Friday, March 29, 2002 9:50<\/p>\n
Weather: Cool and sunny<\/p>\n
Location: La Suiza coffee shop, Plaza de Santa Ana, Madrid<\/p>\n
I\u00b4m enjoying a distinctly un-Lenten pan chocolat, oozing with dark chocolate and covered with slivered almonds, with a fresh orange juice and cafe con leche on the side. La Suiza is basically right outside the hostal where we\u00b4ll be staying for the weekend, so I suspect I\u00b4ll be in here on a daily basis.<\/p>\n
The train brought me to Atocha station on schedule at 9:05 last night. I had a blurry memory from the first time through Madrid that the Metro had been easy to use, and indeed it proved itself again: the automated ticket machines even speak English!<\/p>\n
The Plaza de Santa Ana, where the hostel is situated, is at the centre of a trendy area, and there were crowds of people in the street. The hostel’s discrete signage was a bit hard to find, but it turned up tucked in the northwestern corner, next to the massive Hotel La Reina Victoria. The first impressions weren’t promising: the outside door led into a dimly lit corridor leading to a creaking old staircase with an extremely shabby carpet. Up a couple of flights the staircase wasn’t lit at all, and briefly walked up in pitch darkness until I worked out that the little glowing lights were on timer switches for the main lights.<\/p>\n
The main who let me in looked a bit uncertain that there were in fact rooms, and I had a brief vision of trekking door to door through the many hostels of the neighbourhood, but a quick check with his wife and I was shown to a clean, but small single room next to the shared bathroom.<\/p>\n
After a good night\u00b4s sleep, everything started looking up. I got up, had a hot shower (although at one point the water briefly cut out, leaving me with my hair full of shampoo) and prepared to set out.<\/p>\n
First priority was making sure Paul, Patrick and Kelly have a place to stay. I wrote out arrival and departure days, and with many visual aids, a few words of Spanglish, and about 20 minutes, managed to communicate the details to my hosts. They were able to offer a double to add to the single I\u00b4m in, starting tonight, and another double on Monday, so we\u00b4re all set.<\/p>\n
Second priority is laundry: today\u00b4s my last day in clean clothes otherwise. I found the local laundromat easily enough, but it, as with most of the other shops, is shut tight for Good Friday. I guess I\u00b4m back to washing my own clothes again.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Friday, March 29, 2002 9:50 Weather: Cool and sunny Location: La Suiza coffee shop, Plaza de Santa Ana, Madrid I\u00b4m enjoying a distinctly un-Lenten pan chocolat, oozing with dark chocolate and covered with slivered almonds, with a fresh orange juice and cafe con leche on the side. La Suiza is basically right outside the hostal […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-148","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2002-mediterranean-tour","category-travel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.tomleslie.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/148","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.tomleslie.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.tomleslie.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.tomleslie.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.tomleslie.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=148"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blog.tomleslie.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/148\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":470,"href":"https:\/\/blog.tomleslie.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/148\/revisions\/470"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.tomleslie.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=148"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.tomleslie.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=148"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.tomleslie.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=148"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}