of a drilling into metal smell. I saw some construction looking tape and lots of bags lying around in a fairly organized fashion, so just assumed the brand new airport was getting more construction done. Oh was I wrong. The Basque separatist group ETA decided to end the nine-month cease-fire by exploding a huge car bomb in the parking garage of the terminal where I was going to land 9 hours later. Read about it here. I don't want to call this sort of thing a tradition for me. At least an unfortunate coincidence. Luckily, once again, I was pretty far away when it actually happened.
The strange thing was that they didn't tell us anything about it. So we carried on thinking it was construction until the next morning when we picked up the paper. I did have suspicions, though, when they put us on some random bus to another terminal and I could see smoke coming from our terminal. Crazy.
After that, we knew this trip would be an experience. It didn't let us down. The tapas style of going out basically resulted in five days of bar hopping for us. We'd have a little bite and a drink somewhere, and then head out to see what looked good down the street. And then stumble home between 4-6 in the morning!
So the night starts out like this:
And ends like this:
New Year's Eve was pretty crazy too. We bought tickets to a really cool club called Palacio de Gaviria which is right by Madrid's Time Square, Puerta Del Sol. So we thought we'd grab a bite to eat, head down to Sol, and then over to our club. Unfortunately, the tradition in Madrid is to eat dinner with your family till about 1am, and then go out to the clubs. So there was almost NO bars or restaurants open. Hard to imagine. In one of the most vibrant cities in the world, we walked around from 10-11:30 looking for a restaurant. We found a couple but they had been booked for ages. So what does any respectable 20-something in a suit do at a time like this? We went to the kabob shop, met a crazy french guy who promptly fell in love with Justin (much to his dismay), and then headed to Sol.
Last year we were near Time's Square so there were lots of comparisons. The most incredible difference was that there were almost NO police anywhere. People were generally cool and just happy, but some were climbing up and dancing on store signs and newspaper booths. No problem. So we bought 12 grapes each (one for each bell chime at midnight), a cheap bottle of champagne, and joined in the revelry.
The Palacio was magnificent! It is actually a former palace. Two main dance floors, one had huge ceilings and played techno and Spanish music. The other was mostly pop and American music, so we kinda went back and forth between trips to the side rooms to relax. Here's me ruining another good picture:
Did you notice I got glasses?!? How sad!! Ok well lots more to tell, but I'll save that for some other time. I wish everyone a wonderful and healthy 2007. Come visit this year if you haven't! And if you have, come again!!
Cheers,
Dan
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