Training Day

Today we spent a majority of our day trying to get train tickets. It was not too exciting for us, and will be even less so for you, so I'll keep it brief. We left the hostel early for the train station, where we waited in line for an hour and realized that we would miss our hostel's checkout time if we stayed long enough to be helped. We hustled back to POP and just barely made the 11:30 deadline, then went back to the train station, waited several hours, learned that the overnight for Portugal that evening "es completo," and booked one for the following evening. To save time, we also made reservations for the train back to Madrid and the high-speed day train into Seville.

With a substantially lighter wallet, I had extra bounce in my step as we made our way up to Stace's old stomping grounds. I got to see where she lived when studying here several years ago and along the way we stopped and snacked at the fanciest damn ice cream shop ive ever seen.






It was mid evening when we decided that it would be a good idea to find a place to stay for the night, so we made our way back to POP. There we inquired about vacancies and crossed our fingers that Stacey's bag had been delivered unto us by the luggage gods.
We received negative answers to both, but POP mentioned that they had a sister hostel aross town with room. They called ahead for us and reserved a spot and, after checking our email and chatting with other guests, we made our way through Plaza Mayor to Musas Residence Youth Hostel.

Last night at POP Hostel we had been content (I was just trying to be flowery with my description earlier, Mrs. Schwartz. It wasn't really bad at all), but Musas - which had opened just 20 days prior and only had warm water on a single floor - really blew us away. Come to think of it, I really should have taken more pictures, but only have one of our room. It was clean, bright, open, artsy, friendly, and in a beautiful part of Madrid that left me with a completely different taste of the city than POP.
I was exciterd because finally we were in an area of Madrid that didn't feel and smell like the less reputable areas of downtown LA. We were 3 or so blocks away from the gorgeous Plaza Mayor and could get to the Palacia Duques de Ucedo Viaductyo, Palacio Real, and Plaza España in less than half an hour. That evening we walked past the palaces before heading back to the hostel. We had heard word of a festival in the Latin Quarter, but we were too tired for a night of debauchery that "would show us just how liberal a town like Madrid could be." We hit our matresses and were out.