Sol district

Yesterday in the evening -- which starts at 6:00 or so even though the sun doesn't set until after 8:00 for now -- I did my laundry and ate at the Chinese place across the street. The Chinese place, called Starry Night, is the opposite of fancy but the staff is very friendly and the food is good. They have good wifi, and I'm glad I developed a friendly relationship with the restaurant guy because when he gave me the wifi password it was about 15 characters long.

I say "the restaurant guy" because there seem to be three different concerns going there: a bar, a smoothie bar, and the Chinese food. I had one of those smoothies at the hottest part of the day on Sunday and it was terrific.

After that I walked to a place that receives Amazon packages. It looked close by on the map but I had to make about seven turns before I reached it, and many of those streets were ones I hadn't walked down before, even though that part of the city is quite close. Along the way I stumbled upon the hotel that Anna and I stayed in in 2019. It's pictured above, sunlit, with that funny ball on the peak of the building's corner.

After picking up my packages -- band-aids and hand lotion, which I ordered on Amazon because I couldn't yet find them here -- I continued my walk. It was a beautiful evening and there were tons of people out, very many of them tourists.

I saw the most beautiful sliver of a moon poised at the end of a street, appearing delicate and burnished with gold. My phone can't take pictures of celestial objects though.

Finally, I found the spot where Anna and I had churros on our 2019 visit. If you picture those massive churros you get in San Francisco, these are much thinner. They're served with a thick cup of hot chocolate, and you drown the fried dough in the chocolate before eating. Then you drink the rest of the chocolate.

That 2019 visit, which made me like Madrid so much, took place right before the Covid pandemic. Like two weeks after we returned, the first U.S. people started dying. Of course, we couldn't travel for the next three and a half years. So coming back here feels like a nice ending. Not just to mark my retirement -- the way to say "I'm retired" is "Me jubilado," which sounds very festive -- but also a new stage, if not the end, of the pandemic.