Mercado de San Miguel

The best part about walking around a new city is running into a great place totally unexpected. I just love this joy of making a discovery on your own or with a friend. Christa and I decided to be touristy on Saturday and go around town on a double decker bus, which is great because you can get on and off these buses all day and see the whole city. So we stopped off near Plaza Mayor and ate lunch outside, in February!

We strolled around afterwards and ran into this great market, Mercado de San Miguel. Turned out to be our favorite destination in Madrid. It had a fun atmosphere with so much going on and a lot to offer. You can order sangria, champagne, wine to sip on while you order breads, cheeses, meats, seafood, produce, chocolates, sweets, and much more. We enjoyed a fruity sangria followed by pistachio and vanilla walnut petits fours. So tasty! Had we not just eaten lunch at Plaza Mayor we would have gotten much more to eat I think... Next time! Mercado de San Miguel.

Madrid!

Its been three days since my visit, but I still can't get over how wonderful Madrid is. Even though it was a quick trip to this beautiful Spanish city, it was long enough for me to fall in love with it. I was absolutely amazed with the architecture, the people, and the food. The city has an incredible amount of candy shops (seriously, I mean a lot), beautiful buildings, Starbucks, and people dressed up in costumes in the touristy areas. I don't know what is it about Winnie the Pooh, but he's all over Madrid! They have a different time schedule in Madrid, or should I say no time schedule, because its so laid back. Nothing is open early in the morning so there's no reason to wake up early. But everything stays open very late. For dinner for example, we'd go to a few different spots for tapas starting at 11. Everyone I talked to was so, so friendly, and a lot of people seemed obsessed with Americans and American accents which was pretty amusing.

Spanish food is DELICIOUS. They'll fry just about anything, which is fine by me, and serve eggs on just about anything, another great idea I'd say. One place I really loved was a popular shrimp tapas bar called La Casa del Abuelo, which gets packed and everyone stands and eats shrimp, theres only a few things on the menu and its all shrimp. It was SO good!! But the price wasn't, for my plate of 5 shrimp is was 14euros (21 dollars). Eek. Fortunately all the other food we ate this weekend was really reasonably priced and just as delicious.

One great thing to enjoy in Madrid is the architecture...

I'll have to let you in on my favorite place to go in Madrid in my next post... :)