Madrid

Palacio Real
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Madrid was a very different city to the rest visited in Spain, it was more cosmopolitan, bigger, busier, but also had the downside of many big cities of being a bit pushy and rude. It was a beautiful city with many lovely buildings, parks and plazas.

The highlights were definitely the galleries; we visited the Museo del Prado which had an impressive collection of Spanish art and also the Centro de Arte Reina Sofia which is famous for Picasso’s Guernica. Guernica was more powerful than I’d expected, it is huge and quite overwhelming in its stark use of grey, black and white.  All the galleries and museums that we’d visited throughout Spain had audio tours and they were all very well done and I’d highly recommend them, if only for the amazing array of makes and models – we never saw the same type twice…!

"Oh, I'm sorry. We were talking about chocolate?'' "That was ten minutes ago!''

Man's best friend deserves protection
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Also visited was the Palacio Real (Royal Palace) which was stunning and surprisingly tasteful!! It is a functioning palace and had many interesting sections, such as the royal armoury and royal pharmacy.

Nearby the Palacio Real was a café were we had breakfast and discovered the joys of chocolate con churro – or hot chocolate with Spanish donuts… it was all so very very wrong…! A cup of hot chocolate that you had to ‘drink’ with a spoon…glorious…..

We also had some great tapas in a real locals bar and actually saw our first drunk local. We were amazed that for a country that seemed to eat and drink non-stop, we never saw drunk people and rarely saw fat people! The El Retiro park was an accidental find and was a massive and ever changing park, from ‘wilderness’ to manicured lawns, to a pond with row boats. It also had a memorial to the Madrid train bombing victims, the memorial was in a peaceful section of the park and was a little hill that you walked up and around to reach the top and surrounded by a moat. It was very simple, but very nice.

Nice day for a paddle
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All up, a great couple of days in Madrid and then our impersonation of ‘The Amazing Race’ to get to the train station for our overnight trip to Bilbao.