Spain | Madrid: First Impressions of Madrid (Part 5)

After three straight days of wandering around here, we’d pretty much covered Barcelona. Today we’re heading to our next stop, Spain’s capital—Madrid!

We’re taking the high-speed train to Madrid. We’d already bought our tickets online in advance. There’s one big difference between buying train tickets here and back in China: the prices fluctuate, a bit like airfares. Tickets cost different amounts at different times, and apparently the closer you buy them to departure, the more expensive they get. Honestly, that did take some getting used to, but luckily, after comparing a bunch of options, we still found reasonably priced tickets (Barcelona to Madrid takes 3 hours, covers about 630 kilometers, and costs roughly 485 yuan).

Getting into the station and boarding is also a little different from back in China. Even after your ticket is checked, you still don’t know which platform to go to; it only comes up on the big screen about twenty minutes before departure. Since it was our first time and we didn’t know how this worked, we spent ages wandering around and just couldn’t find our train. Only after a whole lot of asking and gesturing did we figure it out. I remember asking a ticket inspector nearby, “Where’s the platform for our train?” The inspector spread their hands and said, “I don’t know.” I was genuinely baffled for a moment there, hahaha.

While we were waiting, I popped into the restroom and noticed a small detail: the men’s restrooms here also have dedicated baby-changing tables. That really is thoughtful.

After a short rest, we started boarding. The first thing that struck me was how huge the gap between the train and the platform was—a smaller bag looked like it could fall straight through. There was even a cigarette butt on the boarding step, which, honestly, was pretty unbelievable. Inside the carriage, the seating area was generally more spacious than second class on China’s high-speed trains. But the best part was how few people there were: we could just pick an empty row and sit there. That was pretty comfortable.

Looking out the window along the way, apart from the buildings we saw when passing through some larger cities, it was pretty much vast stretches of crops everywhere else. We occasionally came across some dry land too, but not much.

About three hours later, we arrived at Madrid’s Atocha station. It’s supposedly one of the most beautiful train stations in the world, but after getting off, we walked around and really couldn’t see what was so beautiful about it—maybe we just weren’t looking in the right place. Later, I specifically looked up a photo online, and it did look pretty nice. But credit where it’s due: getting out of the station was ridiculously convenient. They had those moving walkways like you see in airports, so hauling our luggage took hardly any effort. That part of the experience was pretty great, hahaha.

(Photo from the internet)

After leaving the station, we went straight to the metro to head into the city center, and happened to take Line 1. Once onboard, it did feel a little cramped overall. I looked it up online and found out this was Spain’s first metro line, which opened in 1919. Doing the math, doesn’t that make it over a hundred years old now? Honestly, that was pretty surprising. No wonder the route displays in the carriage were still static. Every so often, I had to check our location on my phone, worried we’d miss our stop if we weren’t paying attention, hahaha.

About twenty minutes later, we reached the city center. My first impression coming out of the station was how clean it was. Compared with our earlier experience in Barcelona, this place was so much cleaner. Everywhere in the square, people looked completely relaxed, leisurely drinking coffee or strolling around, and some were even lying down for a rest. That laid-back atmosphere was our first taste of Madrid.