Perdido en España y Los Ángeles

It's been over a month and a half since MS and I came home from Spain, and it's taken me that long to sort through the thousand+ photos that we took and to finally post about our trip. I'll cover the highlights of our trip, from good eats to crazy adventures - it was definitely a fantastic trip to remember.

We arrived into Madrid and loved the ultra modern space of the terminals and baggage claim areas. After getting our luggage, we headed out to the rental car area.

Adventure #1. The rental car was a manual shift drive, but neither one of us remembered how to drive a stick-shift. It took us about a half hour to realize we weren't getting out of the parking lot. After stalling the car too many times to count and laughing at how funny we both looked, we got an automatic.

Thus, our Spanish adventure began.

We were on the road and hit Madrid without any detours, following our international Google mapped directions. But after exiting the highway and driving through the city streets, we soon got lost.

Now normally, we would have stopped to ask for directions but neither one of us spoke Spanish (except for the limited vocabulary I could vaguely remember from my high school language classes).

Adventure #2. We drove around and toured Madrid for almost TWO hours, trying to find our hotel off of several one-way, one-lane, narrow streets. It took driving past the same streets three times to realize that the street names were printed on the sides of the buildings, and that each plaza had its own name too.

It was about 2am by the time we got to our modest and small hotel room. We were completely exhausted from driving around in circles, trying to find a public parking lot, and hauling our bags up the underground parking ramp and across the street to our hotel! But we were ecstatic that we were in Spain and celebrating our 2-year anniversary together.

The next morning, we set off to explore the city. We grabbed our walking shoes and strolled the streets to find some breakfast. We stopped at Cafe Comercial, one of the oldest cafes in the city that's next to the Bilbao Metro station, only to realize that we were in for yet another crazy adventure.

Adventure #3. Reading the Spanish menu!

I asked our server in my best Spanish/English accent, "Por favor, habla Ingles?"


But to no avail, and we were left to fend for ourselves. MS ordered what he thought was safe: Sandwich de pollo - a chicken sandwich. I, on the other hand, went with the Tortilla con Patatas - which I thought would be some sort of potato burrito. Boy, was I wrong!

Out came an omelette like dish, along with my chorizos that we ordered in a tomato-based sauce. We were pleasantly surprised to have such a delicious and hearty breakfast for our first meal in Spain.

The adventures continue...