A day in Madrid

Madrid is in the geographical center of Spain.  A very big and beautiful center of Spain. 


What a day!  Todo bien!  We hopped on our tour bus this morning, and had a guide that spoke a pretty rough English, although I wish my español was as good.  We went lots of places, but we couldn’t get off the bus until the the bull fighting stadium.  All of the rest of the pictures are filtered by the green tint of the bus windows; sorry.  




I understand why there are so few stops, however.  We had 10 minutes at the stadium for pictures.  Done; and Janet was even able to sneak off to a baño.  Time to depart and suddenly, several ladies NOW had to use the restroom.  Okay, the rest of us had to wait for these inconsiderate few.  If it was just this once, todo bien.  It has been happening over and over.  Cash machine, shopping, whatever.  It’s affecting all of us....    okay, enough rant. 






We split off from the tour at a location close to several points of interest for us.  Another couple joined us for part of it.  They weren’t interested in the Prado Museum and left us there. 




Beautiful statues, sculptures and paintings adorned the seemingly hundreds of rooms within the museum.  Many of them dark, representing the beginning, medieval and time of Christ. 
















Barb heard of a rooftop bar that was a must do.  The Hat was hostel and the rooftop bar had a view of… rooftops!  




We struck up conversations with a bunch of younger travelers and it turned out several were from the Seattle area or had at least lived there for a while.  Terrific!










It was getting later in the day by the time we left there.  We began wondering back toward our hotel and a steakhouse that we spotted the other day.  We did hail a cab to take us to the restaurant but he only managed to get us kind of close, before declaring success.  It was still a few blocks away. 


Dinner was again, way too big.  The T-bone steak alone, could have fed 5 or 6 people. We also had ox tail and scallops.  It was fabulous however. 




Tomorrow we head to Córdoba. 

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