Drinks + free tapas, salsa dancing, chocolate + churros - just a typical night in Madrid

It's hard to believe that we have only been in Madrid for 3 full days. Adjusting to city life has meant pretty late nights (even on weekdays), plenty of people watching on our walks to and from school, and learning to navigate the metro, buses, night buses, and taxis to get around. Ever since we arrived in Nerja last Saturday night, we have eagerly explored the night life in hopes of experiencing the Spanish lifestyle that we have heard never sleeps. Our orientation scheduled called for early mornings, usually an 8 or 8:30am wake up call, and required lots of energy to keep up with the lengthy Spanish history and grammar talks we received as well as the countless hours of walking, climbing, and visiting we did. We were all exhausted from our jet lag and knew we needed to (try to) sleep at least 6 or 7 hours to keep up with our schedule.

The problem with this is that Spanish night life starts late. So late, in fact, that when we asked the concierge in our hotel at 11:00pm if there was anything to do in Nerja, they laughed and asked "You don't think you'll find something open now, do you?" They basically told us there would be plenty of bars and music pubs open, but anything more exciting wouldn't open until 3:30am. We thought we would have better luck with Cordoba because it is a bigger city than Nerja, but there was always just something missing in the few places we found.

Wednesday night a group of students went out to explore some of the places we had heard would be fun on a weekday from previous students in the program. I opted to stay in that night to catch up on emails, applications, and to skype, but my roommate came back with some interesting stories about the atmosphere and the people they encountered. Thursday night the original plan was to visit Kapital - a 7 story discoteca that has free entry + 1 free drink specials on Thursday nights. Somehow that didn't end up happening, but we visited a place near Puerta del Sol that boasts having the best sangria in Madrid. We spent the night talking and laughing (and later got pizza to calm our American-food cravings), then we met up with a few other people and spent time at an Irish pub. I had a great time, but most of us were still looking for that crazy Spanish night life we had heard so much about.

Then it was Friday. We all decided to visit Chueca which is the LGBT neighborhood in Madrid and we have heard can be really fun. Our first stop was El Tigre, a bar frequently visited by American college students studying abroad that serves large drinks and free tapas. It definitely was not an authentically Spanish spot but it was a great atmosphere to start the night and helped us all mellow out. We then really wanted to go to a discoteca, so we walked along a few streets to see what specials different club promoters could offer us. We walked back to the plaza at Sol and found a place that gave a pretty good deal. They had good music but not very many people, and our night had been long and not terribly exciting so a few people left and a couple others were considering leaving. We finally convinced everyone that we should check out a salsa place one of our friends recommended called La Negra Tomasa.

At the entrance, the promoter told us entry was 10 euros. We were skeptical, definitely not wanting to spend 10 euros a person for a bar/club we weren't sure would be fun. I talked to the promoter and convinced him he did not want to lose us as clientele (there were 6 of us total at this point) and he agreed to reduce the entry fee to 5 euros a person and offered us 3 free drinks - not too bad, eh? We walked in and immediately were impressed. There was great live salsa music, plenty of people dancing, and plenty of people looking for partners to dance. Within minutes of arriving 3 of us had been asked to dance - and we all ended up dancing well into the morning. Right around 5 am we decided we wanted to get some of the famous Spanish hot chocolate and churros so we made the trek out to a nearby Chocolateria that is open 24 hours. Considering it was 5 am, the Chocolateria was completely full. Young Spaniards our age, older adults, high school aged kids - the Chocolateria had them all, and more people continued filtering in the entire time we were there.

The problem with night life is that the metros close at 1:30 am and re-open at 6 am. Considering that people usually arrive at clubs and bars around 1 am, this means you take a night bus home, a taxi, or... stay out until the metros re-open. Students in previous programs have told us this will happen rather frequently, and that is precisely what we did last night. There was quite a number of people waiting for the metro when it opened and I got the feeling that most of them had spent the night out dancing and having fun.

One of the staff members for the Stanford abroad program had once told us that we should send our host families a text message if it gets to be around 7 or 8 am and we will haven't arrived home. I found that comment amusing but only half-believed that that could be a real possibility. Now I realize that its typical for Spanish nights out to turn into Spanish mornings with chocolate and churros. And the public transportation system here is great (safe and operates on decent hours), so it really isn't terribly inconvenient to get around from place to place.

Overall this was quite an eventful and interesting first week - the exciting part is that we still have Saturday night left :)

P.S. I'll definitely write about my host  mom soon, I just felt it was important to share my night life experiences because it honestly was a little surreal that it happened haha