A Day in Madrid

North to go South

We checked out of our apartment after 25 days in Pontevedra and walked to the train station one last time for a 1:30 pm train to Madrid. In addition to our numerous walks in Pontevedra, which often took us past the train station, we also made this walk each time we rented a car so it was a route that felt warmly familiar in a place we had come to admire.

Madrid is about 350 miles (600 km) southeast of Pontevedra. Our train originated in Vigo and arrived at the Pontevedra station from the south. We boarded and then left town heading north because the high speed train lines connect with Santiago de Compostela. The train arced eastward just below Santiago de Compostela, finally making a 180 turn south in the general direction of Madrid. The path is not geographically efficient but the speed makes up for it.

The train stopped in Ourense which we enjoyed seeing again as a reminder of how our month in Galicia began.

After Ourense, the train worked its way through a number of tunnels and across bridges until the land flattened out and then it picked up speed for the long straight shot to Madrid.

Madrid for the lame* and lazy

The train ride took four hours. When we arrived to Chamartín Station around 5:30 p.m., the rainy weather from Galicia followed us. We took the express metro (called the Cercanías) to Puerta del Sol and walked a few block in the drizzle to our hotel. Puerta del Sol was under heavy construction so navigating the sidewalks of this intensely congested train station at rush hour with luggage made the experience feel like a mosh pit.

We had less than 48 hours in Madrid before our flight to Croatia. Between the lousy weather and knowing we’d be returning to Madrid for a few days in January, we had a fairly low level of ambition on what we wanted to see and do during the visit. We also will have Henry with us in January so if we did anything too exciting, we’d end up just wanting to do it again with him.

In 36 hours, we ended up achieving only five things outside of our hotel which were: one dinner, one museum, one lunch, one purchase, and one scouting expedition.

I also a (re-)learned a lesson called “check the ATM’s exchange rate when you withdraw money in a tourist zone.” Our bank, USAA, is great about refunding ATM fees so I tend to blow through the intermediary screens on the rare occasions I need to withdraw cash. USAA, however, won’t help the financial illiterates who say “Yes” to an extortionate exchange rate. With the USD/Euro being so close to 1.0, I have even less of an excuse for getting fooled. It was pure haste, which makes pure waste. That was a $30 lesson; not the worst financial decision but it was among the dumbest because it was entirely avoidable. Slow down and read!

* the term “lame” is intended in its behavioral context and in no way is meant to offend anyone who walks with a limp.

One Dinner

After checking into the Petit Palace Posada del Peine, we picked a peck of pickled peppers and then assessed our dinner options. As Lyn read through the list, she mentioned Mesón del Champinoñes (which translates to something like “the Mushroom Tavern”) and started reading the description. It was a short walk (in the rain) and they claimed to serve not only “the best and most delicious mushrooms in the world” but also Iberian ham and…wait for it…vermut. Lyn had me at mushroom but how can you turn down a boast that bold or a nice glass of vermut.

Amazingly, they had an open table (the last open table) and we got a spot in the corner of a cave-like room decorated with fake mushrooms all over the sloping walls and ceiling. The mushrooms may not be the most delicious in the world but they were the most delicious mushrooms I’ve ever had…and I have eaten a lot of mushrooms. Seems almost like cheating when you cook them in olive oil with Iberian ham and garlic on top. They are served with two sticks each for getting them from the plate to your mouth. We quickly had nothing left but a stack of sticks.

The vermut they served was good, but we had become fond of the Galician vermú (Gallego for vermut) which is more herbal, a touch bitter, and less sweet than the Catalonian version we first discovered in Barcelona. I drank it all, of course, but vermú got added to the list of things we were already miss about Galicia. For anyone traveling to Galicia, El Petroni vermut is the gold standard and widely available. If you can find it, Povarelo won our judgment as “best in class”.

After dinner, we took a short walk in the rain (we still had our umbrellas from Galicia). Plaza Mayor was practically within eyesight of our hotel but, like Puerta del Sol, its magnificence was somewhat diminished by the vast majority of the plaza being a construction zone. We stopped for one more round of tapas near our hotel and called it a night.

One Musuem – Spain’s Museo Archaelógico Nacional (MAN)

Lyn’s early Christmas present for me was agreeing to visit Spain’s National Archaeological Museum. However, the museum was sufficiently impressive that she ended up being happy with the experience. I think I might get another Christmas present even. We learned a lot and saw some amazing artifacts. What I really loved that the exhibits tell Spain’s story and do a great job stitching together the successive eras that have shaped the national identity, especially from the Roman era onwards. It goes back much farther than that and covers the arrival and development of humans, the copper age, the iron age, and the influences of Phoenicia (specifically the city of Tyre), ancient Greece, and Carthage. Unfortunately, the second floor (one third of the museum) was closed for renovation so our tour ended with the Moorish conquest and we didn’t get into the late Middle Ages, the Christian Kingdoms, the Spanish empire, the Hapsburg and Bourbon dynasties, or the creation of modern Spain. We also apparently didn’t see a sizable collection of Greek and Egyptian artefacts. Maybe that was a blessing because we spent almost three hours just covering the ground floor and first floor.

The museum hosts temporary exhibits in the basement which at the moment was a terrific presentation about Neolithic (stone age) people who lived in the Côa River Valley (a tributary of the Duoro we saw in Porto) on the border of Portugal and Spain. In addition to seeing some interesting displays about the tools and “open air rock art” they left behind, one particularly compelling display highlighted the overlapping existence of homo sapiens and Neanderthals. We also got to meet a lovely Neolithic family and get our photo taken with them.

If you don’t like history museums, start scrolling now.

The Costitx bulls are bronze artifacts from the Talayotic culture on the islands of Mallorca and Menorca and date to approximately 500-200 B.C. Read more about them here in the Atlas Obscura.

The Visigoths were one of the “barbarian” Germanic groups that sacked Rome and eventually found their way to Spain where they ruled for almost 300 years. In the dynamics of assimilation, the Visigoths adapted to many of the Roman customs but were notable in creating the Visigothic Code of Law which, among other things, protected the property rights of married women. Much of their history was lost to Europe’s “Dark Ages” but these crowns survived. Learn more about the Visigoths here.

One Lunch – Menu del Dia

After the MAN, it was well into the afternoon and we had finally worked off our breakfast from the hotel. I’ll spare you having to look at more food photos but takeaway is that even in a European capital city like Madrid where prices tend to run higher, finding a good Menu del Dia (3-course limited selection lunch special) is a great way to save money and get enough food that it practically takes care of supper, too. My first course was Russian Salad (insalata russa) and it filled me up even before the steak and fries arrived. For dessert, I had dulce de leche which is basically rice pudding (one of my favorites). Man, I love Spanish cuisine.

One Purchase – finding a needle in a Madrileño haystack

For most American men of my vintage (and quite a few women), I would rather gnaw off my left arm than go “shopping”. However, that emotional response is inversely proportional to the specificity of the shopping mission.

In Pontevedra, we spent a morning in search of an AAAA battery (yes, a quadruple A) for Lyn’s wireless keyboard. It took four tries and four awkward conversations in Spanish but we finally found perhaps the one store in all of Pontevedra that carried AAAA batteries. Aside from the enjoyment of watching Lyn try to communicate this fairly obscure request in Spanish, I enjoyed the excitement of the hunt, the rejections, and ultimately the success.

Although AAAA batteries can indeed be found in Pontevedra, the city nonetheless has its commercial limits as a modestly sized city far away from any sizable metropolitan area. Lyn needed a USB-C data cable for transferring files from her camera’s SD card to her laptop. We came up empty handed searching for a cable in Galicia and decided we should wait until Madrid. What we didn’t know is how hard that search would be even in Madrid. Once again, it took four visits at four stores spread across several square miles. Just when we were about to give up, we found what we needed (albeit at a higher price than if we’d ordered it online before leaving home). Online shopping is convenient, but let’s hear it for brick and mortar in a moment of need.

One scouting mission – a hotel for next time

Our initial plan was to assess the Petit Palace Posada del Peine where we were staying and, if we liked it, book a triple room for out stay in mid-January with Henry. However, we ended up roasting in our room despite having the window open in the cool and rainy weather. We also were turned off by the hyper-congestion at the nearby Puerta del Sol (mosh pit), so we went for Plan B and found a two-room apartment through Booking.com about a half mile away. Since we were on the ground and had the time, we walked over to that neighborhood to check it out. Other than the nearby ATM (bankomat) that ripped me off, the neighborhood passed our sniff test, so we have a good plan to enjoy more of Madrid on our next visit.

Both the USB-C cable search and our scouting expedition had the unintended benefit of getting us off the beaten path and seeing more of the neighborhoods in the south end of the city center area. This was far from “high adventure” but traveling is always more fun when you have a purpose beyond ticking off the boxes on tourist list of “things to see”.

Our flight to Croatia departed at 1:30 pm the next day which let us enjoy breakfast and make our way by metro to Madrid-Barajas airport Terminal 2 at a civilized hour and a civilized pace. We flew on Lufthansa through Frankfurt and acquired the all-important stamps in our passports checking us out of the EU’s Schengen Zone after a terrific 63 days on the ground. We will return to Spain on December 18th and look forward to celebrating the holidays with our kids in Andalusia.