The Europe Experience

We wanted to catch the free tour in the morning but upon reaching the meeting point, we were told that the tour was suspended because of some activist condeming such free tours and thus they were unable to carry out the free tour. Its quite sad because I always thought that such tours were really meaningful and useful and i thought that a similar concept could be replicated for cities in South East Asia. Nevertheless, the guide met us at the gathering point and briefly explained some of the history and landmark of the capital of Spain. Can tell that he’s really a very good tour guide, because of his enthuasiasm and humour. We brought us to the zero point marking. Interestingly, madrid has this system, where everything is calculated from this marking point.

Zero Point

The guide drew the suggested route to travel on our maps before bidding goodbye to us. From there on, we started our very own city tour. It wasn’t easy touring Madrid with the girls, because temptations were everywhere, with zaras and mangos “waving” to them at every other street. We arrived at a market and decided to go in and take a look.

The markets in europe are generally a very nice place to visit. Unlike Singapore’s market, its super clean, some fully aircon and the variety in the markets are huge. The raw meat and stuff like pork were nicely displayed behind glasses(like the hams in cold storage style), thus the market isn’t smelly at all. Everything looks super fresh and nice. Its no wonder they also sell Tapas, with people eating at the store. Can u imagine people selling and eating curry puff beside a stall selling fish beside it in Singapore?

market in madrid

market in madrid 2

We continued to visit some of the attractions in the city. But I couldn’t remember any of their names or significance anymore. Anywhere, we don’t have guide book or tour guide so we will just take some photos with any nice looking buildings.

Some of the attractions

more attractions

er...more random stuff

end of our tour

The tour finally ended and we decided to split up after that.

Me Reg and Ys decided to catch bullfighting! Some say you’ve never been to Spain if you didn’t watch bullfighting! And coincidently, its the bullfighting season, thus the shows are on everyday. We arrived at the bullfighting stadium about 2hrs before the time. It was quite an experience trying to buy the tickets. We enquired at the ticketing booth but the leftover tickets cost about 100plus euros. OMG lor. There were many tix booth so we went to each booth to ask. Finally found the cheapest available tickets selling at 30euros each. Its abit too ex still, we just wanted to have a feel of the event, not really into seeing bulls dying. While we were walking around comtemplating whether to get the tickets, some random passer by will sell u tickets. Its the blackmarket! These people came early to buy the tickets and sell them at higher price to loser tourists like us. Some are trying to sell really front row tickets, which we can never afford. Some keep asking us to go to a particular ticket booth (think they have some sort of business relationship). Finally there is this guy, who thrusted 3 tickets to ys and said some spanish words with some weird hand signals and then walk away. We were in shocked. Why did he give us the tickets? For free? While we were loss, he came back and snatched by the tickets and continue to mumble words that we couldn’t understanding before walking away angrily. We saw the ticket price was 4.50euros. Thus we approached him again to ask him how much. Blah blah blah, no one understand each other, we took out 20bucks and he snatched the money from ys and gave her 2 tickets. Ok so it means 10 euros per tickets, so we gave him another 10euros and we were glad even though the guy just earn more than 100% profit from us lar. But at least we get to see the bullfighting at a reasonable rate instead of a wasted trip there.

We took uber alot of photos with the posters and stadium there before heading in. Unfortunately i dun have the photos with me so there wun be any photos and videos of the bullfighting in this entry. The stadium was quite big and grand, and its fully packed. There were a total of 5 shows (as in 5 bulls that they will fight per session) but we left after they killed the 4th bull. Its no fun watching them torture the bulls with blood pouring out their back, struggling, fighting a losing battle. Its all the same routine for each round. People on horses will pierce the back of the bull when the bull charged at the horses, followed by 3 guys pierceing more stuff into the bull’s back before the bull fighter “fight” the bull. By the time the bull had already lost a significant amount of blood and were super tired already. There could only be an outcome, the bull would die, and dragged away by the horses. I wonder why the locals love it so much. The would cheer whenever the bull got stab and fall down or die. Humans are really cruel. Can u imagine a higher race next time had this sort of “human-fighting” event, with the aliens cheering when they torture and kill the humans. Such activities such stop seriously.

We returned to the hostel feeling like we were raped in the mind. It’ll the first and last time we would be watching bullfighting.

After that we decided to go to the pub crawl, to ease the bullfighting memories. BUT the pub crawl sucks. The guide was like shit in his own world. The people that joined were not fun, some are weird. And the girls were super evil to this guy, whom I think he’s nice and did nothing wrong. I dunno why the girls find him weird and started to ostracsize him. The drinks were nice, but not strong enough to get us high. The club was a spanish club, with spanish music and pros dancing spanish dance. But i guess ys and se enjoyed themselves becos they danced with some cute guys. lol. ohhh..i guess i cant upload the photos because they are tooooo…erm…SCANDALOUS! haha..

what a day…