Travel: Spain 2014 | Part 14 - Last Day in Spain· yc.sg

This post took a lot longer than I had planned, anyway, here goes…

Day 14 - June 21

The day to leave Madrid, and Spain, finally comes :(. As mentioned in the previous post, we had planned an itinerary the night before, which basically boils down to:

Buy olive oil and vinegar back to Singapore
Have breakfast
Enjoy the city of Madrid by walking around
Return to the lodging before 2pm and then head for the Madrid Airport to catch our flight at 5.50pm.

We headed for Gourmet Experience at El Corte Inglés around 11am. It was about 15 minutes from our lodging, so we arrived there quite quickly. The selection of olive oil and vinegar here is huge! Unfortunately we did not take any photos of them… :(. We soon got what we needed, thanks to the helpful staff there, who gave us lots of advice on what type of olive oil we should be getting depending on what we needed it for :)!

I did, however, take a very random shot while there:

Kopi Luwak! Never thought I’d see this in Spain, haha :).

We then headed to the Gran Via and took a nice walk. I remember seeing a large souvenir store along that stretch, but somehow I could not find it again. Either way, it was nice to soak in the morning vibe one last time :). For some reason, we did not take many photos on this day. I think we were both wanting to explore the city one last time without any distractions.

I may have forgotten to mention earlier, but Sheryl and I were down to our last few Euros! We were trying hard not to withdraw any more cash, so we had to spend quite frugally on our last day :(. Either way, we decided to grab our breakfast at a different cafe instead of our favourite 24-hour cafe…

This picture does not do our emotions any justice. We were very sad and emo that we were going to leave Spain.

The food here was quite good, although we felt that we should’ve gone to our favourite and usual 24h cafe after all… It just felt different :(. Anyway, we headed back to our lodging once we were done with our brunch.

Sheryl and Magui (our wonderful Airbnb host)!

We left the lodging for the airport at around 1.45pm… And this is the last shot we took of Madrid city:

We probably reached the Adolfo Suárez Madrid–Barajas Airport at 3.30pm. Things kinda took a turn for the worse here. We had arrived early so we could settle our tax refunds. We had even purposely packed the things that we could have a refund for separately. However, for whatever reason, it slipped both of our minds, and we checked the luggages in.

It was only after we were in the departure area shopping around that we realized. Nonetheless, we decided to try our luck and see if we could somehow get our luggages back. I must say that most of the staff at the Madrid airport are extremely unfriendly and unhelpful, a far cry from what we had experienced in Madrid (and all the other cities). To make matters worse, we were told by one of the staff to make our way back to immigration, but we couldn’t find our way there, and whenever we asked for help along the way, we were simply turned away. We decided to give up on this impossible mission, and just head for the airport lounges instead.

Following the instructions from one of the unhelpful staff, we ended up in the arrival area!!! For whatever reason, we actually walked till we exited the departure area. We tried going back to the departure area and had to go through another security check. We were also asked what we were doing loitering around, etc

Anyway, we managed to get it all cleared in the end and ended up in the lounge :). Even the reception person at the lounge was extremely rude :(.

The lounge had a decent collection of food and drinks! Finally, a bit of positivity. Haha :).

Soon, it was time to board the plane and head back to Singapore. I caught a couple of movies on the plane, including (finally) The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. I liked it a lot! It’s like the perfect show to watch while on a flight, haha.

Once we arrived in Singapore, we had someone waiting to pick us up and send us home!

Meet our friend, Jeremy! :D

That about sums up our entire Spain trip… Not! Next part, Sheryl will be writing about the trip from her point of view <3! She will also be providing the summary instead of lazy me :P.

Other parts in this series: