On Sunday morning we woke up early for us, 10a, and took the Metro to El Rastro – a famous flea market in Madrid that takes place on Sunday mornings. The market was huge, spanning many city blocks, and was crowded with people. There were quite a few booths selling clothing, leather goods, music/dvd’s/video games, and jewelry. We saw a couple booths selling cooking supplies, and only a few selling posters or art – surprising for a city that boasts such wonderful museums. El Rastro provided some excellent people-watching and a great walk around the city. There were some great deals (Kat bought an apron!) and it was a lot of fun.
After El Rastro, we took the Metro to the Parque del Retiro and stopped by an outdoor café to split a sandwich for lunch. The sandwich was “Spanish omelette”, which was essentially an egg/potato/onion mix with ham, and Joe enjoyed it (Kat didn’t like it quite so much). We walked around the park for a while, sat on a bench to do some more people-watching, and listened to the various music players in the park – particularly a bad saxophone player that was pretty funny. We saw the boating pond inside the park, and watched the fish for a while (they were ugly fish), and also visited the Crystal Palace. The Crystal Palace, according to my guidebook, was inspired by its British namesake in 1887. It’s a pretty glass and iron structure with a pond and fountain in front. After enjoying the beautiful day at the park, we walked back to our hotel, where we took a siesta before going out to dinner around 10:30p. We ate dinner at Gino’s, a chain Italian restaurant, which is close to our hotel. Joe had a margherita pizza and Kat had ravioli with shrimp – both were very good.
On Monday we woke up late, around 11:30, and ate sandwiches for lunch while lazing around our hotel for a while. We walked down to the Museo del Prado and stopped for coffee on our way. When we arrived at the Prado, we realized that it is closed on Mondays so we changed plans and headed to the Museo Reina Sofia instead, which is only a few blocks away. The Reina Sofia is a modern art museum that was incredibly interesting, but it can be hard to appreciate modern art when you don’t understand it. We spent most of our time looking at the 3 dimensional works, though we did stop to see some Salvador Dalí paintings, and of course Picasso’s most famous work inside the Reina Sofia: Guernica. Pictures were not allowed of Guernica, but you can see the work here: http://bit.ly/ud8r. Some of our favorite exhibits in the museum included works by Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama (temporary exhibit), the Dalí paintings, and two works by Lygia Pape: “Magnetic Space” and “Book of Time”.
After leaving the museum, we stopped by the hotel to grab our laptop and then went to the Plaza Mayor where we worked on our pictures that we’ve uploaded to the link on the right. The Plaza Mayor is a great place for people-watching, and is basically a large square with grand statues and archways surrounding the many terrace restaurants. We saw several street performers, like a really fat Spider-Man, Minnie Mouse, and an artist drawing tourist portraits while working on our photos. We went back to the hotel around 7p and uploaded several of our pictures and videos, but we were bored by 11:30p, so we decided to head to VIPS for a little late night snack: crispy chicken caesar salad and some croquettas – a great way to end the night!