So today was the end of my Moroccan adventure as I flew back to Madrid in the afternoon arriving in the early evening.

Before I left though a couple of cool things happened to me at the hostel in the morning.

As I was sitting in the living room typing up my blog a guy who was just checking in came up to me and thanked me for my video of the hostel tour in Marrakesh I took a few days prior.   I never imagined that someone would look for a video tour and find my video – that was kinda cool.

I also met a couple of girls who were just checking in as well and I told them all about Marrakesh and what to do and what to see.   Of course I told them about stall 98 and its’ great food – kind of paying it forward as someone let me know about stall 98 when I first arrived.

I’m staying at a different hostel in Madrid than I did earlier in the week as frankly the last one was kind of lame.   This one is much bigger and has alot more going on.   Unfortunately I’m only here for 1 day and 2 nights and I kind of wished I had been at this one all the time.   Having said that though, I would have never met Sabrina, Hanna and Muge so it all worked out in the end.

I still had my pub crawl ticket I purchased last week and was determined to use it tonight.   The pub crawl started at 10pm but before I headed out there I found out the hostel had their own at 10:30.   On top of that, I met some cool people here when I checked in so I was torn as to which one to go to.   I actually headed down to the pre-purchased one to see if it was a good crowd.   If it wasn’t I figured I could just use the ticket for tomorrow (my last night in Madrid).

I walked past the group of   4 people and decided to just keep walking back to the Metro and back to our hostel.   Well, our turnout was even worse and our pub crawl was cancelled!

Sigh!

Well, I took matters into my own hands.   Last night when I came back from my camel trek I was happy to find 3 girls in my hostel room (German, of course).   Even better – they had a large bottle of Absolut Vodka they didn’t want and asked if I wanted it.   Uh, yeah!   Anyway, I broke open the bottle tonight.   I brought it down to the common area and myself, Jason (another person from Boston), Mariela (from Argentina) and Dimitri (from Bulgaria) drank – well, me and Jason mostly but anyway we had a few to get things started.

We then headed out determined to make our own pub crawl.   We weren’t that successful to start as the first place had sangria in a can (say what?) and horrible tapas for an over inflated price of 11 euros.   The second place was worse as we were corralled by an employee on the street into his bar – always a sure sign that the place sucks.   Long story short, I paid 10 euros for some exotic drink which I downed quickly just so we could move on.

The next stop was the best.   We stopped at el Tigre.   This is the tapas place I stopped at a couple of times last week that gave me a huge plate of tapas with a huge sangria for only a few euros.   Once again they didn’t disappoint.  In fact I think they gave us extra food as it was 1:30am and they were closing in half an hour and were trying to get rid of the food.

The final stop was some comfy, cozy bar with couches surrounding the bar.   Of course we were too late to get any of those great seats but Jason used the ultimate pickup line as 3 girls were taking a photo of themselves.   He simply asked if they wanted him to take a photo for them.   I’ll definitely have to remember that one.

Well he got to chatting with one of the girls so I decided it was time for me to head out back to the hostel.   Mariela came with me and we said our goodbyes.

All in all a pretty decent night.   Some highs, some lows but still better than being in stuck in “real life”.