Friday, Day 2 - Madrid

After I land and get my luggage and walk out of Customs Kevin is waiting for me at the door. So he and trek (This place is huge) to his apartment. Drop off all unneed clothes and pack for Egypt, we then hop back on the subway to find a restaurant that Kevin wants to take me to and on the way we get to meet one of the stinkyest bums I have ever had the displeasure of sitting near on a Subway. I wanted to take a picture but there were too many people about and well it may have been a little rude, (I would have done it otherwise since he was a monument to bumminess).

The restaurant is a small little place that serves a hundred different types of sandwiches, you just get a little card and pick what you want. The card of course is in spainish and while most things I can read or ask Kevin to translate there are somethings that even he cannot read, so of course I pick one that we both had no clue what it was and gave it a try. I also had four other sandwiches with various meats and cheeses all in all pretty good. The mystery turned out to be something Jamon or Ham, and in Madrid (known for its Jamon) everywhere seems to serve Jamon. Actually Anthony Zimmerman talks about it in his Madrid show. Jamon is salt cured pork shoulder, which they sell by the leg and you slice off a piece at time to make in the case a small sandwich. The good legs sell for nearly 1000 Euros, so it is expensive stuff.

After lunch we head back to the Airport and then to the Hilton where I got a great online deal for half price (70 euros) by using a special website that Kevin sent me to. Well it turns out that you have to be a travel agent or airline worker to get the special and they weren´t about to give me that rate so I had to man up and pay the extra 70 euros to sleep for the night.

We then head over to the mall that is next door to the Hotel (across an amazingly busy street) to kill some time. We walk the entire mall where I notice that alot of the items in the mall are actually in English, I don´t mean they are in English because they are translated for us or there for us but more like there for decoration. Some of the songs for the mall are popular american songs and people are walking around the mall wearing shirts with english sayings like good boys need not apply and other oddly phrased sayings (maybe poorly translated) all of which I thought was peculiar since they really don´t like americans too much. While looking for a cheap watch (no way to tell time for our Egypt trip) we were popping through booths looking at different things when I noticed a key chain that B would love it was a cute little skull and cross bones, and when I told Kevin he thought he would get it for her. He asked the lady the price 5 euros Holy crap 5 euros for a small little keychain I immediatly said to him that it was like 7.50us and that it was WAY too much money so he didn´t get it and when we stepped outside he said I should stop doing that, I said stop doing what, converting money it will only depress you. You just need to think about euros as dollars and if you convert all the time you will never buy anything. Writing this a couple of days later I see what he means, it is much easier to just pay the difference.
Later in the mall(insert picture of beer vending machine) we step outside to check out a go cart track and run into an interesting site, a vending machine for beer. Since the drinking age is 18 I guess it doesn´t matter that there is one next to a go cart track but it still seemed odd to me. We fully explore the mall until we get tired and since we ate not to much earlier we sit down and wait for a bit till we are hungry again (never really was hungry again but had to eat anyway).

Let me point something out before I go on to describe our meal, in Spain you do not eat dinner until about 9pm actually it is quite hard to find a restaurant that is even open before 8pm so when we walk into Grandmas Cabinet or Diner or Cafe or whatever (we never really figured out the name of the place because Kevin could not translate the second half of the name) the place is deserted and the waiter is actually cleaning the tables and seems to be setting up for the evening crowd (two hours from then) but we get him to serve us two dishes (tapas style eating) we have something that Kevin enjoys called Patatas Bravas which is fried chunks of potato with a mildly spicy red sauce (they were great) and something else from the menu that Kevin couldn´t translate so we had to try it. Well let me tell you something, sometimes picking the mystery dish is not a good idea and this might have been one of those times. We got what looked like Black Beans and rice stuffed into a hot dog casing and then baked and sliced. The problem with the dish is that there was some funny taste to the beans and rice and it seemed a little meaty so I am afraid to google the name morcilla de burgos ... AHHH I just did it to make the post, Yep that funny taste was blood. See what happens when you order what you cannot read. Other then the funny mystery taste and the fact that we were not really hungry it wasn´t all that bad and if I was not full I would have eaten my half of the dish (not if I had know what it was made of)

After dinner we head back to the hotel by taking a 6 euro Cab ride across the street(it was freezing at this point). Went to sleep and woke up 2 hours later at 21:51(time differences are really messing with my body and sleep seems to lose out alot) so I forced myself back to sleep only to have my reoccuring Manson Dream, yeah you know I am sure you had it too.

The dream goes something like this, I am in a house that is next to the Ocean (Seems like it is my house) and I tell Marlyn Manson that he cannot take my daughter out for the evening (not Becca but some other daughter that perhaps I don´t know about yet) and I am firm in my descision that she cannot go out that night with him (Perhaps another night???) so he gets angry and starts to prank me and some people I am with (was I having a party at my beach front house?) well some of the pranks include making Zombies come out of the sand at the beach scaring all my guests so I have to beat the zombies down and get everyone calmed down again. Then he orders Pizza for the party which seems like a nice things until there are bugs on the pizza so the guests think that I am being too hard and him and he is acutally a nice guy who took the time to order pizza for everyone and I try to tell them about the bugs but they don´t listen. He then calls the cops on the party saying it is too loud and again my guests are upset so I finally ask my daughter kindly ask him to stop and I know that the only way he will stop is if my daughter asks him to sincerly stop so he does stop and I wake up. Does this seem strange to anyone else? I wonder what is more odd, the dream or that I write about it in the blog of my trip.

Well after the dream I wake up and notice that Kevin is also up and we decide to watch TV since we cannot sleep and yep you guessed it, sleeps natural enemy is on. Poker, I cannot fall asleep when Poker is on so I basically stay awake from midnight to 5 am watching poker. At that point I do fall asleep again till 10 so I get some sleep just not quality.