Scattered throughout the world, there are certain restaurants upon which all humanity converges. Whether you are the Duke of Toledo, or Duke, of Toledo (OH), you will visit these places, and discover the food that makes them famous, as generations of people have before you. Cafe du Monde in New Orleans is one such restaurant, known for its indulgent beignets and coffee. Madrid may have something even more indulgent than these, and just as legendary. This is Chocolateria San Gines, where we had breakfast.
San Gines has served the traditional churros con chocolate since 1894. For just 8 euros you can buy 2 cups of molten decadent chocolate and a platter of 12 churros. Which, for those who do not know what those are, they're wonderful deep fried sweet dough sticks similar in flavor to a doughnut. You can coat them in sugar and cinnamon if you like, but perhaps the best way to eat them is to dip them in rich chocolate. This will fill you up and make you wonder if you have put on an extra 10 pounds from breakfast alone. I guess all of the walking we will do today will help with that.
The walking began with the hostel's free walking tour. We saw the Plaza del Sol, Royal Opera House, Royal Palace, Madrid Cathedral, and a few other sites, while learning some stuff about Madrid history (and Spanish history by extension). The Spanish have a very different relationship to their monarchs than the English do. This is probably because while English monarchs have been the models of staid conservatism, Spanish ones have not. There's enough incest to sterilize a royal house, a king consort called Paquita (he was a gay guy in the 1800s), and his wife, who the locals called "chocha loca". Translate that at your own peril, but let's just say she didn't mind having a gay husband so much. The Madrileños also went through a period where drinking water was illegal (due to bubonic plague), and everybody had to drink wine for a year. This is part of the reason why their main square burnt down 3 winters in a row before being replaced with a stone one.
The most important part of the walking tour is when they point out where to avoid if you don't want to get ripped off, and where to go for a good deal or good time. Our guide sadly informed us that the Mercado San Miguel we loved so much was a rip-off (still going to head back, most likely). She then directed us to a place she enjoyed to have lunch, which was called Rosi la Loca.
This is where Madrid started exerting it's peculiar schedule on us. We got there at 2:30, and spent 2 hours at lunch. Lunch consisted of a free welcome drink on arrival, a starter, a main course with a full sized drink, an after dinner coffee, and a shooter of a Spanish liqueur called patxaran. This cost us €12.90 per person. We also enjoyed this meal with people we met on our walking tour: an Australian guy named Will, and a girl from Portland, OR named Katelyn.
After this, we all went to the Museo Reina Sofia. This is where the national collection of modern art is held. It focuses heavily on Spanish artists like Gris, Miro, Dali, and Picasso. Chief among the pieces is Picasso's massive Guernica, arguably the most important 20th century painting. Unlike the Mona Lisa, it is of a suitably massive scale for such a famous work, and there wasn't a 10 deep crowd of selfie stick wielding tourists to block the view. After the Sistine Chapel, it's the number 2 must see painting over here.
We arrived back at the hostel at 9, just in time for an all you can eat tapas dinner. For €12 each, the hostel took us to a local tapas place, and got us all of the tapas we could eat, plus a glass of tinto de verano, a mixture of wine and lemonade. There was ham, calamari, squid, Spanish omelette, fried potatoes in garlic sauce, wings, and ham croquettes, all eaten standing at a round table. Any trash from the meal went on the floor (the tapas waiters are too busy to bother cleaning tables, and so a sure sign of a quality establishment is the presence of trash on the floor). After stuffing ourselves and having a nightcap, we returned to the hostel at midnight, having walked around 30,000 steps, or more than 13 miles.
Madrid continued to party for several hours after we went to bed.
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