Madrid III

4/3 - Madrid - Sunday morning Kayleigh showed us where to get some cheap coffee ... not many people were on the streets - I'm guessing they were recovering from their previous night. Every Sunday morning there is a Market about 1km from the center of Madrid. We passed a famous square (pictured) on the way.

The market was easily 10x the size of the market in Cangas de Onis. You could find anything there. Mostly clothes, but many stands had souvenirs, tools, cheeses, and one even had juggling equipment.

After the market Kayleigh brought us to try something new. We got "Chupas" - which is basically like having a heart attack for lunch. Chupas are strips of fried dough which you dip in thick, hot chocolate. Needless to say - they were delicious.

We wandered around the city for a bit. Madrid is really beautiful - very classic/old, and really clean. It's a great combination of traditional/old architecture, and a very modern/young lifestyle of staying up late and being social. For Dinner we went to "LATERAL" - a restaurant that serves many smaller dishes which you share w/ your party. Among these dishes were the delicious "Patatas Bravas"... (Brave Potatoes) - potatoes cooked in a sweet and spicy red sauce.

Our goal for the night was to find Street Beers. Street Beers are cans that are sold after-hours by people wandering the streets. IF an Indian man approaches you on the street, holding a cooler, and says: "Cerveza?" - you've just been offered a street beer. On our quest to find one of these guys we stopped by our Hostal where we ran into our room-mate. He had never heard of street beers - so when I told him about our quest he came along. Brian's a really cool guy (on the right) - lives in Illinois, but has been all over Europe, and South America. He knows English, German, Dutch, and a small bit of Mandarin.

After finding our street beers, we stopped by an Irish Pub to listen to some live music before we retired for the night (~1:00am - very early for Madrid).