magnificent Madrid

Day 4 (April 6)


This was another travel day, this time from Barcelona to Madrid.  We had an afternoon flight, so didn't have to get up ridiculously early.  Our flight went quickly, we got a bus, and were in Madrid between 4 and 5 p.m.

We found our hostel, not so easily.  Its sign wasn't prominent.  When we checked in, we discovered that the hostel was pretty sketchy--it didn't have lockers, we didn't get a key for the room, there was a kind of crazy lady in our room who alleged she was here to prosecute the U.S. for war crimes, and it wasn't very clean.

We headed to the metro to try to find another hostel and ended up bumping into an American girl who told us that her hostel was pretty decent.  She gave us directions to the area it was in, and we headed there.  However, all the hostels in that area looked like the same type of situation as the hostel we had checked into.

Just as we resigned ourselves to the somewhat sketchy hostel, we spotted a hostel that looked more like a hotel than a hostel and wasn't too pricey.  Luckily, we were able to get out of the sketchy hostel and into the nice hostel with only losing our 10% deposit.

Day 5 (April 7)


For our first day exploring Madrid, we decided to head to the Palacio Real (Royal Palace).  En route, we passed through some cool plazas, including the Puerta del Sol and Plaza Mayor.

When we got to the Palace, we enjoyed some time in the courtyard (where pictures were allowed) before heading into the Palace itself (where pictures weren't allowed).  From the courtyard, we had a beautiful view of Madrid and some hills.

The Palace was gorgeous!  Like the Royal Palace in Stockholm, it was draped in gold all around, in addition to rich colors, especially red.  There was also an abundance of clocks all around the Palace.

Once we had gone through the Palace, we returned to the courtyard where we sat and relaxed a bit before heading off to our next stop.

On our way back to the Plaza Mayor, I noticed a sign telling us that the temperature was 30 C (86 F).  It was quite the hot day!  We definitely needed to cool off, so we stopped at a restaurant in the Plaza Mayor for some sangria.  It was delicious and filled with fruit.

We enjoyed some of the street performers in the plaza before heading back to the hostel for the day.  Growing tired of the music channel, we went in search of a deck of cards (and found some just as we were about to give up!) so that we could play Rummy.

Day 6 (April 8)

The big sight to see was el Museo del Prado.  It was a pretty massive museum.  Once we were inside, Ashley and I were a little bit overwhelmed by the sheer presence of art in the museum.

We took on the second level before we even had our caffeine for the day.  There were so many paintings that we couldn't possibly take the time to really take in all of them.  So, we browsed past them for the most part.  In some of the larger rooms, there were artists doing replicas of some of the paintings on display.  It was pretty interesting to see.

Some observations of Spanish paintings:

1. It is obsessed with religion.
2. Nudity is rather prevalent.
3. Children are depicted like adults with baby heads.
4. Fat children were painted often.

After we grabbed some coffee from the museum cafe, we went through the first level, which had more of a sculpture to painting balance.  We went through this level pretty quickly before leaving the museum.

We headed on a somewhat lengthy walk through a couple plazas (including Plaza del Colon), stopping to rest and take some pictures a couple of times.  We tried to find a restaurant that serves patatas bravas (a common dish according to my Europe book), but no luck.  We ended up (again) getting pizza.  It was pretty good, but they charged us for bread that we didn't ask for, so we decided not to tip.