Madrid, Spain!

My roommate Ashlynn and I took off for a weekend adventure to Madrid, Spain with just our backpack packed of clothes and passports in hand. We flew out of Dublin around noon and arrived to Madrid at 4:45 PM. We were able to use the train to get us from the airport to our hostel. We stayed at the 2060 The Newton Hostel. The Hostel was super clean and well decorated. This made up for it being off the beaten path. By the time we got to our hostel and unpacked for the weekend, it was 7 PM. We googled best places to eat in Madrid and we ended up eating restaurant la primera, this was about a 25 minute walk away from us but was on the main drag in Madrid called the Gran Via. This dinner was so good, this was first time we experienced a language barrier in Spain. I was able to speak Spanish and order meal! I was proud of myself throughout the trip being able to recall the Spanish I have learned from high school and college. After dinner we went to couple roof tops. The first stop we had to pay a cover to get up to the rooftop but we didn’t have to wait in line which was worth it! Azotea del Circulo was the 2nd coolest rooftop I’ve been on. So many views and well decorated made it easy to enjoy a couple drinks here. After we finished our drinks, we went to Radio Madrid. This rooftop was on the way back to our hostel and enjoy another view of the Madrid nightlife. We stayed here for one drink and then just was beat. I would recommend going to the Azotea del Circulo rooftop over Radio Marid. We got back to our hostel and called it a night.

We slept in until 10 AM, we didn’t realize how tired we were from yesterday but the sleep was well needed for our big day ahead of ourselves. Our first stop was the furthest outside of town, this was only a 20-minute train ride away from our hostel. This was the Temple of Debod, unfortunately the long was too long to wait in but, we enjoyed the view at the top of the hill the temple was placed on. We could see the whole city from here. We were able to walk to the Royal Palace after the temple (only 10 minutes) and we couldn’t believe how much security they had around the palace. In front of it they had artwork to replicate the Friends coach and was by far the cutest picture from the weekend. Next to the palace was the catholic cathedral. The cathedral had multiple visits by the pope and was beautiful. It was just after noon and on our way to Plaza Mayor we saw them shooting a television show! We had no idea what it was for but it was cool to see the production and behind the scene action. The scene was shot just in a random alleyway. We stopped at the market on our walk as well, the market de san miguel was packed! There even was a huge bar in this market that everyone was watching on soccer match at. We walked through Plaza Mayor and saw the amazing architecture on the buildings. In general, the architecture of all the buildings in Madrid were gorgeous and colorful. We grabbed hamburgers to refuel ourselves before we went to Museum del Prado. The museum included so many different Spanish, Italian, Dutch, French, German paintings. It also included 250 sculptures dating all the way back to the 17thcentury. By the museum was El Retiro Park. This park was huge and had a big pond in the middle of it. The park was well kept and was so big! There were points were we got lost and had to put in our google maps how to get back on track. El Retiro was our last stop of sightseeing, we had a 27-minute walk back to our hostel. By this time, our legs felt like jello, we walked 26,000 steps! We took a quick nap back at our hostel before we headed out to get tapas for dinner! We went on the main drag of all the tapas restaurants and went to Cokuy. The food was ok but the drinks were amazing! We spent almost three hours here partially because it was raining super hard out and we were trying to wait out the rain. Once the rain calmed down we went to the 28thbest bar in the world. This bar was called Salmon Guru! From the drinks to the decorations it was so funky and hip! By this time, it was super late and we were exhausted, we started walking back to our hostel just after 1 AM. We had an early morning of getting to the airport and catching our flight back to Dublin. We woke up just after 6 AM and headed to the train station to catch the train to the airport. We got to the airport just before 8 AM. We grabbed breakfast at the airport and caught our flight back home!

Overall the trip was amazing and Ashlynn made it so fun! It was gorgeous there but the language barrier did impact our ability to communicate from time to time. I’d highly recommend anyone to visit Madrid, it truly is a bumping city that never sleeps.