Weather: warm, mostly overcast
Internet: 2 Euro/hr
Madrid was not a very eventful city for us. We took our time, easing into our touristing style. We were there for two nights (not including my night at the airport) and went to an art museum, a movie and did a fair amount of wandering around. The art museum seemed nice, though there was a lot of it to take in and I was definitely not up to the full task even if we had taken a whole day there. It made me feel like I don't really know how to appreciate art, which is probably true. It's not being unable to make it through the whole museum that makes me feel that way, more that I didn't feel like I was really appreciating much of any of the works on much more than a superficial level.
Although we never ended up eating tapas (a food Madrid is known for) while in Madrid we did eat at a fun old style chicken and cider restaurant. The decor was rustic with wooden tables and chairs to sit at and barrels and such like decorating the walls. For around 12 euro we ordered an entire small chicken and a bottle of cider which was sufficient for the both of us and quite tasty. Figuring out how to pay was a little tricky, this being our first time eating in a sit down European restaurant. While we were eating we began to keep an eye out to see how things were done, but by the time we finished we still weren't certain. We sat around for quite awhile hoping the waiter would bring us the check until Jason finally manned up to the task and flagged the waiter down and successfully concluded our dining experience.
After our chicken dinner we hurried off to the theater and watched Chicas Malas (Mean Chicks) which was dubbed in Spanish rather than the hoped for Spanish subtitles. Jason had a bit more experience with Spanish than I did so he would occasionally fill me in on some of the details, but I was actually able to follow what was happening pretty well. I watched it on dvd when I returned to the states: I certainly had missed some of the humorous dialog, but for the most part didn't feel like I had missed that much when watching it in Spanish.
Fortunately for me, Jason was the official interactor while in Spain (due to his superior knowledge of Spanish) so I was spared much of the trouble while negotiating our first train tickets (from Madrid to San Sebastian). We did have Eurail Passes but for some of the legs reservations were also required. To my memory, Madrid's train station seemed to be the most confusing one, but a lot of that is probably due to the fact that it was fairly large and it was the first one we had to deal with. After trying to communicate with a couple of different train officials, Jason finally was able to secure our tickets to San Sebastian. The train out of Madrid was somewhat unusual in that it was on the junky end of the middle as far as the quality of trains we experienced in Europe, but was one of only two trains to have movies and/or tv capabilities (the other train a German one which was by far the nicest quality). Unfortunately I had already seen both movies they showed (Spy Kids 2 and Double Indemnity).