Sunday 6 May 2012

Madrid

After a rocky start things got a lot better and we had a good time in Madrid.

The Palacio Real (Royal Palace) was pretty impressive. Less impressive was that my sunglasses got stolen at the security checkpoint. Still, that was the only thing stolen the whole trip.


Had some excellent tapas, including my first taste of 'pulpo' (Galician style octopus), with jbm at Mercado de San Miguel. The food here was amazing. Em sat this one out since we thought the Spanish 'after 9pm' dinnertime was too late for E....oh how things changed :)

We spent quite a while wandering the huge Parque del Buen Retiro, this is the Palacio De Cristal, a greenhouse built in 1887.

After some debate about which museum to visit (there are lots) we ended up going to the famous Museo del Prado to get our Velázquez and Goya on. The collection was impressive but it made me thoroughly sick of paintings of Jesus and co.
We did the tour of Real Madrid's stomping ground, Santiago Bernabéu Stadium, which was actually really good. They have a large museum dedicated to the sporting club, which includes a number of sports other than soccer that I cared even less about. After we were bombarded by trophy cases we walked down to the field, sat on the player benches, and walked through the tunnel to the changerooms and showers.

Bernabeu
Some of the more ridiculous trophies
Team tourist
Vomitorios sound like they would be useful for a stadium that serves booze but the Internet tells me the translation is pretty much 'stadium entrance'


More great food: pintxo in La Latina. We defied the trendy standing-room-only crowd in Txakolina by dragging baby and stroller inside. Also happened to walk past the oldest restaurant in the world. Spain significantly shifted my perception of 'old'.

Sobrino de Botín: Goya's former employer and was apparently mentioned in a Hemingway novel.

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