The City of Gold

My flight from Madrid, ESP to Johannesburg, ZA was the worst flight of my life:

• I was exhausted from the previous days redeye + walking around Madrid


• It was 12 hours


• I couldn't get any sleep because a couple of Telemundo TV personalities were smoking, drinking, and being generally loud and obnoxious for it's entirety

On the plus side I got to share the plane with the Paraguayan national team.

The airport in Johannesburg had geared up to accommodate the impending influx of tourists so I was able to quickly sail through the passport control and customs. I met Beardo and Anna on the other side of security and they chauffeured me to their residence in Melville, a suburb of Johannesburg. As I was taking in the sights of my first visit to a developing country I noticed a distinct burning sensation in my eyes. I mentioned as such to Peter who remarked "yeah, they'll do that" - apparently there isn't anything resembling an emission standard in South Africa and diesel trucks still burn leaded fuel. As we approached their residence Peter pointed out the small wooden guard house at the end of their street (apparently there is another one at the other end of the street), and I began noticing 12 foot walls surrounding each of the houses with razorwire across the top and signs alerting passersby "ADT: ARMED RESPONSE."

That's great, I thought. I dropped off my stuff and Anna asked if I was hungry.

"I could eat," I said.

To which she replied, "ok, lets walk to service station."

I paused for a second. Let's what to service station? Peter and Anna had been living here for nearly a year, so I figured that they knew what they were doing.

From lunch we went to the art space where Anna was going to present her work with the first post-apartheid generation in South Africa titled: All My Cities. I painted, assembled, and generally helped out while trying to organize a union with Peter to rise up and throw off the chains of capitalist oppression.

Peter felt that it was important that I get at least one run in before the marathon to acclimate myself to the elevation, so the three of us suited up and ran the 7km to the Zoo and back. Peter was dead on about the need to acclimate, I spent the entire run back from the Zoo gasping and wheezing. The experience was enough to give me second thoughts about the race the next morning. To get to the start of the race on time, we needed to leave the apartment at 3am. I tossed and turned all night.

Layover of Doom

If I take this option, I save $200. I'll do it.

That's what was going through my head when I booked a flight with a 15 hour layover.I can get out and view the city, I thought. I've never been to Spain, this could be a nice opportunity to see Madrid, or so my rationalization went.

My flight to Spain turned out to be almost pleasant. I sat next to a recent college graduate undergoing a standard 20-something existential "I don't really know what I want to do with my life" dilema. We chatted for a while, and I was able to get some airplane sleep. When we finally landed in Madrid, I had to overcome a bit of inertia and actually work myself up into going out to see the city. The Madrid subway system conveniently connects to the Aeropuerto, and a day subway pass is fairly cheap. After purchasing the pass, I realized that I hadn't done sufficient (or any really) research into what Madrid actually had to offer so I grabbed a subway map and figured I'd wing it.

Step one in my grand scheme of exploring Madrid involved ditching my two-and-a-half weeks worth of luggage. In my travels around Europe while I was living in Germany I had learned that regional rail stations usually had luggage lockers, so I picked a regional train station that was kind of near the airport and headed there (the airport probably also had lockers, but it didn't occur to me at the time to ask). So I made my way to the rail station with a locker area and as I was walking in I was confronted by an irate security guard who began issuing commands at me in Spanish.

Woah, woah, woah - let's just calm down and speak English.

But he didn't speak English, it turns out English fluency in Spain is not as common as English fluency in Germany and donde esta el bano only gets you so far. After a few hand gestures I determined that he wanted me to put my luggage through the large x-ray machine at the entrance that I had somehow missed. With my luggage safely stowed for the duration of my layover, I decided it was time to hit the town. Or rather, I decided it was time for me to grab a coffee and figure out where I wanted to wander around. I pulled out my subway map and decided that SOL was where the map wanted me to go.

Sol turned out to be a quite pleasant area to walk around, tourist sights had pedestrian signs directing you to them, and the city center was actually quite walkable. So I did just that - I walked, and walked... and walked. After four hours of walking around and taking pictures I decided I would try out one of those siestas that I had heard so much about. I wandered into a park like area, found a bench and made myself comfortable. I drifted in and out of consciousness until I heard a few people walking near me chatting, only they didn't continue walking. They continued chatting near enough to me that I was forced out of the sleep-like state I was in. I tried to ignore them and soon enough their chatter died out. I continued drifting back and forth between varying states of consciousness until I decided that my hunger was worth obeying. I roused myself enough to sit up and look around and it was at that point that I realized that the chatty group hadn't left, they were siesta-ing behind the bench I had claimed. In fact, as I looked around I saw quite a few others sleeping on either other benches near me or on the grass under the trees.

I had wandered out quite a bit from the SOL subway stop that marked the start of my aimless wandering tour of Madrid, so I decided to make my way back in that direction in search of food. One one of the ancillary streets of the Plaza Mayor I found some Donner. I wandered around a bit more and decided that even after the siesta I was getting pretty exhausted. I checked my watch and saw that I still had 8 hours of layover left. I thought about it and just decided to slowly make my way back to my luggage and then to the aeropuerto.