There are two kinds of layovers: short ones and long ones. Short ones—four hours or less—offer little more than time to change gates and grab a bite to eat. But the longer ones, the ones that provide enough time to leave the airport—ah, those are the best.
A well-planned layover will give you plenty of time to visit the Prado Museum and enjoy some Spanish tapas before heading back to your hotel.
While checking available flights I’ve found layovers as long as an entire day. I prefer those and choose them whenever I can. With long layovers we can enjoy a bit of leisure during our voyage. We might sleep in a real hotel bed instead of an airport lounge, grab a shower and change, enjoy fresh local cuisine instead of microwaved food court value meals, and maybe even see an interesting sight or two before it’s time to head to our next destination.
Here’s a for-instance: As soon as our trans-Atlantic flight landed in Madrid, we dropped our carry-ons off at our hotel and made our way to Puerta del Sol in Madrid’s city center. Like most flights from overseas, we arrived in the morning, with plenty of daylight to enjoy the city and acclimate to the jet lag.
Read more: 10 Tips on How to Avoid Jet Lag
Getting by with the language
Avoiding tourist areas pays off: Prices and food are better on the side streets. We have learned to speak passable Spanish thanks to having lived in Latin America. (You know how we learned? We finally realized that people don’t mind if we mangle their language. They just appreciate the effort.)
It’s at times like these that I’m especially glad we avoided spending all our time socializing with English-speaking expats. In Madrid we had to adjust to the Castillian accent—they use th instead of s—but otherwise it’s not too hard to understand.
That is, when they speak slowly enough.
Read more: How to Make Friends if You’re an Expat
How to eat like the Spaniards do
Spaniards eat lunch between 1 and 3 pm. Dinner is usually served between 9 pm and 11 pm. Between lunch and dinner the locals cover their hunger at tapas bars. If you go to a local bar and order a drink, you’ll often get a free tapa.
Tapas are a sort of appetizer, just a small plate of bite-size morsels that you can savor along with your drink. The customary wine bar culture is to bring a plate of tapas to the table along with the first order—anything from olives to marinated beans to cheese and meat.
(Ham is ubiquitous all over Spain. If that’s not for you, the least complicated way to get an acceptable tapa is to mention to the waiter that you’re a vegetarian. I don’t know if that will always do the trick, but I do know that they never brought us anything that even slightly resembled meat when we said that.)
See? You don’t get a lot with your drink.
I suspect that a lot of the popularly served tapas are intentionally salty. It would make good business sense to make patrons thirstier so they will want to drink more. BUT you only get a free tapa with the first glass. Also, it’s only one per table, which means that you’ll have to share with your table mates. If your appetite is screaming for attention or the waiter brought you a tapa that was so delicious that you want a second, plan to spend about 1 to 2 euros each. Or you can do what the locals do:
Go tapas bar hopping.
Spanish culture includes a lot of bar hopping in the early evening. Because they’ll get a free tapa at each one, locals generally only order one glass of wine per bar, then settle their tabs and head to the next. Although liquor and mixed drinks are readily available, the cervezas and local wines are so inexpensive that I don’t recall ever seeing anything else on the table.
Also, we noticed that a lot of people eat their tapas standing up, rather than sitting down at a table. I’m not sure if it’s because they don’t want to get too comfortable in one spot, or if perhaps there’s a price difference for table vs. bar service, like there is in France. We weren’t there long enough to compare prices.
Maybe you know?
