Madrid Adventures

This past weekend, I was fortunate enough to take a weekend trip to Madrid through CEA. I had completely different expectations of what the city would be like after experiencing both Barcelona and Pamplona. I fully expected to find myself in the middle of a dirty european city just like London and Paris. Instead, I was pleasantly surprised to find a large clean city with wide streets like avenues, lots of monuments and statues, a great number of public parks and trees and grass. After living in Barcelona for nearly 3 weeks, I thought I had Spain all figured out, and here comes Madrid to throw me a curve ball. While I rested after the exhausting bus ride from Barcelona, my roommate and I scoured over the city map to find the notable landmarks we wanted to visit. We saw the Goya exhibit at the Prado, which was a beautiful building on its own, not to mention all of the fabulous art housed inside. After the museum, we visited the Buen Retiro Gardens, which was a gigantic public park with statues and beautifully shaped trees and bushes and these gardens even had a huge fountain inside where people could rent boats and go boating around the park! After leaving the park and being accosted by gypsies, my roommate and I managed to navigate our way to the Puerta de Alcala (above), some sort of arc d'triumph, which was completed in 1778. This was the old gate into the city. We made our way to the Spanish capital, a very impressive building with tipped fences surrounding it and a great view of the city and wanted to take a tour of the inside of the palace, but the long line and pricey admission ticket deterred us so we explored the magnificent cathedral directly next to the palace. This was the most fantastic cathedral I have ever seen, with ornate gold and marble, fantastic paintings on the walls, several tombs inside and the largest and most impressive pipe organ possibly ever made. Visiting Madrid was a great experience, and the only way to describe it is that it isn't necessarily better or worse than Barcelona, just very different and more homey thanks to the lack of tourist mobs which I always get caught up in going to my apartment on Las Ramblas.