We arrived in Madrid around 6p local time and decided to take the Metro to our hotel, which turned out to be a very easy, 40 min trip. We had to change trains twice, but the Metro here is really easy to use. When we arrived at our hotel, we unpacked our suitcases and took a little siesta – apparently traveling really wears us out!
We woke up around 11p and decided to find some food close by our hotel, on Gran Via. The McDonalds was pretty busy for that time of night, but it was also a Friday. We called it a night shortly after eating, and decided to get a fresh start the next morning.
Saturday morning we slept in (this is turning out to be normal for every day of the week) and woke up around 11am. We stopped by a convenience store to purchase some sandwiches for lunch, and then decided to purchase tickets for a hop on / hop off tourist bus. The tickets were cheaper in Madrid than they had been in Barcelona, but it was the same setup. The bus provides you with headphones that you plug into the seat in front of you, you select your language, and then you listen to the tour of the city as you drive by. The bus had both a “Historic” route and a “Modern” route, so we made sure to catch both trips. We saw a ton of beautiful and interesting sites, such as the Museo del Prado, Gran Via (what used to be a major thoroughfare in Madrid), the Plaza de España, the Templo de Debod, the Palacio Real (Royal Palace of Madrid), the Plaza Mayor, the Puerta del Sol, the Museo Thyssen, the Museo Reina Sofia (modern art museum), the first Post Office, the Naval Museum, Santiago Bernabeu (stadium for Real Madrid), and the US Embassy.
At the Templo de Debod, we stopped to get out and walk around. It was a very pretty park with views over the city of Madrid, and contained a temple that was a gift to Spain from Egypt. We were not able to go inside the temple because it was on siesta, but the park was still beautiful. We took a video of the park and will post it to our pictures section.
After riding both the Historic and the Modern routes on the tourist bus, we came back to our hotel and took a short siesta before heading out for dinner. We found a diner-type chain restaurant by our hotel named VIPS and decided to eat there. We ordered croquettas for an appetizer and Joe had a “Brooklyn” wrap, which consisted of toasted white bread wrapped around ham and cheese served with honey mustard sauce and french fries – it was really good. Kat ordered the barbeque chicken flatbread, which was pretty good, but the croquettas were awesome (so was the sangria)! We headed back to the hotel that night around 10:30p and lounged around before falling asleep.