Arrived in Madrid from JFK at 9am (took 6.5 hours). What’s great at arriving at 9am is that it’s 12am in SF, so could either check into an Airbnb or get a day hotel and sleep for 3 hours to help adjust.

The airport is 20 minutes from Madrid city center (Sol – Gran Via), which most consider the city center).

So checked in around 10:30am. Airbnb was renovated, so seemed pretty modern.

Probably didn’t start making moves until 6pm though. First did a grocery pit stop at a local mart called Dia (seems like a chain). Got some jaman (aka ham), power ade, and most importantly water.

After, we explored the Sol / Gran Via area out. Stopped by a Tim Horton’s (connected to a Popeyes lol) to grab a latte with French vanilla syrup.

After walked into. Huawei store (first one I’ve been to), which is the flagship store in Spain. Gotta way, they’re smart watches look really nice, but the OS on their phone is super under performance (scrolling perf is bad. OS looks a lot like a meld between iOS and Android).

After, we went to a rooftop bar called Gymage. Can find the details here:

http://food.johnmatienzo.com/2022/07/26/gymage-terrace/

We stayed at the rooftop bar until sunset, after which we were ready to get some food. We still stayed in the Sol area, where there was a bunch of shops like Zara, an Apple Store, and street performers (also, the main access point to the city, Puerto de Sol, which has a horse status and building we walked by).

We ended up going to this really good (and cheap) tapas place:

http://food.johnmatienzo.com/2022/07/26/matador/

After, we walked around to see if we could find a club that played house music. We found a lot of clubs, but none that played EDM (there were a lot of Latin type music clubs). There were lots of people of all ages trying to promote various random places. After asking around, finally found one called “Fucking Monday”, which was conveniently 2 blocks from our Airbnb.

Some interesting things about the club is that there were definitely 14 year olds there (now the show Elite from Netflix makes sense). But music was good. The main room was top 40 EDM (which they called commercial music). The smaller “boiler room” was called (EDM, which was mainly big room house (think fisher / Oliver Heldens).

Ended off the night going to McDonalds (we wanted the Taco Bel to be open, but it wasn’t open at 5am unfortunately). One thing this McDonald’s had was wedges with bacon and cheese (first McDonalds to have that.