Tagged spain (Lifestream)

Madrid marked the end of our trip to Spain. Our plane home flew out of there and so we decided to spend the evening before exploring what we could of the city. We boarded a train from Seville and arrived at our hotel around 4pm that day.

I would argue Madrid is the Toronto of Spain from the point of view of visiting Canadians because, like Toronto, it's the largest city in the country as well as its economic hub and also the city that everyone loves to hate.

I've said this before but I'll say it again - everyone loves Barcelona. No one loves Madrid. Madrid, by all popular accounts, is mediocre at best.

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I'm 47 years old, and most of the people I work with are much younger than I am - often in their 20's and 30's. Cultural references that I think are universal sometimes turn out to be pretty specific to my age group in ways that surprise me.

Take something like Bugs Bunny. Most people, young and old, have of course heard of Bugs Bunny but it turns out that not a lot of young people grew up watching it. I have, and it is because of this cartoon that I happen to vaguely know some of the music to The Barber of Seville.

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The COVID-19 pandemic put a cramp in my travel habits, as it did with everyone. The last overseas trip that Evelyn and I went on was to Poland in 2016 for a wedding and the last one that we actually planned was to Greece in 2015 (and, my God, it's hard for me to accept that Greece 9 years ago). We've been to a handful of relatively local destinations in the interim (Vancouver, New York, PEI) but nothing particularly foreign.

And while I do remain part of an increasingly small minority of people who still thinks about the pandemic in the present tense, I also wanted to finally visit someplace a bit more exotic.

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