Biarritz, 17th June

17th June 1999, 1250hrs, Thursday. Intercity between Madrid and Hendaya.< br />This is our last day in Spain. We got up around 7 – so unlike us as to be worrying, packed, washed and left Hostel Mondragon. We caught the metro to Chamartin station where we bumped into the Italians from Morocco. We hadn’t really talked much, so we bought some playing cards, a couple of pastries and sat and munched those while discussing which card games we knew.
Madrid has been interesting. Whilst we’ve been tired all the time – not just due to the tail-end of our bug, which is still hanging on for dear life, but also due to the stifling heat which peaks at about 38C in the afternoon. On Tuesday we slept in until around 12, because we were exhausted. We got up leisurely, dressed, and headed for the USIT unlimited student travel office to buy our second interrail ticket for Italy and Greece. I got ticket no. 90, and the display told me they were currently serving no. 54. My number came up about 45 minutes later, when I was politely told that I still had a hundred turns to wait. After three hours of ‘Viva’ – German MTV, we discovered that buying our ticket in Spain cost about £40 less than in the UK. It being about 1730, we couldn’t really do anything else that day apart from go and sort out our supplements for this train into France.
< br />Yesterday we got up at about 10am and went to ‘El Palacio Real’ –the Royal Palace - which was free for us that day. Incredibly impressive inside and out, it was 17th and 18th century decadence in one, hugely ornate dose. There were over a hundred enormous chandeliers, no two alike. Massive painted ceilings, depicting the Greek and Roman gods in each room. Huge gardens, an interesting old Royal Pharmacy and a photographic exhibition with a 3D ‘Spanish Guinea at the turn of the century’ photo show. We wanted to move on to the Prado or the Thyssen-Bornemisza afterwards, but after writing postcards and a short letter home each for Father’s Day, we didn’t have enough time, and so we went to the Atocha train station, which has a huge rainforest-like station.
By 5 o’clock, we’ll be in France.