Entering the home of Spanish

I only just made it to the shuttle bus to for my flight to Madrid! I had plenty of time until I decided to get a Mexican travel guide and a Latin American Spanish book. Talk about cutting it fine. I knew it would be close from square one, so I started running right away and in the end I only scraped in with a minute or two to spare. My 23kg pack turned running into a totally new experience.

I met a great guy, Ruben, who is from Madrid who was in Brussels for business, promoting NGOs in governmental planing from what I gather, and we talked for much of the trip to Madrid.

I met up with John Logos (an old friend from Oz who worked on our house with David and Kimon) and John's lady friend, Silvia. We headed for the mountains outside of Madrid, where we stayed for a few days. The house, care of Silvia's sister, is located in a snow resort village called Puerto Nabatherada a little over an hour out of Madrid.

John and I took a day trip to a village where he spends much of his time during the summer months, while Silvia studied in Madrid. He does a lot of building for people so he has many places throughout Spain that he has a share in. This little hut is one such place and we spend a great afternoon before heading back into town.

On the walk back into town I was treated to, arguably, one of the best sun set I have ever seen.

The plan was for John and I to leave for a farm in the south of Spain in a couple of days from Madrid, so it made sense for me to take Ruben up on his offer to show me around Madrid a bit.

He was open for me to come down for a few days and stay with him and see Madrid a bit. I jumped on the train in Puerto Nabatherada and enjoyed a slow ride off the heights of the snow covered mountains and met up with Ruben in the swarming night life of Madrid. There was a bit of a complication with staying with Ruben, his land lord(Juan Carlos) had decreed I was not welcome, so we arranged a hostel in the centre of Madrid. Later that evening Juan Carlos retracted that decree. I had already booked the hostel and we felt more comfortable giving Juan Carlos his space so I opted to stay at the hostel.

The Spanish love to party, so quite appropriately Ruben and I went out to the birthday party of a friend of his and enjoyed our selves until the early hours in the morning.

Once the party came to close, I jumped in a taxi with some people leaving the party for a nightclub in down town Madrid at 4:30am, with the hope of getting out near my hostel. One of the guys in the taxi didn't stop telling me how he really wanted me to get home safely for the hole time in the taxi(30 minutes or so) and I forgot which suburb I was meant to get out at. So, in my rather poor Spanish and a bit of his English, he convinced me to get out at Anton Martin :s

So there I am at 5 am somewhere in Madrid central, a little drunk, with very little other than a map of the metro, which is closed at that hour by the way. So here's me looking a the map and trying to work out which metro stop it was that I was meant to get out at. After about half and hour I remembered I needed Tirso De Molina and started asking for directions. Thankfully it turned out I was only one suburb away from Tirso De Molina. The only reason I remembered I needed to be in Tirso De Molina was because I remembered thinking of semolina :p By 6am I was in bed in the hostel. Quite an experience.

The following afternoon Ruben took me on a wonderful tour by foot and metro of Madrid, explaining much of the history behind the architecture and culture. This was a great introduction to Spain. Thanks so much Ruben.

John and I met up the following morning and took the 6 hour bus trip to Totana in the south of Spain. We were picked up from the little village of Totana and taken to a small farm nestled in the hills about 15km to the north.