madrid
Madrid
We got off the train from Barcelona at about 7:00 AM and it was still dark outside at the Chamartín rail station. We got some 3 day subway passes and lugged all our luggage onto a subway train which was packed with Madrid’s morning commuters. After one transfer we arrived at the subway station that had a entrance directly across from our hostel. One of our rooms weren’t ready yet, so we dropped off our bags in the room that was ready and headed out for breakfast at an authentic Spanish coffee shop – Starbucks. After breakfast, Rick and Fanette decided to head out and explore the city while I was ready to collapse. My feet were hurting and I was sleep deprived, so we went back to the hostel for a siesta, even though it was only about 10 AM. After lunch, we took the subway over to the start of a cable car ride that stretches over a portion the city. These are the same type of cable cars that you see at amusement parks and at one point, they pretty much go right through a neighborhood of apartment buildings. I suppose the people there are used to it, but I don’t think I’d want to live in a building where I had tourists looking in my house all day from a cable car. Weird. There wasn’t much to see at the other end of the cable car, but we got off anyway and walked around for 20 minutes or so, then made our way back. We found a nice restaurant that had a “menu” special (everything included for €14), so we ate dinner there. I had my first experience of eating a fish with its head still attached, which was pretty tasty…and good looking. At night, we has beers at our hostel with a friends of Pili’s, Domenico, who is from Lima and has lived in Madrid for the last five years.
The next day, we slept late, then headed out to the Pardo Museum. The Pardo is arguably one of the finest art museums in all of Europe and is one of the “must see” lists of pretty much anyone who visits Madrid as it boasts over 8,600 original paintings, including Diego Velázquez’s Las_Meninas. After lunch, we decided to head out to one of Madrid’s other famous museums, the Reina Sofia, Madrid’s modern art museum, known best for housing Picasso’s Guernica. That night, we walked around downtown Madrid, looking for a place with flamenco dancers. You’d think that this would be an easy task, I imagined that in Madrid there would be one avenue swamped with tourists and an overwhelming presence of men in the street begging you to come in and check out their flamenco show, as it is better than the other twenty flamenco shows on the street. Not true. Trying to find a flamenco show in Madrid was like being on a scavenger hunt. We walked for over an hour stopping in from place to place trying to find one, which we finally did, however the show was sold out. We decided to grab a great dinner at an Italian restaurant and call it a night.
On Thursday we decided to check out the Royal Palace of Madrid, which is where the Royal Family of Spain used to live, but now is used only for formal occasions and is mostly a tourist attraction. The palace has over 2,000 rooms and for €8, you can walk through 25 of them on a self-guided tour. The rooms that we saw were incredible and all lavishly decorated, so much so that taking pictures hardly does it justice, as would trying to describe it here. Some of the highlights were a room built entirely of porcelain inside and a dining room table that was as long as a bowling alley. After the palace, we took an hour long walk across downtown Madrid in search of a place that had tapas. We hit gold as we found a great place run by a Frenchmen who told us that we would need to trust him and he would serve us tapas of his choosing. This worked out great and he brought us four dishes in total that we all enjoyed immensely. Rick and Fanette soon left for the airport to catch their flight back to Paris.
That afternoon, Pili and I decided to check out the Home of Real Madrid, Santiago Bernabeu Stadium as she had wanted to see it for some time. For €10, they offer a great self-guided tour that showcases the inside of the stadium as well as their hall of fame. The stadium is impressive, with a capacity of over 80,000 people, equally as impressive is how proud Madrid is of their team. Throughout the hall of fame, which includes hundreds of trophies collected over the last century, we were continually reminded of how they were given the title of “The 20th Century’s Best Club” by FIFA, which means that they are the best team ever (since this award has only been given once). To their credit, their list of championships over the last 100 years was impressive and the rows of trophies seemed to go on forever. After the hall of fame, we were able to walk around the field, sit in the player’s benches, then tour the locker room and the press room before being ejected into the gift shop. We were both hungry for some Peruvian food and tried in vain to find a Peruvian restaurant, so we settled for some gyros across from the hotel.
Our train left at 10 AM from the same station that we arrived in, so we decided to wake up at 8. Due to me setting the alarm wrong, we didn’t wake up until 9 AM, the time we should have been getting on the subway to make our way to the station. We packed as fast as we could, checked out and made it out of the hotel by 9:20. Our train tickets were non refundable and we already booked a hotel in Paris by then, so while missing the train would not be the end of the world, it wasn’t really an option. We hauled all of our luggage through three subway stations and on two trains in order to make it on time. When we got to Chamartín rail station, it looked nothing like I had remembered from four days ago! We were completely lost. Pili ran ahead and found some people that pointed us in the right direction then found a RENFE conductor that helped us find the right track. We boarded the train at 9:58 and it left the station promptly at 10 AM.
Again, we were in first class on this journey which would be our longest of the trip – 13 hours, 15 minutes, the first train taking us to the French border then the second taking us from the border to Paris. The train was a nice RENFE train of only three cars, of which the first car was first class. The middle car had a nice cafe which came in very handy as we were both very hungry. The day was rainy for the most part, but the scenery was nice. They also showed a few movies, neither of which we tried to watch. The first was “Ultraviolet”, which looked like one of the worst movies ever made (even without the sound on), so I preferred staring out at the Spanish countryside while Pili caught up on some sleep. The train pulled into a small French port town named Hendaye and we were the last people left in the first car. There are no trains that run from Madrid directly to Paris as Spain and France use a different rail gage. Our next train was the French TGV, which was identical to the Thalys train we had ridden from Amsterdam to Paris. For most of the trip up to Paris, it runs at normal speed as it shares track with regular trains, but for the last two hours it runs at 300 kph on the dedicated LGV high speed tracks.
Click here to see our Madrid pictures