Monday, July 2, 2018

Madrid

It was a short day today. We lost 6 hours flying over from Miami. Good thing too, because we're both pretty beat. The flight went on time and our passage through customs was smooth. We even managed to get the customs person to stamp the correct page of our passports (the ones with our visas) without too much fuss.

I'm sure we looked like your average overwhelmed tourists as we wandered around looking for our hotel shuttle, but that too went relatively easily. The shuttle showed up pretty promptly and took us to our hotel very near the airport:
It's pretty isolated out near the hotel. Laura and I went on a couple of walks trying to find anything useful--a grocery store, an ATM, but kept running into dead ends where pedestrians were clearly not meant to go. That said, the room is lovely, clean and well-appointed. Also, the international electric outlet adapters that Emily got me for my birthday work like a charm. Thanks Emily!
We exchanged a $20 at the hotel desk at the very noncompetitive rate of 0.62 euro/dollar instead of the going rate of 0.86 euro/dollar. Upside, the hotel clerk told us how much the bus to downtown cost and gave us our euros in coins that were appropriate for the bus. Consulting google maps, we were able to get downtown to the Royal Palace of Madrid using the public transportation, bus to metro to city center about 45 mins. We had no particular yearning to see the palace, but it was a goal for us as we figured out how to get about. We have a full day here tomorrow before flying to Seville on Wed. Today was just to get familiar and get something to eat. Tomorrow we'll head down there again and perhaps take a tour or visit a museum. I actually didn't get a picture of the palace, but the view out the front was typical beautiful old European cityscape (pardon me while I squint into the sun, haha):
There were also a lot of statues of famous Spaniards presumably. Like this guy:
He looks a bit like he's been hitchhiking and without luck for so long that some birds have roosted on him. There were a lot of other statues. I didn't see any women which is probably one reason why these women were protesting the patriarchy on one of the nearby squares:
Neither of us was terribly hungry, so we stopped and grabbed some empanadas at this place in the palace district:
 A few technical things. Our T-Mobile One phones work pretty well. Unlimited texting and data (albeit throttled back from US rates) with nothing to do and no extra fees.

We hit a cash machine with our Capital One debit card and after ATM fees etc, pulled about a 0.83 euro/dollar exchange rate. We also made a few credit card transactions using a Capital One Quicksilver card and pulled a 0.86 euro/dollar exchange rate (the going rate according to google). We'll try to use the Quicksilver card as much as possible. Also, if you have one of these cards and logon to your Capital One account and set up a "cash advance" PIN number, it allows the card to work with the "chip & PIN" systems ubiquitous here in Europe. The ticket machine at the metro station asked for the PIN, we used the aforementioned cash advance PIN, and the transaction completed successfully. We researched the heck out of credit cards before this trip and Capital One seems to be the best in terms of exchange rates, no foreign transaction fees, and now the chip & PIN technology.

Tomorrow we hope to be Madrid tourists for a day, then Wed fly to Seville to settle down for a while.