More Madrid 1

Firstly apologies - blogger is playing up on me and I have had to remove the photos from my post and put them in another, here's the accompanying text:

In the end there was a pretty mad dash to get from home to Victoria Station in time to catch the train to Gatwick last Friday. Even though we managed to get to Gatwick in plenty of time, the war on hand-cream meant we had about a 40 minute wait to get through security. Great. Luckily for us, Damien used to do stand-up, so he kept us entertained for about three minutes of the forty.

The delay at security meant we weren't able to make full use of the BA lounge. We three barely had time to ignore the 'Members can only take one guest into the lounge' sign, throw back pour a G + T (the drink of ruined mothers) and run.


Madrid's new terminal 4 was where we alighted, and it's beautiful. As someone who is quite easily seduced by the new and shiny, I loved it. Great toilets, funky booths, bins for recycling, what doesn't it have.? I could have stayed there for the four days (and for a while it looked like we were going to be waiting for our luggage that long), but Madrid was beckoning.

We were renting an apartment in the north of Chueca fro four days and their rep. met us (for a small fee) to drop off the key and provide some fascist comments ('We tend to find people from richer countries are the best tenants - south Americans are the worst.') Nice. Welcome to Madrid (Oh, I should stress he wasn't Spanish, even though he displayed signs of craziness). The apartment was good, roomy- newish (not as cool as the airport though), and we looked across the street into a Pilates Studio - all very Habla con Ella (Talk to Her) - Paul was beside himself.

As our last visit to Madrid was two years ago with my parents, and they are the kind of people who like to stay out drinking at bars until the early hours of the morning, we weren't aware that in a (failed) attempt to stop the botellon, the (surprise - right-wing!) Madrid council had stopped the sale of alcohol in shops after 22:00. (As if that will stop people drinking on the streets). So, we had no choice but to go out for a drink and chose Liquid. Liquid is a videobar and was in the middle of a Madonnathon when we arrived (at around 1:40, passing people in the street eating dinner as we went - those Spanish are crazy...), which proved once again that gay men the world over are pretty much the same. We decided to call it a night at 4:00, as at that hour only clubs were open and we didn't want to spend our entire holiday sleeping (and we didn't trust ourselves ounce were inside a club).


Saturday saw us just walking in central Madrid (sol, Santa Ana, Chueca, Plaza Major etc), grabbing some tapas, then going to the Prado. Bosch. Tick. Goya. Tick. El Greco. Tick. Velaquez. Tick. Oh and back to the Ruebens. Tick. It was a beautiful day, so we hit the Retiro for a walk in the 28C sun. Lovely. I was very thankful that I had worn shorts and not jeans, in fact I believe we all were.

Dinner that night was booked for midnight (it was the earliest they could fit us in - those Spanish are crazy....), so at our ages that meant a siesta was mandatory. So after a nap and a fairly rigourous beauty regimen (not me - that was Paul and Damien), we headed down to meet some friends for pre-dinner (for us - post-dinner for them) drink at 23:30 in Chicote, a fantastic art-deco cocktail bar, famous for not having closed during the civil war. Dinner itself was a little disappointing for me, but I shouldn't really complain - it was more down to my choices than the restaurant and it was a snip compared to London prices. We did consider going for another drink after dinner, but decided to have a relatively early night (at 3:30 - those Spanish are crazy). We passed one of Madrid's legendary early-morning clubbing traffic jams (we were staying near to Pacha).


Having been worded up by friends in London and Madrid that the best clubbing iwas to be had on Sunday at Space of Sound, we headed there Sunday afternoon. (not before Pual had danced on the balcony in his underwear, and been caught by the women acrooss the street - very amusing). SOS was very good and we made some new friends - Jose-Maria and Carlos from Madrid, and Jorge and Mark from Belgium. Carlos turned out to be a riot. I was calling him Spanish Damien, mainly becuase of his stupid jokes. After Space of Sound Carlos persuaded us to go to another club via the the Metro. Carlos was dressed in a Adidas boiler-suit and as we entered the second club, the bouncers asked him if he was there to fix something, which had Damien and I in fits of giggles. At one point in the evening,a midget appeared and started having his photo taken with people - it was all very surreal.


Monday we were pretty subdued, so grabbed a Menu del dia for lunch (for 12 Euro! 3 courses for less than £10 - those Spanish are crazy!), then went for another long walk and hung out in few plazas. Mondays are for eating in, so we found a market and bought far too much chorizo, jamon, olives and cheeses etc for dinner. (Paul caused an international incident with a little old lady - 'Are you still buying things?' she asked glaring at him). We polished it off with a couple of bottles of wine. It doesn't get much better than that.

Tuesday after picnicing in Plaza Santa Ana, we booked a couple of hours at the turkish baths and went and detoxed - it was very relaxing and just what we needed after the excesses of the previous few days. We all signed up for the 'exfoliating massage', which involved being pounded by a plump Spanish lesbian with exfoliating gloves on.

Madrid was great fun - it's one of my favourite cities in Europe. It has a great combination of nice people ( there were at least four instances where random strangers went out of their way to help us, which was great), the city's pretty, there's good nightlife and food, and then there's the weather. I can't wait to visit again.