Spain Day 1 and 2

I think I will post about each day of our trip over the next several days so that this isn't a hugely long post to read through.

Our first day in Madrid actually started the day before when we left Ottawa on Wednesday, Nov 5 around 3:30 pm. We took a smallish plane to Montreal which, thankfully, was not a turbo prop but a decent size jet. In the Montreal airport, we had a bite to eat and boarded our plane to Paris aroud 8 pm. We were stuck with a window and middle seat with another guy in the aisle seat. It was quite squishy. We got individual TVs with lots of movie choices. We landed in Paris a little bit late with dense, dense fog that we touched down without realizing how close we were to the ground. From our plane we had to take a bus to the terminal (I guess there aren't enough gates for all the flights that come in to that airport). Then we had to go through Customs and security. By this time our flight to Madrid was halfway through boarding so we ran through the airport and were just praying our luggage would make the transfer. Well, we made our flight with time to spare and as we looked out the window we saw a little van drive up with a few bags on it and our 2 bags got pulled off and put on the plane. What a relief! And so funny that we actually saw that happening. At this time, it was 9:30 am Paris time and 4:30 am Ottawa time. We hadn't slept much on the flight over so we actually caught some shut-eye on this short flight. Landing in Madrid, we saw amazing landscapes.

The airport was fairly quiet when we arrived and we got our luggage and found our way to the Metro. After a bit of confusion, we bought some tickets and took the 45 min Metro trip to our hotel with one line switch on the way. When coming above ground, it took a few min to get our bearings but finally, headed in the right direction to our hotel. Our hotel was on the 8th floor of a highrise building on a fairly busy and main tourist street in Madrid. We took an elevator that you had to manually open and close the doors and it was open to the stairwell. I'll upload a picture later as I don't have one here with me.

Once in our room we crawled into bed and slept until around 5pm. Then we got up and went out on the town. We found a market and bought some scarves, staple apparel in any European country.
We met up with Tim deJong (Reuben's best man in our wedding) and his sister, Esther, at a pub and then they took us to this Sangria pub.

I'm not sure what it was called but it was in a basement and had really curvy ceilings and lots of Spanish poetry written on the walls. It was 10 euros for a pitcher of Sangria and we thoroughly enjoyed it. Our only trouble with the restaurants in Spain was the smoke ... every other person smoked. It was totally overwhelming. We're still coughing it up!

That was our first day and a half. Stay tuned for more adventures ....