Madrid is brilliant.

Madrid is brilliant...

We slept a little better this time on the sleeper from Lisbon, and got some nice views over the countryside on the way into the city (this time I was awake enough to take pictures).

The train got in at Chamatin, the station in the north. We needed to be at the south station, Atocha, where our host lives. Transferring between the two was easy, using the underground commuter line that connects the two stations taking ten minutes. My first thoughts here were how easy it was, I was expecting a load of hassle.

turtles at atocha...

We left our luggage in the stations lockers, where we had to put them through security scanners. We had to do this at a few other locations in Madrid, as well as when boarding our train to Valencia. I was initially surprised at the heightened security compared with previous parts of my trip, but then it was Atocha station that was targeted in the 2004 bomb attacks and apparently the terrorism threat here is quite high.

Next, we went to the Prado museum to kill some time before we could check-in at 2. It was no where near as faffy as the Louvre, and was a nice way to spend a few hours checking out Bosch and Goya.

Our accommodation was awesome. We stayed with Lucia, a really sweet web designer who lives in the coolest apartment ever. I'm always a little apprehensive getting to a new place, but she swooped down on us and made us feel really welcome, was bril. We were on one of the main streets near Atocha, Paseo de las Delicias which was handy for the station and the really lovely el Ritiro park, where we spent a lot of our time.

We ran into some protests on our way to the cultural centre. I asked inside and the girl there told me there's been a lot of anti-austerity protests, with this one being an union of doctors protesting against the privatization of the national healthcare. When we left the cultural centre, the area had been slightly  barricaded so we had to exit via the big crowd - but it was fun, everyone seemed to be having a good time... was tempted to pinch a flag and join in.

For dinner, we went out for Tapas to this awesome little place near the centre. Each dish was only about 2-3 euros and we had a couple each, costing us about a tenner each including drinks - nice one. Everyone seems to eat really late in Spain, it was dead when we walked in at half 8 and they were turning people away cos it was full at 10.

On our final day there seemed to be a more noticeable police presence, with a lot of riot vans parked in the streets and helicopter noise overhead. There was a great deal of noise that night and a quick twitter search told me more anti-austerity protests had been organised and arrests had been made - apparently an anarchistic group had planned to blow up a bank...

On Friday we headed to Valencia. I love how much leg room you get on the train, and how swanky these Spanish trains seem to be. You even get a film to watch. It took two hours to travel 350 km.