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Every Sunday El Rastro is a frenetic, bustling entity. Stretching down from Metro Latina to the Grand Arch of the "Ronda de Toledo", the vast mass of browsing tourists, rickety stalls and hard bargaining locals sprawls so far in every direction that it seems a disservice to label it a street market. One can get quite literally anything here; from Moleskin Notebooks, replica football shirts, various "natural" cosmetics and questionably authentic antiques. The prices are on the right side of decent, but surprisingly it isn't the place to bargain. I picked up a military surplus jacket for 15 euro and though I attempted a fairly pathetic ploy of pretending I only had a tenner (if that stapel of British slang can be successfully applied to the euro), the stallholder would accept nothing less.

Pickpocketing a Pickpocket

James Taylor
2006-08-23 12:07:07

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we went to the Real Madrid/Real Sociedad game. That first glimpse of the interior of the Santiago Bernabeau was worth the admission price alone (not that I payed). From up high it is truly spectacular. My Dad had feared that we would be too high to see anything. While we were very close to the top, such a view provided a unique perspective; from up there I could really notice the player movement and the general shape of the team. Madrid dominated the first half. Guti was controlling the game, slinging balls out to the wing and through the channels. They scored late on in the half, Zidane set up Ronaldo from a free kick. But from then on they just sat back. By the time the second half got underway Sociedad were by far the better team. Sociedad equalised midway through the first half and Madrid had a few late chances, but it kind of petered out towards the end. Anyway whenever I go to a new stadium and the game is rubbish I always say: "it doesn't matter what the game was like because it was the experience that counts". Fortunately it wasn't a game where I had to say that.

I realise this entry is coming rather sporadic and essentially just a snapshot of random occurences. Sorry about that. But because I was in Madrid for so long it is hard to sum everything up in nice rounded little article. I don't have an "angle", so to speak. Even though I was "in situ" for Slightly less campso long I never really felt like I was living there. I didn´t engage with the locals enough to feel that. But by the final few days I did get that sense of boredom that comes with being in a place to long. I suppose one of the dead giveaways with people who are new to a place is that they are always open to new experiences, their heads are up wheras the local's heads are down. By the final few days I wasn't looking, my feet knew the way around. I knew the way to the Corte Ingles (the supermarket), to my favourite internet cafe and to an Irish bar to watch the football. I was really just killing time. I have always thought it would be nice to live in a foreign country, but maybe after a few weeks of novelty it would be just like those last few days in Madrid. Same routine, different place.