Seeing the sights in the worlds biggest village….

So, I´ve been back in Madrid these last few days and I´ve decided this place has to be the worlds biggest village. Since Thursday I´ve bumped into no fewer than seven different people I´ve met in hostels over the last few weeks in Spain – that has it´s advantages and disadvantages, though I guess it´s a side effect of spending such a long period of time in the same country out of season.

Mostly I have just acknowledged the person, or maybe had a quick chat but I had a pleasant suprise this afternoon when I was wandering around the Reina Sofia and bumped into Clara, a girl I spent a couple of days with in San Sebastian and Bilbao. I was at a loose end and she and her friend were first-timers in the city so we spent a pleasant afternoon strolling around the place, drinking coffee and they enjoyed/endured the benefit of my knowledge, it was a nice, relaxing way to spend an afternoon I had no other plans for, especially after last night….

If we count the four separate periods I have spent in Madrid on this trip independently I´ve now visited the place nine times over the last 18 months or so, as you´d expect I have now seen pretty much everything – although last night I saw something new, and it wasn´t particularly pleasant.

It was a typical mad Saturday night in Madrid, I´d hooked up with a bunch of people from the hostel and we´d headed out to do the Madrid “thing”, jumping from tapas bar to tapas bar eating early on, before heading to a couple of drinking bars, at about 230 we hit a so-called “discobar”, and that´s when the fun started.

A discobar is so-called because basically it´s a bar where music is played and there is a dancefloor, the particular bar we went in has windows looking out from the dancefloor on the same level of the street, we ended up by the window next to a group of three local girls who were dancing, giving a bit of a performance for the passers-by, many of whom stopped to join in, make fun of and generally just have a bit of a laugh with the girls and us from one side of the window to the other, all except one drunken/drugged-up/mentally disturbed tramp, who took things a little too far.

Having lived in Bradford, Salford and Hull I thought I´d seen it all when it came to deviant behaviour from scrotes, but this guy took things to new extremes – it started off harmlessly enough with lewd gestures in the direction of the girls, but then things took a sinister twist when he removed his trousers and stood there dancing in his lovely grey y-fronts. Before too long it became obvious that he was getting, erm, excited by what he was doing but he got a little bit too excited, the y-fronts were cast aside and, for want of a better way of explanation, the guy starting pleasuring himself while looking into the bar from the street. Which was nice and like I said, a sight I hadn´t seen in the city before despite my many visits – and it´s one I hope I don´t have to see again.

So, it´s back to Bradford in a few days and decisions will have to be made about what I am going to do come January, am I any clearer than I was six weeks ago? Not really and I´m just going to forget about it for the next few days. I´m about to head down to the Vicente Calderon for the Atletico v Getafe derby game then tomorrow it´s on to Barcelona and another little reunion, though this one planned, with a girl I met in Madrid a few weeks back. It should be fun but I doubt I´ll see anything to top last night!

The Joys of Hostel Life, part deux

Regular readers may recall this from a couple of weeks back, one of the best aspects of travel, and backpacking in particular, are the people you meet. That day was a great example of that, Wednesday night in Bilbao was at the opposite end of the spectrum.

I made the decision not to bother heading to Madrid overnight and getting my head down for some sleep instead, so I trundled back to the hostel I´d stayed in at the weekend, walked into my room to be confronted by well, basically a scally, straight away I could tell he was Brit and he sported the oh so fashionable combination of a Ralph Lauren (knock-off) shirt, tracksuit bottoms and big shiny shoes. Unfortunately I hadn´t had time to come up with some story about me not speaking English before he introduced himself and I had to admit I was a fellow Brit, big big mistake.

Within minutes he was giving me a sob story about how he had “lost” all his money after being ripped off by some Spaniard so he had been unable to make it to the airport to catch his flight home, he spent the next ten minutes or so giving me a sob story about how no-one back home would help him out, his mother had abandoned him to live by himself in a crack-house at the age of 12 and so on and so forth, my heart was bleeding (honest) as he basically asked me for money without explicitly doing so, but I just played dumb and didn´t refer to it, much to his disappointment as he kept banging on about it being great to meet another Englishmen because no-one else here would help him.

I soon made my excuses and left to check out a bar or two, and luckily when I got back to the room at about 1am he was asleep, I called it a night and was asleep too, until about 230 when I was woken by someone shaking me, the someone being him, and he proceeded to ask me whether I wanted to buy his three “genuine” Ralph Lauren shirts for €50, I politely refused but was kept awake for a further ten minutes as he did the same to the other two blokes in the dorm, none of whom were impressed by the interruption.

The rest of the night passed with me sleeping with one eye open in fear of my possessions with this dodgy guy on the prowl until I was again awoken at 7 with him now offering me his oh so tasteful thick gold chain for the bargain sum of €30 – I wasn´t so polite with my refusal this time but that didn´t stop him continuing to try and hawk his stuff to the other guys in the room, again with no success.

After finally raising myself for the day I had to endure another sob story from him as he again tried to swindle some cash out of me “if only I could meet someone who could help me out, as soon as I get back to Nottingham I could send them the money”, “I can´t ask my parents, my mum has disowned me and I haven´t seen my dad for 15 years” there were even tears at this point until he finally sensed he was getting nowhere with me and came out with, what was apparently, the truth – he´d recently been released from prison back home and was in Bilbao to do some sort of drug deal which had gone wrong and left him penniless, I resisted the temptation to laugh, falsely wished him luck in his quest to get home (not that the Spaniards deserve to endure him) and quickly got of there!

It´s always interesting to meet a character, and he certainly was that! Anyway, I headed back to Madrid on the bus yesterday and I´m firmly planted here now for ten days or so, I´ve arranged a meeting with some kind of agency next week who place English speakers into teaching jobs and I´ve even found out about a couple of jobs going for English speakers (basically administration) which I´m going to investigate further now. I´m still not 100% sure about what I want to do after Christmas but at the moment I´m leaning towards heading off and seeing a bit more of the world, after all Madrid and Spain will always be here if and when I get back.

The Joys of Hostel Life

Before I travelled last year and had stayed in hostels I have to admit I was pretty wary of them, everyone has heard stories, everyone has their pre-conceptions, but apart from one or two incidents I haven´t had any real problems in them wherever I´ve been.

I still meet people, and talk to friends, who would like to travel more, but are put off by the fact that they would have to stay in hostels for financial reasons but don´t really want to, I´d strongly urge everyone to do it because they are, in the most part, nowhere near as bad as you think and usually lots of fun.

Take my last couple of days as an example, after my siesta on Sunday (I´m really getting into that now) I stumbled into the kitchen in my hostel for a glass of water, this was at about 630, there was an Australian girl, Suzanne in there and 5 and a half hours later we were being kicked out as the kitchen closed. During the course of the night we´d been joined by three other girls and we´d just spent an enjoyable evening chatting, exchanging travel (and other) stories and, as it turned out three of us were in Spain looking for work, links, information and contacts. I even managed to get a free meal out of the evening as the girls raided the cupboards for the food that had been left behind by departed backpackers and cooked up an interesting mix of pasta, rice, oatmeal and god knows what else. It required minimum effort on my part though, as a gent, I did volunteer to do the washing up. If I add my free meal to the fact that Amy took my washing to the laundrette on Saturday, as mentioned earlier, I can definitely say I´ve been onto a good thing these last few days.

Everyone apart from me was actually leaving the hostel yesterday so we said our goodbyes and went our separate ways in the morning, only to bizzarely end up bumping into each other by the gates of the Retiro park in the early afternoon. After that we went for lunch, did a little bit of sightseeing then headed back to the park where we spent the afternoon lounging around in the sun, chatting a lot more and drinking the occassional beer, hopefully I´ll have the pictures to follow at some point.

It was all good fun, made for a cheap night and day and is something that wouldn´t have happened if we´d all been locked away in our own hotel rooms somewhere. Most importantly of all, how else would I be able to get myself into a situation where I could spend so long in the company of four attractive young women (without paying for it)?!!