Day 1 - December 30th 2007, 5 a.m.

We’re going to Madrid for the New Year’s Eve. Since we had to leave at 5 a.m. from Bari airport, I thought it was useless to go to sleep and decided to stay up till 4 with my friends and then go and wake my family up. Look at my face and guess who had the crappiest idea on earth.

So, there we are, ready to go, each one of us bringing those things that couldn’t absolutely be left at home:

Me: camera and cigarettes

Mother: Lonely Planet guide

Fulvio: himself and cigarettes

Sister: life size ugly disney cartoon monster ( boyfriend’s present…looks like we are going to share the bed, the monster, my sister and I) , two ( two !!!) albums of pictures of her boyfriend and her ( Is she afraid to forget the face of her boyfriend during the neverending three days lasting trip ?)

The reason why we had to leave at 5 am is that to go to Madrid straight from Bari we reserved seats on a charter flight.

Charter: special flight that is scheduled when lots of people from the same town go to the same place in particular periods, like Christmas or summer holidays.

Charters from Bari: more or less the same thing but with some slight differences:

1) People from Bari only move in hordes, so the avarage leaving family includes: Mother, Father, three or four ( or five) overweight kids ( if older than 15, you have to add the respective boyfriends and grilfriends), the octogenarian granny ( that the rest of the family always forgets on the plane since it’s too concentrated in remembering the duty free bag) and some more relatives and friends.

2) People on charter flights from Bari look ( both aesthetically and behavioral) more like animals: they aren’t genetically able to respect the queues at the check-in, the can even punch you in the face to get your seat in the plane (justification: I’m afraid of heights), they dont’ respect the seatbelt sign and cruise all around the plane looking for the lost granny while the plane is taking off and generally drive the hostess nuts so that as the plane lands the poor ladies quit the airline and go sell ice to the esquimos.

3) As you finally reach your destination and get off the bloody plane, you can be sure you will keep meeting your flight mates twice a hour in the following days so, in the end, you’ll be so confused that you won’t understand anymore why you paid loads of money to go in a place full of those people you were trying to escape from when you decided not to stay at home for the holidays.

Hope Madrid is a big, big city.

02.00 pm

Finally got in Madrid, after a four hours lasting flight. The top moment of the trip was when they told us that, since the group from Bari wasn’t big enough, we had to stop in Naples and wait for some more people to get on the plane. Well, that was cool.

In the end we got to our super high tech Catalunia Centro Hotel in Calle Goya, one of the most chic streets of Madrid and, since our rooms weren’t ready yet, we democratically decided to have a first sightseeing tour of the city. That is when I quitted being a young charming lady and I transformed myself into a hybrid alien half daughter and half citymap. My mother is smart: he brought me with her all around the world since I was two, she sent me abroad every single summer to study languages in order to make me able to reach ( and bring her, that follows asking every two seconds: are we almost there? are we almost there? Almost there?) every single place on Earth.

Anyway, Madrid is awesome.

We walked for a hour and a half, crossing the biggest open air mass I’ve ever seen ( Spanish people are catholic indeed! ), reached then the core of town, Puerta del Sol, were thousands of people were getting the square ready for the big New Year’s Eve Party, and started looking for some place to eat. In the end we chose a place called Canas y Tapas, had a seat and grabbed a menu. At that point we realized that:

1) Menu in Madrid are only written in Spanish

2) We couldn’t understand a single world of what was written on the Menu, so we looked for some linguistical help on the Lonely Planet Glossary

3) The Lonely Planet Glossary is useful if you have to tell someone you have diarrea but says nothing about what Lomo Chorizo Jamonado con Salsa Brava is.

4) The Lonely Planet Authors are smart: since they know you won’t understand nothing and thus order some croquetas ( which are potatoes with ham very, very fried), you will necessarly have diarrea, and that’s why they teach you how to communicate that to the rest of the world.

My sister asked for some scrumbled eggs and here what she got:

After that we decided to go back to the hotel and have some rest. Only thing that worths to be recorded: the bathroom had the bidet, and the bidet had the cover. Never seen something like that.

22.00 pm

After couple of hours of rest we went out for dinner ( always following Lonely Planet directions ) ready to experiment the true Spanish movida. First of all we went in a old and typical Cervezeria where we ordered ( guess what?) cerveza and vermouth ( a drink that looks like wine and tastes like Coke). Now, the problem of having a drink ( or dinner, or supper) with my family, is that Fulvio has a wine bar so he feels like he belongs to some kind of secret sect, the Wine Bar Owners Brotherhood Worldwide, and he always ends up becoming best friend with every waiter, barman and sommelier he meets ( he has a taste for the psychos). Moreover, he spends a hour and a half looking the wine list and, when in the end he chooses one, he does all that sommelier stuff, like putting your nose in the glass, and then shake it, taste it, spit it, puke it and dunno what else. At the end of this operation he asks: can you smell the breadcrumb in it? And what about the smoked salmon? I swear, once he asked me if I recognized the smell of cat’s pee. What in the name of the Lord do they put in the wine? The breadcrumb? Are you serious? Why should I pay to drink something that tastes like cat’s pee?

Anyway, our first day in Madrid is over. Buenas Noche.