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December 27th 2011
Published: December 28th 2011
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At a minute before Dec 27th, we boarded our first flight to Madrid.

It was about a 12 hour flight with a crying/screaming baby through the entire time. Luckily the red-eye flight meant we were able to stay asleep for most of the trip. The food, I must say was really quite good as well. (thanks Swiss Air)

Then we had one hour stop over in Zurich. It was quite early in the morning (perhaps around 9...i'm not quite sure) and still there was hardly anyone around. Going through some security checks, customs and merely walking to what seemed like the opposite side of the airport killed that hour and not before long we were on our second flight to Madrid. We were delayed for a few minutes here because the wing was too icy to fly and some weird contraption on the end of a crane was used to blast water and de-frost the wing before we flew. Now that never really happens to us.

It was a much smaller flight and I believe some food was served but we fell asleep for that. It was a relatively quick flight and thus we arrived in Madrid.

Somehow we were convinced our bags would come out of Gate 2 or something and thus began our very long walk to the other side of the airport...to find out we were coming to the wrong Terminal. Then we had to go all the way back, to find our bags. It was quite an adventure but at the very least we were not the only group to get lost. We were lucky enough to have three other people form our flight (who actually spoke Spanish) who were able to help us find our baggage.

After all that, we then returned to the Terminal we originally exited out of to meet our Tour Director. We hopped onto one of the Insight buses (with the capacity to hold up to 40 people with less than a dozen in there) that took us to our hotel; Melia.

That night was at our leisure till welcome drinks with our tour group that night.

Krystal and I decided to try and wander around Madrid with a map. We found quite a few restaurants (the streets were empty) and went to La Ursula. It probably wasn't a big tourist destination as the waitresses spoke little English and the menu was completely in Spanish. We merely randomly chose dishes, hoping for the best.

I chose a "Lasagna" because i thought that we couldn't possibly go wrong there but it definitely was NOT lasagna. Instead it was some meat (still unsure about what type of meat it was which really quite wories me) and some cheese.

At last, we returned to our hotel for our welcome drinks. It was more of an information session with a few crackers and juice. Turns out our "Amazing Spain and Portugal" tour had been quite overbooked at this time and thus there were two separate (but completely identical) tours running side by side.

We were introduced to our tour guide, Jorge - a Portugese man and briefed on the usual things. Our tour group itself was...interesting (very large with quite a variety of people) and yet no young people . Besides one very little girl, we were the only teenage-aged people.



As the Spanish eat really quite late (restaurants only really start serving at eight) we then went out to dinner. We had all had late (and big) lunches, so had only a little bit. Krystal and I tried a nice casserole and also a famous Spanish tapa which was a potato mash type thing.

Apparentlyit is so important in Spain that mothers-in-law will judge the quality of their prospective daughters-in-law by their ability to make this tapa.



And thus was our first day in Spain, the night before our tour officially began.


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