Second Day in Madrid

Today was a pretty sweet day. It started out a bit slow. I woke up at 9 AM to work on last night's blog post since I had been having trouble uploading all the photos. Unfortunately, one of the four of us seriously cut his hand on his soap dish retrieving the soap, which meant we weren't able to leave until 11 AM.

After grabbing a quick (and truly delicious) breakfast of bread, brie and veggies at the neighboring convenience store, we walked in the direction of the train station to buy our ticket to Barcelona for tomorrow. We saw some cute dogs outside of the store:

Before getting to the station, we stopped in the same coffee shop as yesterday to get a quick cappuccino/espresso. Quite a nice place - they make a delicious cappuccino.

The train station was ridiculously complicated. It took us a long time to figure out how the place was actually organized. It was a complicated system involving acquiring a ticket to get into a specific line that depended on the destination of your intended travel. Kevin, Tim and I acquired train passes to Barcelona using our Eurail pass. One of the four of us then got into a separate line to acquire his own eurail pass. Meanwhile Kevin, Tim and I got some lunch and some wine at a small wine bar in the train station. The place had delicious mini hamburgers. The red wine was served cold, which I thought was odd.

A view of the mini plant forest inside the station

Where we lined up for the tickets

Waiting for the tickets (took us about an hour)

There was a turtle pond inside the building

After leaving the train station, we made our way towards the Prado Museum. We immediately became quite lost and ended up the East side of the Parque del Retiro. It turned out to be quite a pretty walk through the park back West to the museum.

After making a few wrong turns, we arrived at the museum. It was absolutely amazing! I didn’t know much about Spanish artwork, but it was quite interesting. We saw Greco and Valasquez. I especially liked Goya’s black paintings.

(Unfortunately I wasn’t allowed to take photos inside, so I could only sneak a few)

A copy of the Mona Lisa by one of Da Vinci’s students

After leaving the museum, we made our way back to the hostel. We were all getting a bit tired, and I wanted a chance to work on the blog, so we took a 1.5 hour siesta in the room.

Tim about to sleep

After regaining our energy, we exited the hostel and walked towards an interesting restaurant we passed on the way back from the Prada. Dinner was quite good. I had a Paella, Tim had fries, an egg and ham and Kevin had a pizza. Since the menu had no words on it, we took so long to order and had so many questions that the waiter walked away from us midsentence. In the end, he ordered a ham sandwich and a soup (which looked quite delicious).

After that, we returned to our hostel to drop off stuff and change. We then attempted to find a flamenco bar near our hostel. It took us a good 20 minutes to track the place down. We kept walking in circles, asking bouncers at other bars where it was, and they kept giving us wrong directions (I guess that makes sense).

At one point, one of the bouncers yelled at one of the four of us for not being polite enough (“use por favor and gracias!!!”). The man was quite rude, but I guess he was right – we could work on our European manners.

We finally found Villa Rosa and sat down. Let me tell you, tap dancing has got nothing on flamenco – it was absolutely phenomenal. The dancers slam the stage so hard it was actually cracking in the middle. It must be very hard on their skeletons.

Us at the flamenco bar

Most impressive to me was that the whole thing was improvised (Although parts had to be preplanned). The guitarist would improvise a melody, the dancers waiting for their turns would be holding the beat by clapping their hands, the singer would be singing on top of all of that and the main dancer would be improvising an incredibly intricate dance. All of this was without a well defined meter.

After watching flamenco and finishing a “cerveza espagnol” that tasted suspiciously like Corona, we made our way back to our rooms to go to sleep.

Today was really fun and interesting and I’m starting to get used to the new time zone (9 hours ahead), which is great. Tomorrow we are leaving for Barcelona where we will be meeting up with one of Kevin’s friends Joel.