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This is a big place.\u00a0 We thought Lisbon was big, and it is, but Madrid, together with its outlying metropolitan areas has roughly 6.5 million people, making it the 3rd<\/span><\/sup> largest city in the EU behind London and Paris.\u00a0 It\u2019s nice here though, hustle and bustle with great energy.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n We arrived here last week after a 5-hour train ride from Santiago (we had to get up at 4am) and walked straight into market day.\u00a0 Our airBNB is in the La Latina area, an older neighborhood with the usual narrow streets, antique stores, and bars, cafes, and tapas joints everywhere.\u00a0 It\u2019s also in the middle of El Rastro.\u00a0 According to the Madrid tourist site, it\u2019s the most popular (and probably largest) open air flea market in Spain. \u00a0I think it covered about 2 square km. \u00a0We did not know this.\u00a0 Every street between the train station and where we needed to go was part of the market.\u00a0 Have you ever tried to drag luggage through wall to wall people and have no F****G idea where you are?\u00a0 People are gawking at trinkets and they ain\u2019t moving.\u00a0 I almost assaulted several people who wouldn\u2019t get the F*** outta muh way!!! \u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n We were a bit late obviously, getting to the airBNB, but it sure was nice once we got there. \u00a0The hosts were awesome. They had stocked the fridge with food including two of my favourite food groups, beer and chocolate! \u00a0So, we managed to de-stress in short order, take a nap, drink a cold one, and listen to the sounds of market day fade away. <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n This is a big place.\u00a0 We thought Lisbon was big, and it is, but Madrid, together with its outlying metropolitan areas has roughly 6.5 million people, making it the 3rd largest city in the EU behind London and Paris.\u00a0 It\u2019s nice here though, hustle and bustle with great energy. We arrived here last week after a 5-hour train ride from Santiago (we had to get up at 4am) and walked straight into market day.\u00a0 Our airBNB is in the La Latina area, an older neighborhood with the usual narrow streets, antique stores, and bars, cafes, and tapas joints everywhere.\u00a0 It\u2019s also in the middle of El Rastro.\u00a0 According to the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3808,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6,1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/travelblog.lewington.ca\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1951"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/travelblog.lewington.ca\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/travelblog.lewington.ca\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/travelblog.lewington.ca\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/travelblog.lewington.ca\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1951"}],"version-history":[{"count":38,"href":"http:\/\/travelblog.lewington.ca\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1951\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4143,"href":"http:\/\/travelblog.lewington.ca\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1951\/revisions\/4143"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/travelblog.lewington.ca\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3808"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/travelblog.lewington.ca\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1951"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/travelblog.lewington.ca\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1951"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/travelblog.lewington.ca\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1951"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"http:\/\/travelblog.lewington.ca\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/05\/Madrid03small-1024x683.jpg\")
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