Yo soy happy

So, Madrid. What a lovely city. I wouldn't call it beautiful in the conventional sense - there are quite a few fading tacky remnants of the 1970s dotted around the city still - but it does have a quirky kind of vivacity to it and there are some gorgeous buildings in the old part of the city. We spent our four days there wandering round the various plazas near Sol and Santa Ana, taking in the city's galleries, riding a cable car through the main city park, eating plateful after plateful of tapas and paella and drinking some really great rioja. The Madrileans do seem a slightly strange bunch in some respects, though, and we encountered some rather unusual things along the way:

- Facial piercings. So, so many facial piercings. Nostrils, lips, labrets, eyebrows - every second person we encountered on the street had some kind of metal in their head.
- Chirpy street crossings. I don't mean disco lights instead of the flashing green man, I mean actual chirping - every street crossing made a starlinglike 'cheep cheep cheep' sound so realistic I wasn't sure where to look at first.
- Lots of hanging around in public. Oran (who's seen more of Spain than I have) tells me this is a generic Spanish habit but I found it amusing all the same. The idea seems to be that one suggests a meeting place (in Madrid's case, the overwhelmingly popular choice is the bear and strawberry tree statue on Puerta del Sol) and then proceeds to loiter in said place's general circumference for at least an hour or so with one's friends, engaging in animated discussion and possibly quaffing a can or two of beer in the process. Oran said he's visited one tiny village in Catalonia where, on pretty much any given night of the week, the entire population decamps to the fountain in the village square, drinks in hand, for chat and craic. Brilliant.

The best thing about Madrid, though, has to be how unbelievably cheap it is. Unless you were to go looking for every Michelin-starred place in town, it is nigh impossible to spend a fortune on food and drink. Even our last (decadent and unbelievably filling) meal on Friday came to way less per person than we would pay in either Amsterdam or Dublin, and we spent most of the preceding nights in various tapas bars where dinner cost less than a tenner each. We also did pretty well on the hotel and shopping fronts - although I maintain I would have spent much more in the shops had the shoe selection not been quite so tacky and PVC/patent leather-ridden. Definitely a place to visit in the next couple of years before it reaches Barcelonaesque popularity and price.

(Photos on Flickr soon, I promise!)