Shortly after arriving back from our own honeymoon (Wedding and Honeymoon pics to be posted soon!) we found ourselves jetting off to Madrid for Ana and Jim’s Wedding. We made the most of the weekend and caught a flight from Luton at 0640 on the Saturday morning. This meant that we had checked in to our hotel in the centre of Madrid by 11am, leaving us most of the day to explore before attending the wedding in the evening. It being Spain, the wedding didn’t start until 6pm and then carried on into the very small hours of Sunday morning.
With neither of us having been to Madrid before, we set off walking with our Lonely Planet guide to accompany us. Our first port of call was to find some food so we headed off in the direction of the Mercado de San Miguel.
Mercado de San Miguel
If you are ever in Madrid, then you have to find this amazing place. It is a food market with lots of traditional national and local foods on offer at sensible prices. We spent a couple of hours here until we were too full to continue, trying mini hot-dogs, local meats and other local specialties.
We then headed back to our hotel to get ready for our first taste of how weddings are done in Spain. With the ceremony not starting until 1800 it was going to be a long night, which was just what we wanted after being up since 0400! The wedding was held in Ana’s local church and the reception was at the Ritz Madrid. We eventually made it back to our hotel room at 0330 on Sunday morning – 23 1/2 hours after getting up!
Ana and Jim
We had a relaxed start to the Sunday, checked out and wandered back to the city centre. On the way we discovered that the Vuelta e Espana cycle race was due to finish just down the road from our hotel that afternoon! We went back to the Mercado de San Migual for lunch before taking a stroll through the chaotic El Rastro – the most popular flea market in the city. We then headed back to watch the end of the bike race before collecting our bags from the hotel, catching the bus to the airport and heading home from our flying visit to Madrid.
More photos are available at http://photos.andywicks.com/FlyingVisitToMadrid.
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