Madrid Day 2

Today's plan was to go on the city sightseeing bus tour, which in Madrid has two routes: the historical and the modern. So we walked into town; between us and the meeting point was Retiro, the huge park in the middle of Madrid.

We had to wait a while for the bus to arrive, and by the time it did there were a lot of other people waiting as well; it was starting to look like we were going to have to wait for the next one if we wanted a seat on the top deck - and of course we wanted to be on the top deck; you can't see much from the ground floor.

Thanks to events around Spanish National Day (happening in a few days) it took us a bit longer than it should to get around the historical route, but we got there eventually and, back at the start point, we waited for the modern route bus to show up. And waited. And waited. Turns out this organisation was not very good at dealing with these sorts of situations.

Eventually three turned up at the same time and it got ugly amongst the people - there were a lot - as to who was to get on which bus first. There were some Australians being obnoxious, which was a bit embarrassing. But off we went.

Unfortunately, the modern section was pretty dull compared to the historical - but we didn't have much choice but to stick around until it brought us back to the city proper, after which we got off and went looking for lunch. Worried we wouldn't find anywhere before it got too late, we stopped at the first likely place; that turned out to be a hipster place that charged us way too much for what we had - as we discovered with every subsequent, much cheaper, place we passed afterwards.

We wandered around for a while, found a rooftop bar where we stopped for a while to have a drink and take pictures. We wound up in the shopping district near Gran Via and wandered around there for a while - including to make a stop at a Doc Martens store so I could buy some laces.

It was getting close to dinner time so we made our way to the San Miguel markets, which is more of an eatery than a fresh food market. We sampled a lot of stuff.

After that we had our walking tour, which was called 'The Spanish Inquisition, Ghosts and Legends Tour'; we'd done something similar in 2019 when we were in Budapest.

The park on the way to the bus stop.

Out of the park and on our way to the stop.

Now we're on the bus.

Lunch.

Bacon, mushroom and - yes - sweet corn pizza. It was pretty good.

Humourous graffiti.

Would have been more impressive had there been a breeze.

"Lady Bongo Aloha Japanese" - what an odd sequence of words.

An Irish pub.

I believe we're now at the rooftop bar.

We found a Tim Hortons, so Rochelle did some weird thing she'd learned from a Canadian friend.

Some street art.

In a convenience we found the one thing even better than cask wine: juice-box wine.

Jollibee is a Filipino chain that we did not expect to see here.

We go to the Mercado San Miguel.

Some pintxos.

Sweet vermouth and olives.

Pork belly bao.

Torreznos - fried bacon.

More pintxos and and sangria.

A strawberry tart.

On the way to the walking tour.

We passed through Plaza Mayor.

Now on the walking tour.

Me, listening for ghosts in the walls.

This guy doesn't like that the apartment above is an Air BnB.

We passed by a statue that you're supposed to slap the butt of for good luck.

And finally, a late night shiba inu.