Time Out Madrid - European Travel Books

Paperback - 10 December, 2004 - Time Out
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By: Sally Davies
ISBN: 1904978266

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Reviews by readers

Must take book

If you are going to Madrid there are two books minimum you must read before hand and take with you: Eyewitness Guide Madrid, and this Time Out Guide. I have been to Madrid several times and always take the most current version of the Time Out with me.
To understand why the books are so good, you need to know that Madrid has the greatest number of bars and restaurants per capita of any city in the world. In Spain, the people of Madrid are given the nickname gatos, which means cats, because they stay up all night. They go to work at 8am, leave at noon, go home and sleep after the big meal of the day, return to work at 5pm, work until 9, leave work and go to tapas bars, where they have one drink and a snack, move to the next. Keep moving until around 11pm, when they stop for dinner, then it is off to a disco club, flamenco club, or a bar. But the same m.o.: in for a half hour or hour, then move on again. At 4:30 am on the weekends there are traffic jams because the streets are so busy. And I saw only one person who was drunk, that person undoubtable a tourist. The locals have fun, but behave themselves.

This is why the Time Out guide is so valuable. Even if you dont want to stay up until 4 am, the Time Out guide assumes that just as important as the monuments and art musems, the lifestyle is a 'must do' part of your stay. The book has 109 pages devoted to details on cafes, bars, arts and enteratinment. There is another 22 pages just on shopping; the 18 pages of hotel listings are detailed and a good source of information. The first 34 pages do a solid job of covering history, architecture, and modern Madird; 44 well done pages on sightseeing sights. Although the Eyewitness Guides usually win the best map award, the maps in this guide I think are acutally a little better. Slightly larger and they include the bus routes.

Two of my favorite places I found by reading this book, both on the same street 4 doors apart. The Time Out guide says "CARDAMOMO, open 9pm-4am daily. If you've got any interest in flamenco or salsa, this is an essential stop. The dancing varies from eye-catchingly sensual to reassuringly clumsy. No one here gives fig about such niceties, and the gitano flavour ensures the music can't be resisted for long."

The other is "EL BURLADERO open 3 to 3:30am daily. A packed two-storey locale off Plaza Santa Anna that's regularly full of copupes swinging each other round to flamenco, shouting Ole, and clapping. On the upper floor its calmer and a bit more space."

The descriptions are accurate, you wont find them in the other books. You would miss alot if you didn't have this book on your trip. When you go to Madrid, use the jet lag to your advantage; sleep in the middle of the day and early evening, get up at 10, go out for dinner, wander the Plaza Santa Ana area, catch a flamenco show, and see if Madrid isn't one of your all time favorite cities.

the best madrid guide we found

After living in Madrid for six months, I can honestly say this is the best guide that we found for recommendations on local bars, cafes, restaurants, shopping, nightlife, and tourist attractions. For people with a limited amount of time in the city it might be best to go with a tourism-focused guide like Rick Steves which gives you specific itinerary recommendations, but Time Out would still be a good secondary guide for those folks. It contains extensive information on all of the usual and unusual tourist sights, including up-to-date pricing and hours, as well as an abundance of listings of bars, restaurants, and cafes that contain more locals than tourists (which I prefer). I know I'm sounding like an ad for Time Out, but this was the first time I'd used one of their guides and I was impressed. It ended up being the one we turned to again and again, when we needed a recommendation but wanted something that would feel truly "Spanish" (and not created for tourists). We also found their day-trip info for the surrounding towns very helpful. I couldn't more highly recommend this guide.

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