Madrid, Spain - December 9-11

We took a four hour bus ride to Madrid from Valencia. Luckily, it seemed that we had left the rain on the coast in Valencia. We checked into our hotel which had our first private room, which was so wonderful - no more drunk roommates coming into our room at three am and talking really loudly for an hour and trying to compete with the room next door to see who could be louder (true story!). Notice our "double" bed. We decided to go to the LDS Madrid temple that evening. It was really easy to get to and we had a great time. On the way home we had more of those golden, warm, Spanish rings of deliciousness, a.k.a churros. By the way, they look very differently than the churros that you can buy at carnivals in America. They are much thinner and are in the shape of a ring. The next day we went to the Palacio Real de Madrid, which is the official residence of the king of Spain that is still used for formal events. It was forbidden to take photos inside the palace, so I only have photos of the exterior of the palace to share. There were a lot of peacocks wandering through the grounds. I always forget how beautiful peacocks are until I see them. They are gorgeous, and if you are science nerds like Scooter and I, it is fun to theorize about their evolution. Evolutionarily, they just don't make sense. Next we went to the Reina Sofía Museum, which holds a huge collection of contemporary art. It also holds the mural by Picasso which is arguably the most important work of modern art, Guernica. Then we went to another art museum called the Prado National Museum. It was another amazing museum, but I particularly liked the work by Velázquez called Las Meninas. We went and sampled that strange dry-cured uncooked ham that Spain is famous for called jamón. Scooter loved it, I didn't. Near the Prado museum there was one of the coolest buildings that we had ever seen. From the front it looked like a regular structure, but the side of it was totally covered in vegetation of various kinds. It was obvious that it had been planted in specific patterns. We are not sure how it grows, where the dirt is, etc., but it was visually stunning. We went to see the arena where the bull fights take place in summer. We were going to go inside, but a travelling circus had taken over the entire complex, so we didn't. That night we walked around and went to a Christmas market in the Plaza Mayor. The lights, like in Barcelona, were stunning. The people in Barcelona and Madrid stay up really late. They don't even eat dinner until around ten o'clock. Even the stores were open late, so even at midnight the streets were still packed with holiday shoppers. It was a huge contrast to England where everything except grocery stores close by six. The next day we went to the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in the morning. The entire collection was owned by one family, which is amazing to think about considering that it seemed like there were works by a few major artists from every time period. After that we took a day-trip to Toledo, which I will write about in the next post. When we got back to Madrid that night we just walked around enjoying the Christmas spirit. We came across this square that was full of these "blinking" eyes. They looked a bit too eerie to be Christmas lights.