Fancy

After a little breakfast at a local cafe and a last desperate search of the local shoe shops to see if I could find some new Italian sneakers, I bid Milan farewell and took the train out to Malpensa Airport to catch a short flight to my next destination: Madrid.

At the airport I checked in at the Iberia Air desk, and, with a couple of hours to spare until my flight departed, wandered up to the foodhall, which had expansive views of the runway. I spent the next hour relaxing, watching planes from random little airlines taking off and landing.

With about twenty minutes until boarding was due to commence, I ambled off in the direction of the gates. As I walked, it very gradually dawned on me that my hand luggage hadn’t been scanned at a security station. That’s meant to happen, right? Also, isn’t there passport control for international flights?

It turns out that in the nomenclature of Malpensa, your ‘Gate’, which I’d already been directed to, is more analogous to ‘Terminal’. I’d spent the last hour thinking I was in a departure lounge, and instead I’d been sitting in the public area where your family sits while they wait to greet you. My ambling suddenly turned into scurrying.

I found a swarm of about a hundred tourists standing about outside the barriers preventing them from joining the several hundred strong queue slowly being fed through the security checkpoint. Apparently the barriers were broken, or something. So, as precious minutes ticked away, we watched various small irritated Italian airport women querying each other for a solution. Eventually someone rebooted something and we could press forward and join the mad scramble to get through Security.

Fortunately, it turns out that the Iberia Air staff coordinating the boarding of the plane are as blasé and low-energy as any Italian bureaucrat, and boarding had only just commenced by the time I arrived at my actual gate. The flight ended up leaving half an hour late, for no reason we passengers could see apart from the extreme relaxation of the people boarding us.

The pilot, on the other hand, clearly felt the need to make up for lost time, and we landed in Madrid only ten minutes behind schedule. We were then shunted through Madrid Airport’s idiosyncratic retro-future-industrial spaces to the airport’s internal metro, which took us on the weirdly lengthy trip to the baggage claim (seriously, the train runs past literally kilometres of the creepy identical painted-over windows of some impossibly large building that’s been swallowed by the rest of the airport – I was wondering if I’d entered a Twilight Zone episode and we’d all been doomed to an eternity in an airport shuttle).

But we finally reached a station, and we could at last collect our bags and leave the terminal. With heavy luggage and no idea how to use Madrid’s public transport system, I opted to splurge on a taxi, which operate at a fixed rate (33 euros) from the airport to central Madrid. The taxi driver who collected me from the taxi rank spoke almost no English, but he understood the address I showed him on my phone, and off we went.

The phrase “bat out of hell” gets bandied around a lot, but now I think I can use it fairly. We didn’t drive out of the airport so much as explode out of it, rocketing down the expressway like a cutscene from Grand Theft Auto 5. I looked at the GPS screen at one point and noticed that we were in a 70 zone doing… 120.

In due course the taxi driver dropped me off in the centre of Madrid, still a ten minute walk from my hostal because, he explained in broken English, that entire section of the city is all pedestrian malls. The truth, I later worked out as I walked past other taxis much closer to my hostal, is that it’s a time-consuming trial to maneuver through the limited one-way streets in this part of the city, and he didn’t want to bother with that, not when the fare is capped at 33 euros.

But it was an easy walk, and I located the hostal relatively easily, considering that it’s an establishment that occupies the 4^th Floor of an anonymous mixed use building, above a language school and what looks like some sort of Herbalife business.

My hostal is… a disappointment. It’s basically a $200 a night doss house. My room is tiny and has no closet, no desk, no luggage rack, no minibar, no room safe, no drinking glass, no toiletries, no towel rail. Guests of residents are forbidden. The desk staff don’t speak any English at all. There’s no public lounge for residents to interact. The room is like a monk’s cell at a particularly austere monastery, or perhaps an inmate’s cell at one of those slightly nicer Scandinavian prisons. Either way, it’s more cell that bedroom. I write this on my laptop perched at an uncomfortable angle on my single bed, feeling like Oscar Wilde composing the Ballad of Reading Gaol. Only with less bitching about the inferior merlot provided and the lack of Aubrey Beardsley wallpaper.

Nevertheless, the good thing about a terrible hotel room is that it encourages you to get out of it and see the town. To this end, I changed my clothes and went to try one of the rooftop bars that was on my list of things to do and see.

A lot of Madrid’s best rooftop bars seem to be very high end, in the sense of “this is where Gigi Hadid and Charli xcx drink when they’re in town” kind of very high end. So I employed my secret weapon. A wealthy and label-conscious friend recently gave me a maroon double-breasted cardigan after he lost too much weight to wear it. I found the original price tag in the pocket: it retails for $1,500, although he got it in a good sale for “only” $700. It is, needless to say, the swankiest piece of clothing I own. I did the best I could with my limited clothing supplies, teaming it with my new Tommy Hilfiger dark indigo jeans and a black V-neck T-shirt I bought for 8 euros at OVS, and made my way over to the Edition Hotel, which hosts Oroya, their public rooftop bar.

The Edition Hotel is next level luxury of a sort that we simply don’t see in Perth, because the people who stay at the Edition don’t need to go to places like Perth, but may have multiple reasons for visiting Madrid. The cardigan was good enough to get me past the doorman, who smiled and waved me up the dramatic curved staircase to the lobby.

The lobby had the sort of ridiculous designer swank normally only seen in fashion shoots and the more upmarket hip hop videos. All of the people lounging in the low armchairs or stalking gracefully across the marble floors looked either like models, or like people who own models. Trying to be unobtrusive, I noted a discreet sign pointing to the lifts and made way over to them. I slipped into one just as the doors were closing and hit the button for the 5^th floor, where I surmised the bar would be. It refused to register the button press without a swipe of my room key, but a well-dressed woman who got in at the same time as me saw the cardigan, assumed I was a guest, and swiped her own key to make the 5^th floor accept me.

She got off on the 4^th floor, and I rode up to the 5^th alone.

The 5^th floor, as it turned out, was not the rooftop. The 5^th floor was the penthouse. It was very silent and empty, with just subtly numbered double doors leading to presidential suites, and occasional artful floral displays on expensive console tables. I made no sound as I padded down the thickly carpeted corridors, hoping to find a stairwell. But there was no such luck. I slinked back to the lifts, and made my way back to the lobby, where a nice concierge directed me to the basement level lifts that were installed to take riffraff like me to the rooftop.

Oroya is lovely in a no expenses spared kind of way. Ironically, the cocktails were similar in price to those in the “fancy” bars on the cruise ship, but of superlative quality, and served in a milieu of absolute and utter luxury. Even the bar snacks – crisps and peanuts – were the most incredible crisps I’ve ever eaten (they’re dusted with extra paprika) and the peanuts were rolled in tumeric, honey and sage.

I ordered their house negroni. Pirate Pete, an egalitarian at heart, was all for hoisting the black flag and slitting Eurotrash throats. I had to tell him not to embarrass me in front of the negroni. It was dusted with toasted coconut and was amazing.

The rich know how to live.

Afterwards, back in my cell, I looked up the price of a basic room at the Edition. If I’d planned ahead, instead of my $200 a night cell, I could have had a decadently comfortable room for $800 a night. Which would only be an extra… $5,000 across the length of my stay. Dammit.