Madrid 2010-07-19
First of all, happy birthday to my mother. I used Skype to call her on her cell phone. It was pretty clear considering I am on the other side of the ocean…
Madrid was HOT. I got up late and hung by the pool for a while. It was still 99 Fahrenheit for much of the day. It was all over the news (I think, it was in Spanish). I schlepped around some museums and cathedrals. None of them fell down when I walked in… not surprised, they have been around for a very long time. One cathedral you could walk all the way up the stairs to the pulpit. It was really pretty. There was even a priest hearing confessions. No I did not confess anything, first of all it would take too long and second, you are supposed to be sorry and not do those things again…
One very interesting thing about the hotels over here is that you need to keep the key in a slot in the wall in order for anything to work including the air conditioning. The hotel in Barcelona even turned off all of the outlets so my laptop did not charge :< I ended up getting a spare key. Also important note. The hotel keys have weak magnetic strips that can be easily reprogrammed for reuse. That is the good news. The bad news is that if you keep in in your money clip between two credit cards, it will cease to function. This happened twice so far… I got it now.
The room here is very nice, BUT, once again I situated myself way out of town. It takes a bus and a subway to get into civilization. I have to do it again tomorrow to get to the train.
Dinner was good. I had roasted suckling pig… hmmm.
So I spent at least an hour over lunch attempting how to complete my trip… it was a lot more complicated that one might thing. You see not every city connects to every other city, so it took some doing… so far we have Madrid=>Barcelona=>Bern, Switzerland=>Zurich, Austria=>Innsbruck=>Munchen, Germany=>Praha, Czek.
Now some of those spelling seem odd, but just to make things a little more complicated the Eurorail map is not completely English… I just booked two nights in Bern in the center of town!!! The description said it was 100 yards to my favorite place, the train station. There was one hotel that actually listed the number of steps to certain places including the train station… it was gone by the time I booked… AND this is the first time that I am going to need to change money… I need Swiss Francs. Hmmm. The good news is that the dollar is worth more. Still a pain.
So I have only figured things out to Prague, Czech. I think I will attempt to figure out the rest in Bern… it is tough… the Eurorail site is useless. I am forced to use the paper timetables and do it all manually. I have even resorted to pen and paper for now…
Ok, now I am going to watch Eureka on my laptop and least fancast does not block all non-us traffic!