I'm just not sure about Madrid

Stay tuned to hear what I did in Madrid. I can't write now but I'll just quickly try to explain the title. Madrid is a strange city. It isn't all that big for a capital and while it has some great sights (the palace, the Prado) it just doesn't seem like a proper tourist spot. They must have heaps of visitors but yet, the opening hours are strange, the tours are run only in Spanish at many of the sights and they don't seem to know what to do with tourists. They don't have signs up giving you information in Spanish or any other language at many of the sights. It just doesn't seem quite right to me. Don't get me wrong, I have seen some great stuff here but the town just doesn't feel right. It doesn't help that I had someone try and steal stuff out of my bag today while I was walking outside one of the galleries. Look out for women walking too close to you or Spanish women coming up and asking directions while holding tourists maps. When I came out of the museum they were doing that to another group of tourists. Luckily I noticed her and she only got to the stage of unzipping my bag when I turned around and I have all my valuables inside another bag in the bottom of my backpack so nothing got taken. I haven't had anyone try and steal anything from me for the entire trip so far and I have been to places where they constantly warn you about pickpockets. So it says something about Madrid and the way they feel about tourists here.

Here is my actual entry about Madrid. Sorry it took so long to write but I've been on my way home and have finally made it back to Tassie after all this time.

I arrived in Madrid on the lunchtime plane from Seville and after waiting for what seemed like hours to get my bags headed to the train station to head into town. One good thing in Madrid is the metro system goes all the way out to the airport so it only costs a couple of euros to get into the city. You do have to do a fair bit of changing of lines to get anywhere that you actually want to go to from the airport but it isn't too hard to work out from the maps. It does take quite a while though. I was staying the middle of the city and it took a little over an hour to get into town from the airport. It doesn't look that far on the maps but is actually quite a distance out. I was quite disappointed by the hostel when I arrived. The service was pretty poor and they were renovating the steps so there was dust everywhere and the sound of sanders constantly but having chatted to some other people who had moved to the hostel from other places that also had high rating on Hostelworld, all the hostels in Madrid are pretty bad. It also had those annoying showers that you have to keep pressing the button every 20 seconds to keep the water running which gets very tiresome when you are washing your hair or shaving your legs. The bathrooms were also only a couple of degrees above zero which didn't improve things. I was tired and cranky on the first night which didn't help my feelings about the hostel at all! I just went out to the supermarket and grabbed some things and then cooked dinner and went to bed.

Unfortunately, I didn't get the early night that I had wanted because two Spanish girls turned up at 9.30 and didn't quite get the hint that I was trying the sleep and kept coming in and out of the room talking loudly until after 11pm. Finally they settled on an outfit and headed out into the city and I could finally get some sleep. I had some of the reasonable free breakfast in the hostel and headed out into town at about 9.30 am. I headed first to the Puerta del Sol which is the centre of town and a popular meeting place. It isn't a particularly attractive square but does have a couple of statues. One is the bear and the tree (which has some form of fruit on it but I'm not sure what. I was told by one person that it was strawberries but they clearly have never seen a strawberry plant!) which is quite cute. The square was all sticky and full of rubbish from the people from the night before. It had that tacky ground that you get in pubs after a big night (and it takes work to make cobblestones sticky). I then headed to the Monasterio de las Descalzas Reales forgetting that it doesn't open until 10.30 so walked past it (the outside is very ordinary) and continued onto the nearby Gran Via which is one of the main shopping streets in Madrid. I found a tourist info booth and grabbed a slightly smaller map of town though it wasn't great because it had those large pictures on it which end up obscuring some of the street names.

I walked through to one of the few Modernista buildings in Madrid which is a few streets north of Gran Via. It was okay and nothing compared to Barcelona's buildings. It is more something to see on the way to somewhere rather than making a special trip. There is a good chocolate store a couple of streets further north so you could just make a detour on the way there. Once you get off Gran Via the streets become quite dirty and a bit smelly as well. Lots of dodgy looking pubs and alternative clothing shops up this way as well.

I headed back to the monastery to find that there was a queue to get in which was quite odd as I didn't think it would be that popular. So I stood around for a little while and waited. It was all explained when I finally made it to the top of the queue when the woman (who thankfully spoke some english) explained that you had to go on an hour long tour (in Spanish only) and they were only letting in as many as could fit on a tour and then waiting 10 minutes before letting anyone else in. She tried to discourage me from going on the tour as she said that it was really boring (great selling technique!) but I decided to go anyway as it was meant to be really good and you can just follow the group around and look at the paintings. I bought the combined ticket that also allows you to go to the Monasterio de la Encarnation which I was hoping to get to later in the morning.

We had to sit and wait a little while for the rest of the group to get tickets and then we set off. I can't tell you much about the place because my Spanish isn't that good but it is fabulous and if you are interested in religious art it is well worth the visit. It was founded by one of the Spanish queens and lots of royals and nobles were nuns here over the centuries. Of course, that meant that it was a quite wealthy convent so despite being the barefoot nuns they lived in fairly opulent surroundings.

The tour starts with the staircase from the lower courtyard up to the chapels on the balconies above. It is decorated with frescos of the archangels with some paintings of the royals and a couple of patron saints as well. The top level has a series of small chapels that are all elaborately decorated by famous painters of the time. Some are very heavily gilded and baroque. The largest has a copy of the mosaic of Our Lady of Antigua (from the Cathedral in Seville) as well as a truly fabulous painting of the Archangel Michael leading the angels into battle. I'm very curious to know what the rest of the archangels actually did since you only every really hear about Michael and Gabriel. There are lots of relics in the various chapels as one of the Spanish kings collected lots from England during the reformation.

One the lower level of the building there is an art collection that is a mixture of religious and royal art. Many of the Spanish royals seem to have reddish blonde hair which makes me wonder how many of them were married to Dutch royals. There is an interesting set of portraits of one of the princesses holding the attributes of various saints including the wheel of St Catherine and the eyes of St Lucia. Other than the change of iconic symbol, the paintings are almost identical. One of the last rooms on the tour contains a fabulous painting of the apocalypse that is based around boats. It has heaven as the safe port that the boat is heading to and there are about 5 other boats in the painting too. The largest has the saints of Spain on board and is heading to the harbour. They are helping people aboard from the two boats behind which contain the royal family and the clergy. At the bottom of the picture there are people being pulled out of boats and fed to sea monsters. It is really quite striking.

The tour was done by 12pm so I headed off towards the other monastery. By the time I got there, it was only 30 minutes until closing time for siesta so I decided not to go in. So I continued on past the royal palace to the Temple of Debob. It is an authentic Egyptian temple that was rescued by the Spanish from the rising waters of the Aswan dam. It is in a park about 5 minutes walk from the palace. It isn't very large but is quite interesting. Not all of it is still intact and upstairs they have models of it in the various stages of construction. Each new king added his own little bit to the building over the centuries. Some of the carvings on the walls are still visible. It was really crowded on the inside and the Spanish have no concept of traffic flow (I should have guessed that from the way they drive) which gets a bit tiresome. To give you an idea of how cold it was in Madrid, the fountain around the temple was still frozen at lunchtime despite being in the sun.

I had lunch sitting in the park in the sun to try and warm up a little bit. I then headed back to the Palacio Real. I walked through the Jardines de Sabatini which have some nice views of the outside of the palace. I then came to one of the entrances to the palace. It had a sign up about all the opening times and that you could enter there so I joined the queue to go in. It was quite slow and long but I stuck with it. After 30 minutes I made it to the top to find out that it was a special queue just for people who wanted to go to the nativity exhibition and not into the palace. It would have been nice if they had put a sign up about that. So pissed off, I walked around to the other entrance to the palace where thankfully there wasn't a queue. I walked straight in and got a ticket and the nice man in the booth even gave me one for a student price which brightened up my day. I grabbed an audioguide (2.30 euros) and headed out into the courtyard. The palace takes up three sides of it and the fourth is filled by the Cathedral which isn't particularly attractive.

The site of the current palace has had various fortresses on it in the past (for over 1000 years) but the current building is from the 18th century when fire destroyed the palace and it had to be demolished. It was meant to be a much more ambitious building but the architect died after completing the plans and the new one went for something more achievable. It isn't exactly small with over 2800 rooms in total. You don't get to visit all that many though.

I headed across the square and into the main entrance to the palace. You head up the main staircase with marble lions and a large statue of Charles III dressed in a toga. He was the king that built most of the palace. At the top of the stairs I came up against another queue which I thought was unusual but then I realised what the exhibition was and that was what they were queuing for. The free nativity scene is in the old dining room of the palace and they only let so many people in at once so that everyone can see. The anteroom was the Halberdier's Hall which is where the royal guard were stationed so that they could quickly access the rest of the palace. It is fairly fancily decorated but looks plain when compared with the rest of the place. The dining room is difficult to see at the moment because of the nativity scene in the middle of the room. The nativity scene is one of those ones with about 400 figures of angels and animals and people and everyone is dressed like it is medieval Europe rather than the Middle East. And yet again they have the butcher with the pig carcass!

Normally there is a doorway from here into the next section of the palace but they had it closed because of the crowds and I had to walk back down the stairs and back up the other side. You then enter the section of the palace used by the king. The first room is the throne room which is difficult to describe (I don't know that many ways to describe something so OTT) and you can't take photos inside the palace. I did buy some postcards of it though. It is still used by the current king and queen for official function though they live at one of the other palaces a bit further out of town. The theme colours for the room are red and of course gold. Every three feet there is a large gilded mirror with various black marble statues between them. The two surprisingly modest thrones are flanked by four bronze (but gilded) lions and the room is lit by two large silver and crystal chandeliers from Italy. The ceiling is stunning with one of those 3D looking frescos with a stucco cornice. It has some allegorical theme that is basically saying how great the king is. It is an awesome piece of work though.

The next room was the King's lounge and was decorated with fabric walls and another painted ceiling. It was tame in comparison to some of the later ones. Next was the Charles III antechamber which takes things up a notch. It has red and gold fabric on the walls and more of the gold mirrors. There is a giant silver (but gilded) candelabra from France in the middle of the room and two more of the silver and crystal chandeliers. The ceiling has another detailed allegorical painting saying how good the king is.

The final room in the suite is the Gasparini room which is named after the man who designed it. Unfortunately, both he and the king died before it was finished so never got to see it in all its glory. It takes OTT to whole new levels. It has a patterned marble floor, embroidered silk walls (with silver and gold threads) and a gilded stucco ceiling. They have gone for an Asian theme as that was very popular in Spain at the time. It has the ubiquitous gold mirrors and enormous chandelier as well as a really ugly collection of clocks. It was quite spectacular but would have been very hard to live in. You then turn the corner and head into another lot of suites also used by the king. They are much smaller as they were part of the totally private suite but are just as ornate. The porcelain room is lined completely with porcelain (as you do) with an elaborate design of angels and garlands in white, green and gold. It has a large ornamental clock with Atlas holding up the world. The floor is patterned marble but they have covered it with a large rug in bright colours. The ceiling matches the walls and there is another large chandelier ( I pity the poor bugger who has the dust them all!). The yellow room is, of course, yellow and has patterned fabric walls and a painted ceiling. It has a suite of rococo chairs built to resemble the hair combs of spanish women. They look really uncomfortable.

The dining hall was built later when three rooms were combined to make a room that could seat 140 diners. Each ceiling has a fresco and there are lots of large porcelain vases (really ugly). The next room was used by the family for watching movies and is fairly plain. It has a large table in the middle which is decorated with various coloured enamels. The next couple of rooms are fairly ordinary and house the collections of silverware and crystal that are still used for formal dinners. I pity the poor person that has the clean the silver though maybe they know something that I don't about getting into the crevices.

The chapel is built into the surrounding building and is Rococo in style. You enter from the side and it is quite stunning. Unfortunately, they don't have any postcards of it. In the first section are four large statues of the Evangelists and various paintings of saints. It also has a gilded dome.

The next group of rooms were completed more recently when one of the queens wanted to redecorate. The first room is a billiard room decorated in dark wood. The ceiling was just suspended underneath the existing one so the original fresco is still there. The next room is the smoking room which is decorated in Asian style. The porcelain tiles are from France and remind me of the pictures of Tintin in Asia. It also has fabric sections in between the tiles. The ceiling in this room is the original fresco which was found when the ceiling was damaged. They decided not to rebuild but left the old one on view. There are then a couple of rococo studies that were used by the queen. The first is stucco and the second wood.

That is the end of the tour of the interior of the palace and you head back out into the courtyard and to the royal armoury. It has quite a large collection of suits of armour and weapons but is a little bit dull. The audioguide also covers it but is very long winded and a bit tedious. It is set up really well complete with large wooden horses dressed in full armour.

The final stop is the Royal Pharmacy which has been running on the site for over 400 years. It has a small collection of containers and pharmacy equipment but unfortunately very few signs and the audioguide says almost nothing about the place. So nearly 2 hours later, I made it out of the palace and back onto the street outside. I then headed down the street to the Basilica de San Francisco el Grande. It is very ordinary looking from the outside but stunning on the inside. It is a mixture of styles because it took so long to complete but is mostly baroque and neo-classical. It has a round nave with a main chapel off it for the altar and six smaller side chapels. You have to go on a tour (Spanish only) and it is three euros but well worth it. Initially I was the only one on the tour so the man spoke very slowly and pointed to things so I understood quite a bit (it helps if you know a bit about religious architecture and art). The main altar has large statues of the four evangelists in the bottom section and then paintings above them. The choir stalls are older and from another church.

In the back section behind the altar there is a large collection of Spanish religious art by famous painters. There is some really lovely stuff but it is very poorly displayed in the semi dark. You get a quick visit to the antesacristy and the sacristy which are decorated with dark wood and frescos. The tour ends with the main dome of the basilica which is extraordinary. It is split into eight sections with different scenes in each. Closest to the altar is the Hold Trinity and the ascension of the Virgin. Next to it on either side are the main Spanish saints (boys one side, girls the other), then the archangels split into two groups of four, saints from elsewhere in the world and finally the ascension of St Francis of Assisi into heaven. They are each separated by gilded stucco. The paintings are done in the 3D styling and really intense colours. Around the cornice are prophets from the bible and at the bases of each of the columns are statues of the disciples. The choir contains scenes from the life of St Francis and two organs though one is fake and was only built for symmetry. The basilica is definitely a must see in Madrid.

I then walked further down the street to the Gate of Toledo which is a fairly typical looking ornamental arch with lions and the like. I then turned up into the city again and walked back to the hostel.

Sunday was a very full day as I headed to the Prado. I decided to set my alarm and get there early so as to beat the crowds. It was freezing when I headed out of the hostel and walked down to the museum. The outside of the building isn't that interesting so I had a quick look around and then went to the ticket office to wait for it to open. The queue thankfully wasn't that long. The streets on the way there were really grotty again with lots of empty bottles and vomit. There must have been some event on as I heard lots of cheering in the early hours of the morning. The pigeons were enjoying it.

I was surprised that it is only 6 euros to get into the permanent collections and it is even free each day between 6pm and 8pm (though you would need to go a couple of times as 2 hours isn't long enough to see everything). It is really cheap given what you get to see. I decided to grab an audioguide again and it is one of the best that I have had. It gave you much more information about the artist and the particular work than any of the signs did (they are also often only in Spanish). I started with the religious art on the ground floor as it was just there and everyone else seemed to be rushing upstairs. Most of it is Flemish or Italian work though there is some early Spanish stuff as well. Some of the pieces are incredible and most of my favourite paintings are in this section. The Flemish painters were just so far ahead in style and skill.

Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights could easily be mistaken for a surrealist work except that it was painted in 1500. It is one of the most famous pieces in the museum. It was commissioned by the Church to show the evils of physical pleasures and shows the penalties for enjoying oneself too much. He also did the table top piece, The Seven Deadly Sins with its depictions of heaven and hell. Mabuse's Christ Virgin and St John the Baptist is another lovely piece with a gothic background. I've seen very similar paintings in some of the European churches so I wonder who copied whom. Van der Weyden is a painter that I had never heard of but who painted one of the stunning pieces of the collection, Descent from the Cross. It features almost lifesized characters with the most realistic hands. Other pieces to look out for in this section are Fra Angelico's Annunciation, Van der Stockt's Redemption and Piambo's Descent of Christ into Limbo. The largest room in this section contains Italian art with a large collection of Rafael's paintings. There is one really strange set that consists of four paintings but the museum only owns the first three. The story is told across the canvases and goes something like this. There is a man walking in the forest when he comes across a naked woman being hunted by a man on horse back and his hounds. Before he can do anything the hunter catches up with the woman and cuts out her heart and feeds it to his dogs before they all disappear. It seems that the woman, when she was alive, spurned the man's advances so her hell consists of him hunting her down and cutting out her heart each week. The man who watched the whole scene decides to use it to his advantage and organises for the object of his affection and her family to see the scene the following week. He then asks for her hand and the family fearing what could happen say yes. The final painting (the missing one) is of the wedding. It was commissioned by one of the Medici family.

I then headed upstairs to the first floor where most of the permanent display is kept. It has mostly Spanish art and much of it is religious though there is a small collection of portraits, landscapes and still life. I don't remember where most of my favourite pieces were because there are so many little connected rooms and they all look the same except for the paintings. You can see the new pigments that became available in the renaissance and some of the pieces are stunning. Some of my favourites on the first floor were Gentileschi's The finding of Moses with its incredibly detailed clothes, Reni's Virgin of the Chair, Caravaggio's David with the Head of Goliath and Titian's Madonna and Child with St Anthony of Padua and St Rochus.

There is a large collection of Rubens with my favourite being his St George and the Dragon. The dragon has truly crazy eyes. There is a small collection of Baroque art which has some fabulous pieces. I was much more impressed with their art of this period than the architecture in Spain. One of the strangest paintings in the collection has to go to Cano's St Bernard and the Virgin. It has a vision of the Virgin and Child, squirting breast milk into the mouth of the praying saint. Definitely not one of the stories that I was told as a child.

The audioguide also made some sense of some of the stories that I didn't know too. St Anne is the mother of the Virgin Mary and is the older woman in the icons with Mary and Jesus as a baby. I always wondered why the virgin looked so old in the pictures but it makes sense now. I also learnt the deal with the boy and the fish that are the representations of the Archangel Rafael. The boy is called Tobias and he asked for help with his sick father. He was told by the archangel to catch a fish and feed the bile to his father and it would cure him. Bit of an odd thing to have become the most important thing that an archangel had done but maybe he was just a little boring.

The special collection on the first floor at the moment is the complete collection of El Greco's work from the archive in the museum. It's not really my sort of art but there are some great pieces and it is good to see the evolution of his work over the years by seeing the full collection.

The largest collection of paintings are by Goya and cover the full range of his styles. It's probably best to see them in chronological order as his style changes dramatically over the years. His early works are full of light and the people look cheerful. It becomes darker with serious expressions and dreary landscapes. Finally when he was exiled in France his work becomes even darker still and they are really quite disturbing paintings. There is one of Saturn eating his son that is really quite revolting and you wonder why he chose the subject. It seems to be a popular theme for the Spanish though as there were a few of these around.

There are quite a few Velaquez paintings in the collection too (though currently some of the more famous pieces are in a separate collection for which you have to pay extra to go and see). I'm not so keen on his subject matter (though I suppose like the rest of us he needed to pay the bills) but you could see that he was very talented.

I realised once I finally got hold of a floor plan that I had missed a couple of rooms on the lower floor so I headed back down to see them. One had a small collection of gothic art from the 12th century and the other (hidden behind the staircases at the end of the building) contained some Romanesque art which is rarely seen in galleries. They even have a complete set of frescos from a small chapel that have been moved into a fake church. They are really quite lovely and well preserved.

I then headed through into the other building to see the temporary exhibition of 19th century Spanish art. It is spread out over a couple of floors. There are some spectacular pieces in this collection including a stunning one of a woman that is so real it could almost be a photo. Upstairs in this building are the remains of the cloister that had to be destroyed to enable the expansion of the museum. The outside of the building is completely gone but the inside is intact in the modern building. It's nothing special but is worth going up for a quick look. After having a quick look around in the museum shop, I headed out and walked up to the Buen Retiro Park to have some lunch.

The park is quite large and sits on the eastern side of the city centre. The internal sections have playing fields and tennis courts and that sort of thing as well. In the middle is an artificial lake which is big enough to row boats on. There were lots of people around given how cold it was. Next to the lake is a large monument with lions and angels (quite OTT) which seems to be the place to come and sit. I looped out the top of the park and went to the Fountain of the Cibeles which is one of the famous fountains in Madrid. I wouldn't exactly rave about it as it is in the middle of a very busy roundabout and is quite difficult to get a decent look at. There are some great buildings around it though. I continued down the avenue towards the Fountain of Hercules which is near the museums. It is even more of a let down as you can't see it well at all and it is overshadowed by many of the buildings. This is where the woman tried to steal stuff out of my bag as I was crossing the road and heading up to the Thyssen Bornemisza museum (so watch out around here). I went into the museum and checked the opening hours and had a quick look around the shop. I decided not to go in for the afternoon because I didn't feel that I would have appreciated it as much after 5 hours in the Prado.

I didn't really do much for the couple of hours of daylight that were left but did meet a couple of Aussie guys who were also heading to Toledo for the day on Monday. There are two options for getting to Toledo; the train and the bus. The trains leave from Atocha station but don't run all that regularly during the day and buses leave from the bus station that is down the street from the station. There is a metro station near by and I would probably recommend catching the metro to get there as it is much further than it seems on the maps. It took us over 40 minutes to walk there from the hostel and we weren't dawdling. So we ended up missing the bus that we were trying to catch. Luckily the buses leave every 30 minutes so we didn't have to wait long. We were surprised that the staff in the bus station didn't speak any english given that it is the main regional bus station for Madrid. We have all been astounded by the lack of english everywhere in Spain given the large numbers of tourists that come here all the time.

Toledo is a really cute little town and looks much nicer than Madrid. It has the same little grey stone houses that you see in Tuscany. We set off towards the centre of town which is easy to spot since it is on the top of a hill and has a really large castle on the top of it. We came up against the city wall though which is intact on one side of the city, and had to walk up along it for a while to find a gate. We then headed back around the wall and up to the main square of the town. Here we found a sign pointing to an info centre and toilets that didn't seem to exist. We walked the full length of the street and found neither. Luckily in the square there was a little info tent that had city maps.

Our first stop was the Museum of Santa Cruz which it turns out is free. It's in an old convent and has several small but interesting collections. You first enter into the courtyard of the cloisters which is ornately decorated in the gothic style. Downstairs in a room off the courtyard, there is an exhibition of religious art including quite a few el Grecos. It's got some nice pieces including church sculpture from the 15th century. Upstairs there is a collection of ceramics from around Spain which is pretty but I think would have been better if you could read the explanations. You then enter the main building which has an exhibition of local photography on the top level and religious art on the lower floor. After about an hour here, we decided that we needed some lunch so headed off to find somewhere. We ended up in a little cafe around the corner from the museum which was quite good value. I got chips, calamari, salad and a drink for 6.50 euros. We sat over lunch for quite a while before we decided that it was time to brave the cold again and keep walking.

We went past the fortress (which is closed on Mondays) which is okay looking from one side but quite ugly from the other as it has had a 17th century face lift. This side is the local library now. We continued through the windy streets to the cathedral and did an almost complete loop before finding the door. It didn't help that all the signs from the direction that we entered pointed you away from the main entrance. The cathedral is late gothic and quite lovely on the outside. There are very heavily carved main doors on both sides. The others decided that they didn't want to pay the 6 euros to go in and see the cathedral so they went to price suits of armour (the main souvenir of Toledo, it seems) and I headed in.

The cathedral is nice but is nothing extraordinary on the inside. The best of the side chapels is that of St Blaz which is outside of the main church in the courtyard. It is badly damaged but they are working on it at the moment. It's gothic style with frescos on all the walls and the ceiling. The ceiling is dark blue with stars while the walls have saints and old testament stories on them. In the middle are two tombstones with elaborate carvings of lions under the bodies. Some of them seem to be licking something while the others are holding severed heads.

Back in the main church most of the side chapels still have their gothic altars and decorations. It is nice to see that they have been left alone over the centuries. Some have renaissance tombs but thankfully, there is only minimal baroque. Several chapels have elaborate arches or gates over their entrances. Off the back of the church is a small room with some processional items including a baroque large carrying thing with giant gold angels. It's truly ugly but unfortunately, you can't take photos in that room. They'd also surrounded it with mirrors so it was multiplied hundreds of times. The choir is elaborately carved piece with stone, wood and metal. You can walk right into it and look at the carvings up close which is great. The top stone section is the prophets of the old testament while the bottom wooden section is saints. The final row of chairs had animals and local scenes. It is much nicer than the main altar and they have it lit really well.

The main altar is gilded gothic and is very similar to the one in Seville only smaller. It has one renaissance section in stone that looks like it was put in to replace a damaged section on the side of the altar. Behind the altar is the only baroque section of the church. It has an altar to the Virgin with a large Mary, some saints, Jesus and some angels. Above it was a dome where they had knocked out part of the gothic vaulting and replaced it. Off this end of the cathedral are the sacristy and antesacristy which have renaissance painted ceilings and a large collection of religious art. It is a shame that there are very few explanatory signs and no audioguides available for the cathedral as my guide book didn't have that much info on the inside of the building. There were some little brochures but they were only in Spanish.

I met up with the others out the front again and found out that a good quality suit of armour (made to measure) can cost 3500 euros. And that doesn't include the postage costs to get it home! You do get a bonus sword though. We then wandered through the rest of the old town to get to the monastery at the other end. It's a lovely gothic building only with bigger windows. The balconies around the cloister have carved wooden ceilings and gothic arches. The church is the much more elaborate Isabelline gothic but is still lovely. The others had had enough by this stage (no stamina!) so we headed back down to the bus station to head back to Madrid. We caught the metro back to the hostel as it had got cold and dark.

I then spent an hour or so attempting to do some packing and sort out some of the things to toss out that I didn't want to cart home. I then went out for dinner with Mark and Garry at a not bad restaurant need to the hostel. None of us were keen to walk all that far in the dark. Madrid just doesn't have a nice feel to it and the hostel had been held up at gun point on Saturday night so it isn't the nicest area either (not that I think that there are any truly nice areas in Madrid!). We got the set menu for 13.50 and it was reasonable Italian style food (we were all a little sick of tapas). The service was pretty poor though that seems to be a Spanish thing. They all seem to act bored or snooty everywhere you go. Service with a smile is not something you get here.

The next morning, I had to get organised and finish packing so that I could be checked out by 10.30 (Madrid hostels don't do the nice late checkouts that you get elsewhere in Spain). I then headed out into the rain to do some final souvenir shopping. I headed across town to a chocolate shop called Cacao Sampaka which has some really interesting chocolates. They have lots of different boxed types and then cooking chocolates as well. I then continued to wander around looking for t-shirts for other people. I went to one of the religious shops that is just off the Puerta del Sol and was absolutely astounded. It was a serious hardcore religious item shop where the church goes shopping. Upstairs you could get made to measure religious robes and downstairs had tapestries, carvings (including a life sized Jesus on a donkey) and giant incense burners. There are quite a lot of these shops in the area but I'm not sure what normal people would do with some of this stuff.

After a couple of hours I got very sick of walking around in the rain and I had got all the stuff that I needed, so I headed back to the hostel and grabbed my stuff and headed to the airport on the metro. I then flew to Palma de Mallorca and onto Nuremburg for the final section of my trip.