Well, it's been almost a month since I came back to Madrid after being home for two great weeks at Christmas. Since my return, I've been lying pretty low, just going to work, spending time with my friends on the weekends, and of course trying to plan my next trip to wherever. In this downtime, I get to enjoy what Madrid has to offer! On Saturday, my friend Meg and I decided to take a day trip to a nearby town called Chinchón.
There isn't too much to see and do there, but it did have a cool circular Plaza Mayor. We stopped into the tourist information office and saw a funny bat-shaped flyer for a restaurant called the Mesón Quiñones that boasted free entry to some bat caves, with available desgustación de vinos (wine tasting). We'd expected to find pretty cheap lunch menus in this small pueblo, but restaurants were about on par with Madrid prices in the Plaza Mayor, so we opted for a cheap lunch just a bit outside the very center, grabbed an ice cream, and headed out in search of the bat caves.
A quick glance at a map of Chinchón showed that we weren't far from the restaurant claiming to have bat caves. We walked up a few hills and around a few corners to discover that not only does this restaurant actually have some caves under it, but it is also the only restaurant we saw in Chinchón above the Plaza Mayor, save for two oddly-decorated "Irish" bars. We weren't really sure how to go about finding the caves, so we just walked in, and sure enough just across from the bar there were some stairs down into poorly-lit, slightly creepy caves. There was a small group of people heading out as we came in who told us to stop by the bar to have some wine and a snack. Our 1€ wines came with a small pincho and we got to keep our little glasses!
The odd sixteen year-old waiter working behind the bar wanted to speak to us in English, making a lot of mistakes, but he told us to feel free to take a walk around and eventually was nice enough to take a picture of us in the caves (hence why the photo is so dark). Once we finished our wines, we went back out into the town to walk around for a bit longer before having a seat in the Plaza Mayor to watch the little kids go around on donkeys and in little carriages. All of this, of course, was accompanied by some cañas while the unseasonably warm January sun baked just above our heads.
