Arrived at Madrid Airport

We were down for the included breakfast at our Mexico City hotel right on the nose at 7:00am when they opened. Once again, it was a good breakfast. This was the same MX hotel chain that we have used in the past in Mexico City, although this was the first time at the Hotel MX Congreso location.

Not bad, for 784 pesos ($55 CAD, $40 USD) a night with the good included breakfast. On the down side, we found the room too warm, and the WiFi didn't work very well. Good thing we have enough cellular data left on our Telcel SIM card.

We were outside on the streetcorner by 7:35am with one small backpack each and a standard carry on bag each. That's all we've got for the next five months. I ordered an Uber to take us the 5 kms (3 miles) or so to the airport. The driver was about our age, and we managed to have quite the conversation. We still miss some parts, and sometimes have to ask for clarification when we don't quite understand, but most people are really patient with us. Very friendly guy.

At the airport, we were through security and into the gate seating area really quickly. Started boarding our AeroMexico flight right on time. We got to our seats, and were surprised to find that we had extra legroom seats, and in row 15, only three rows behind the people in first class! 

The tickets were expensive enough, at $626 CAD, ($453 USD) each one way from Mexico City to Madrid, a ten and a half hour flight. For that price, I did not entertain the idea of purchasing the extra legroom seats, or even the cheap seats to guarantee we would sit together. The randomly assigned free ones would be fine. So when I checked us in Sunday morning, I was surprised to find us sitting together and fairly close to the front of the plane. I guess if those seats don't sell, they have to put us somewhere if the flight is full, and so we lucked out!

We weren't in the air very long when they brought out dinner.

Dinner was chicken, rice, and green beans with a salad and roll.

And two glasses of wine!

The seatback entertainment had a wide variety of options. Lots of recent movies, as well as lots of older ones. Ruth watched three movies, and I watched two as well as a few episodes of the old Friends TV series. I've seen them all, but still chuckle sometimes.

We took a kind of an odd route, heading all the way up the east coast to Newfoundland before finally crossing the ocean!

An hour before we landed, they brought breakfast.

We had a younger single girl sat in our row of three and she's originally from Madrid so gave us some good tips on places to go for food and drink, as well as some local markets that aren't tourist markets.

Arrived at 4:45am local time. The immigration lineup was huge, and it took us about 45 minutes to get through. Once at the immigration officer, he scanned our passports, stamped them, and we were in. He didn't ask us a single question.

We were in, but we couldn't go anywhere yet. We can't get into our accommodation until noon, so we found a coffee shop here in the airport, bought an overpriced hot chocolate each and sat and used the internet for a while. It's now almost 8:00am here as I write this, and we'll probably wait until 9:00am or so before taking the bus to the southern train station where we can then do the half hour walk to our apartment.

Temperature here in Madrid is supposed to be a high of 17C (63F) and sunny with cloudy periods.

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