Today was a day of reconnection. I flew from Santiago to Madrid in the morning, and my flight out of Madrid wasn't until the evening, which left me a whole day to kill in the Spanish capital. As luck would have it, Christal was also still in Madrid for a few days, preparing for her incredible world-tour of a trip home (apparently getting from Europe to New Zealand involves visiting many other countries along the way), so we spent some time exploring Madrid.
We decided to go with the "easy on our feet" method, and just bought some tickets to the hop-on-hop-off bus tour. It wasn't all that interesting, although to be fair, we had just seen a ton of Spain in the last couple months, and were sort of burned out. We did take some time to walk around a garden a bit, which resulted in the only picture I took in Madrid, a statue that totally looks like a Disney prince:
I left Christal around 3pm, and headed to the airport to wait for my flight to London. I was going to London mostly out of necessity. It turns out that Iceland Air doesn't fly out of Madrid after September, apparently nobody wants to leave Spain to go to Iceland in the middle of winter. Still, I figured I'd make the most of it, since I had never been to Europe before, and that I'd probably welcome some time with signs in English.
Despite getting a little lost (literally winding up on the wrong side of the tracks from where I wanted to be), I eventually made it to my AirBnB host and moved into the lovely little cabin I'd be staying in for the next couple days.
