Day 20 to 23 - Madrid

Madrid's a little harder to get into than the (limited) Spain we've seen so far.  Granted, it's the commercial centre so the focus is primarily work and not tourism; however, it's been hard to find a good meal and harder still to see what the attraction of the city actually is.  Whilst there are plenty of places to eat, they're smoky little places with the telly & football on and the tapas aren't that great. It's also meant to have great nightlife, but we've found only more smoky little bars.  And when I say little, these bars are full at 40 people, they are just tiny and the streets are literally lined with them, but still not the energy we expected in a big city.
We spent one full day shopping at an "outlet" mall about 40mins out of town (which is a long, long way out of town anywhere in Europe!). The mall has a lot of the big name brands such as Ralph Lauren, Diesel, Boss, Bvlgari, Versaci etc.  But we got lost getting to this place and ended up in a nearby suburb and you could see all the housing they've built or partly built that now lays empty and often unfinished. They have "Vendi" signs everywhere and whenever we speak to locals they tell us just how messed up their property market is here and just how disinterested the population seems to be in getting  their economy back on track.