Madrid

Well, here we are in Madrid! We flew from London's Gatwick Airport via EasyJet which we remembered as being not so "easy," but this time it was better.  We only had to queue for about twenty minutes as compared with well over an hour a few years back.  The flight was about half an hour late departing, but we made up some time en-route.  We actually felt quite lucky to get away from London.  The weather was rapidly disintegrating with temperatures dropping to highs of 1 and 2 degrees and risk of snow.  But get away we did.

On the flight, one thing that interested us was the fact that the on-board menu was both more extensive and cheaper than that one finds on its Australian clone, Jetstar. We also found the staff extremely helpful, letting old codgers like us board early.

Many friends who have travelled in Spain told us that Madrid was a bit dissapointing compared to other cities in the country.  So far (admittedly very early days) we have not found it so.  It is a bigger city than we anticipated filled with interesting churches, fountains, parks and fascinating buildings.  As we are wont to do, we took a hop-on, hop-off bus ride to familiarize ourselves with the main sights and sites.  Over the next several days we will be returning to various of these for a better look.  Already our list is longer than the availability of the time we will have here.

One of the problems one always finds in a new city is locating a decent, reasonably priced place to eat.  We had a pretty ordinary dinner last night, but when we stopped for lunch today in a little cafe near our hotel we were so impressed we are planning to have dinner there tonight.  More on this tomorrow.

Hotel Liabeny

Our hotel is the very elegant Hotel Liabeny, and when we left the airport yesterday and got into our cab, Bruce in what he thought was a reasonable approximation of Spanish asked for the hotel, the "Lie a beany".  The driver scratched his head and when we showed him the name on a piece of paper he almost broke down laughing.  "No, senor," he explained, "Lee ah-veny".  Oh well, at least we made the effort.