Ice skating in Madrid

A few days ago, I went with some of my friends from school ice skating. I used to do a lot of ice skating back when I was still a little girl and I was going to ice skating classes. My mom still has some photos of me doing some weird figures while skating in a Mickey Mouse dress, proudly exhibited in the living room for everyone to see. I liked to ice skating a lot, but generally I am not very much into winter sports. Ok, fine – generally, I am not at all into sports. But one of my closest friends here said he wanted to go because he had never done that before and he wanted to try. He is from the Dominican Republic so no wonder that he had never done it before – he had never even seen snow before coming to Madrid, and for people like him (basically the majority of Latin American people that come to Europe), seeing snow or going to do some winter sports is a huge thing.

So I checked the ice skating rinks here in Madrid and was surprised to find quite a few. Of course, most of them have already been closed because they only opened for the period of Christmas and a few weeks after. And since we are almost in February, they all started to close, one after the other. There is one rink though that never closes and it is called Palacio de Hielo, which is located inside one of the shopping centers of Madrid that is called Cines Dreams but I actually have no idea where exactly it is located. All I know is that it is pretty expensive.

We went to the open air rink in front of the Palacio Real. It is really small and it was not very comfortable to ride because the skates were not sharpened (as they said when we tried to convince them to sharpen them for us – it was because there were a lot of children there, although I have no idea what children have to do with the skates that I am wearing on my feet…) and the ice was already very cracked.

Still, I wasn’t expecting a very high quality because it was not too expensive. We paid 7, 50€ each, because it was a Saturday and on the weekends it is always a bit more expensive than during the week days, when it costs 5€. It is said that you can only be there for maximum one hour but I actually don’t know how they can control it, because we have spent like an hour and half there until we finally got hungry and decided to go eat something and warm up. We even got a free skating lesson from some Argentinian guys that was working there.

It was a very nice day, because it was something different than all the things that I usually do here in Madrid. It is one of those things that you can do in order to kill the routine, that after 4 months is already starting to creep up on all of us. It is not as it used to be at the beginning anymore. People start losing their enthusiasm and they become more and more tired with school and the exams. Some also become very home sick, having not been able to see their family and friends in 4 months. The parties stop to be so amusing anymore, because there have already been so many that it all started mixing up. So many things have happened that at one point you find yourself asking a question if there is anything else that might happen that can be so much fun.

But then, after all, it is all perfectly normal. This is how it always is.

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