I woke up early before I met up with Laura and went and bought our train tickets to Madrid for the night. The train wasn’t scheduled to leave until 6:50 at night, so we had almost a full day left in the city. Laura hadn’t gotten a chance to go shopping yet, so I promised her I would take her. We went into a lot of shops, but prices were pretty steep and she didn’t actually buy anything.
We got back to the dorm around 1:30, right as a huge group was leaving for the Mesclata. The Mesclata is a huge, daily fireworks show that starts at 2:00 in the afternoon in the Plaza de Ayuntamiento (one of the city’s main plaza’s). It is more meant to be loud than an actual light show. The state of Valencia is actually the number two producer of fireworks in the World, behind China. Traffic was closed off and the streets were packed with people.
Laura and I were pretty hungry so we bought some homemade potato chips from a street vender and munched on those as we waited for it to stop. The show goes on for about five minutes. It starts of slow and builds to a loud pandemonium; you can literally feel everything around you shaking. It was incredible.
After we all came back and ate lunch. A few of us went on the rooftop patio and hung out since it was such a nice day. A few of us dozed off for a couple of hours and I woke up feeling so refreshed. I packed up my book bag and printed off my boarding pass/hotel confirmation. Laura and I said our goodbyes then headed for the train station. We got to the train station with twenty minutes until our train left. As we were waiting we heard a loud commotion and looked over by a train to see the entire Valencia soccer team getting on a train to Barcelona. It was really cool, especially because I was only about ten feet from David Villa (the star of the team).
The train was smooth sailing. I borrowed Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas from Joe because I needed a new book to read. I knocked out a good chunk. So far I haven’t really liked it, its kind of hard to follow and it takes a lot to concentrate on what is happening. I feel asleep on Laura for the last half of our trip. When we got to Madrid, I asked a security guard the best way to get to the airport because our hotel was right near the airport. He replied take the 1 or 2 train to the Ministerio stop. We took a metro train two stops down. As we were leaving, we came to the exit door and saw that we needed an actual metro slip to exit.
I asked a security guard, thinking we had done something wrong but they scanned a card and let us pass without paying. We hailed a taxi and started toward the hotel. We were still really far from the hotel and it was an 18 euro cab ride. The hotel was really nice though and it made up for the small problems we had encountered earlier. We ordered pizza to the room and watched a movie on my laptop.
We decided not to go out because Laura’s flight departs at 11:15 in the morning and we would need to get there around 9:00. This trip has been absolutely awesome, I just wish it didn’t fly by as quick as it did.
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