Madrid: neck pain and fireworks

This weekend I went to Madrid! As I will probably only live in Spain once, I figure you have to seize every opportunity to get to know the country better! So I decided to start with the capital. There is a bus connection between Valencia and Madrid. It takes approximately 4 hours. As last weekend was a prolonged one - because monday is a holiday, the Dia de la Comunidad Valenciana - this was the ideal weekend to undertake a trip to Madrid! So here we are, Saturdaymorning 9am, in the coach, on the road!



I díd make good use of those four hours to work on my thesis... (Good huh, dad?)

And Morgane, my travel companion, also did some useful work during the coach trip.

As soon as we arrived in Madrid we took the metro to the hostel. We did not have a map of Madrid or the metro, we only knew at which stop to get off. The good thing about metros is that once you´re used to using it in one city, you very quickly get the logic of it for any city. So we were very proud to have found the hostel so quickly using nothing but good sense and our eeeexcellent spanish to ask the way. :-) After a quick lunch we immediately set out to explore the city. The hostel (Mad Hostel, www.madhostel.com, I recommend it!) is very well situated in the city centre, but in a small street so there isn´t much noise. The first tourist attraction we stumbled upon is the Plaza Mayor, a beautiful square that reminds me a bit of San Marco in Venice. Less doves, though, which is a good thing. Same number of tourists, though.

From there we walked to l´Almudena, Madrids cathedral. A very impressive building. I wish I could say something intellectual about the architectural style of the history of the building, but well... I will have to leave that first comment to my brother! Inside the building is very colourful and rather modern for a cathedral of its age. But my pictures of the inside are rather dark.

Then we went to visit the Royal Palace, which is right next to the cathedral. Spain is a monarchy, and in earleir ages the royal family did indeed live here, but nowadays they have moved to a somewhat smaller and simpler palace. This palace is only used for ceremonial activities these days. On the picture below you see the royal pharmacy.

One warning: visiting the Royal Palace is really bad for your neck!! Because the most beautiful thing about the palace are the beautifully decorated ceilings! Take a look!

This room is entirely decorated with porcelain applications! The most beautiful ones are again on the ceiling.

This is the "patio" of the Royal Palace. Enough place to hold two football competitions at once!

After visiting the n rooms of the beautiful Royal Palace, we decided we deserved a little break before heading to the next touristic attraction. Ah, happiness resides in little things... especially if they come by the two!

We sat down to eat our icecream in a pretty little square called Plaza de la Villa. I read there was supposed to be an ancient prison there with beautiful arches, but we didn´t see any arches...

Our next destination was the Centro de Arte Moderna Reina Sofia, or better: the museum that has Picasso´s Guerica! Very impressive to see the painting in reality. It´s much bigger that I thought! You can keep staring at it for hours discovering details you wouldn´t notice on a smaller reproduction. What´s also very interesting is the vast collection of pencil studies Picasso did before Guernica. Very interesting to see how he developed the characters and compositions of this famous painting. The museum also boasts several works by Miró, though not his best (those are in the Miró museum in Barcelona) and Salvador Dalí, not his best either, which are in the Dalí museum in Figueres. The annex to the original museum buidling is by Jean Nouvel. It´s way more impressive than you can see on the picture. It has got outside glass elevators, so you can see the city as you ascend to the top floor! The elevators an sich are a touristic attraction!

On Saturday night we had tapas on the Plaza Santa Ana, as recommended by Morgane´s uncle who is a travel agent. A very nice square indeed, filled with one tapa restaurant after the other! We sat on a terrace on the square, and had four delicious tapas and wine.

Oh dear... Am I eating meat on this picture?! It looks like that... but in fact it´s smoked tuna! It looks like smoked ham and tastes a bit like it, but it´s fish!

On Sunday morning we went to the El Rastro market, a huge, very busy, partially second hand flea market where they sell everything, from jewelry to clothes to bags to electric ustensils to tyres to flowers to...

And when I say they sell everything, I very literally mean, everything! Hmmm, could I try this one on please?

Oh, I have to show you the hostel! Here it is, the orange building. A very nice hostel, not too expensive, small but nice rooms with bunk beds, free internet, a bar that stays open late and breakfast included! Horrible electronic keys that never work, though. What happened to old fashioned metal keys? In the end, Morgane and I just left open our window a little bit, to stick an arm through to open the door from the inside. A lot easier!

This is our dorm room door, on the interior plaza. The dorm was for four people, but as the travel season for youngsters and students is over, we were alone in the room.

Anyway, back to our Sunday afternoon activities. We took the metro to Plaza Cibeles, one of the most beautiful squares of Madrid. Pity it´s not car free though, quite the opposite: it´s one of the big traffic points of the city centre. In the middle of the square is a beautiful fountain representing a Greek goddess. The beautiful building you see in the background is... the postal office! They say the Madrilens lovingly call it the ´Nuestra Señora de la Comunicación´.

Then we visited the Prado museum, a must for every art-loving tourist that comes to Madrid! On the picture you see the façade. The museum is enormous! Even my tourist guide said it is impossible to see the entire collection in one day! Nevertheless, we saw beautiful works by Rubens, Velázquez and the Garden of Pleasures by Hieronymus Bosch, which they call El Bosco in Spain, very funny!

After nearly two hours in the Prado, we decided we had seen enough art and started walking along the paseo del Prado, a beautiful avenue that crosses Madrid from south to north. We stumbled upon a cute little antique book market!

On Monday morning we took visited the Egypcian templo of Debod. What´s an Egypcian temple doing in Madrid? Apparently the Spanish helped moving the temple of Abu Simbel that would have gone under water after the building of the Aswan dam, and by means of thanks the Egypcians gave a temple to Spain!

From the park where the temple is situated, you have a beautiful view on the Royal Palace and the l´Almudena Cathedral!

For lunch we decided to go a little crazy, and we had a delicious chocolate con churros in the old Chocolatia San Gines. It comes down to a cup of chocolate sauce and a beignet like pastry which you dip in the chocolate. Soooooo so bad for your health and waistline, but soooo sooo goooood!

Then we walked to the Puerta del Sol, which they say can be considered the main square of Madrid. We had been told it is a dangerous square, full of pick pockets, drug dealers and even false policy agents who ask for you ID and then run away with it (for what purpose, I don´t know!). Other sources had told us there was absolutely nothing to see but a ´estatueta de mierda´, in the words of Morgane´s flatmate. But we decided to cautiously stop by anyway to take a peek. On the picture you see the ´estatueta de mierda´, a bear eating fruit of a tree. And the square was not at all the dangerous mayhem battle field we had expected.

In the afternoon, we went to the Parque del Retiro, a big, beautiful park with a lake in the middle on which you can row, which we did! Cool eh? Look at those biceps go!

And then it was time to go back to the bus station... Madrid is a wonderful city with lots of beautiful things to see, as you have just seen, but it is also a very busy city, crowded streets, more criminality (though we luckily didn´t experience any)... So I´m happy to be able to say: I´m going home to my beautiful city of Valencia!

By the sixth hour in the bus I wish we had stayed in Madrid... Normally the bus trip takes 4 hours, but we took over 6 because of bad traffic and accidents! (With other cars through, not with our coach). So by the time we arrived in Valencia it was almost eleven, and we just caught the last metro to the city centre, but of course missed the metro to our part of the city. So we walked to the main square to catch the night bus, and as we approached the square, we heard loud bangs... because we arrived just in time to see the fireworks commemorating the Dia de la Comunidad Valenciana! It was great compensation for our travel misery and the perfect way to end a lovely weekend in Madrid!