Day 0 of Spanish Vacation: Madrid on February 1st, 2017
This post follows the previous ones about flights on Qatar Airways from Hangzhou to Madrid, and is about the rest of our first day in Madrid.
After getting off the plane, the city of Madrid welcomed us with its modern and spacious passenger terminal (T4S). The only thing not so nice about that bamboo design was that my camera seemed not so sure about its white balance.
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However, that warm-hearted greeting wore out quickly, as we walked towards the airport immigration with winding queues.
To make matters worse, my newly-installed Sim-card didn't work. My fault that I later learned it's a German number and I should include country code and enable data while roaming.
To make matters even worse, I needed to answer several questions before I can use the Airport's free WiFi, which I wasn't able to because the "submit" button just didn't work.
So after a Facebook-less hour we cleared all the airport stuff and boarded the commuter train downtown.
So 4:30pm and we finally got things settled at our hotel. Given that we didn't have much of a day left, we decided to visit Museo Nacional del Prado for the rest of day (since we were still students and could enjoy free admission).
It was a little bit scary to look down along these winding stairs to the ground.
Insurance company.
Museo Nacional del Prado was a store-your-bag no-photo museum, with quite a collection of arts. My friend and I seemed particularly interested in the landscapes by Goya.
Insurance company.
Spain's lower house of representatives.
When checking into our hotel, we found there was a Five Guys just down the stairs. Since I still had vivid memory of how exactly five six people managed to run a fastfood restaurant near Rockefeller Center, we decided to give it a try.
As oily as the American ones, more expensive though.
It turned out that, the burger tasted still like the American ones, the fries were as oily. It's just that I counted 17 people working in the store instead of five (including one that stood at the doorway doing nothing, which was very Europe by the way.), which troubled me greatly.
END