Sundays in Madrid

For starters, I thought everything would be closed. What the past few months away have taught me is to be prepared that not much will be open on Sundays, supermarkets, etc. Madrid doesn’t seem to fall into that category. Obviously it is such a big city it couldn’t fall into that category. But now I’m rambling. So James and I, with the impression that most things would be open just set out for a walk this morning.

We have been driving ourselves nuts with planning. Basically I just wanted a day off, away from the computer, a day away from the guide book, without thinking about everything so goddamn much!!

After about 3 hours of wandering through stores, most were open- H and M, Blanco, and so on we had a burger. The purpose of the day wasn’t so much to buy anything, merely to distract us, and change the focus of the conversation a bit, from AFRICA to mindless shit. We walked through the clothing stores, pretending we had some idea about what we should wear in the Sahara. The answer is still ummmm, well its going to be hot, and sandy, and hot, and hot, and more sand.

As we walked back to the hostel, James said- why are we so fixated on shopping, we should be concentrating on other information and I said- what we wear is the only thing we can control right now, it is the only real decision we can make.

We didn’t buy anything.

Chucking all our clothes into the washing machine, everything that needed washing for the past week, and 2 hours later, having clean clothes was satisfying. It was something we could tick off our growing list. And of course it meant clean clothes to start the week.

The more research we do, the more we realise we don’t know, get worried about then think, hell why not. We are finding rail journey’s that would be wicked, only to find out they are definitely not in operation in 2012,  then we find another, but it takes us in the wrong direction, crocs in Burkina Faso, a boat up the Niger river, sleeping on the beach in Sierra Leone. We get to the point where we wish we had more than 6 weeks. Then we read out the border crossing from Morocco to Mauritania, that has 10 stops in 3km and just off the road is riddled with land mines. We read about officers asking for bribes, and canopy walks, do not travel warnings, local cuisine and donkey cart pub crawls.

We are so far out of our depth here its not funny, and hilarious at the same time.

Tomorrow is the Embassy tour of Madrid. Are you ready? Coz we certainly aren’t. oh and of course the yellow fever injection.

By the way- we learnt today that malaria tablets have side effects like mouth ulcers, night mares, anxiety and others I can’t remember right now. Really? Like travelling through Western Africa isn’t going to be challenging enough.