Five Year Plan: España

Saturday, January 14, 2012

España - Madrid

The last two days of our trip were spent back in Madrid. We stayed a slightly nicer, more modern hotel right off Puerta del Sol, the city center (it was more modern, but they still had the key-card-for-lights setup). I had thought it made sense to be in Madrid at the end of the trip so we'd be there already to get back to the airport on New Year's morning. I did not really think about the fact that Puerta del Sol is Spain's equivalent of Times Square and we'd be there on New Year's Eve ... Yep. When you're someone who doesn't "do" New Year's Eve, details like this tend to escape you. Oh well! It did make it an exciting place to be, although on Saturday night when you could barely open the doors to the hotel because of the crowds pressing outside towards the plaza, we stayed in, with a bottle of wine in our room and the traditional twelve grapes at midnight down in the hotel's restaurant. Well, I say "we" had the twelve grapes, but I think only Mike managed it. I was dealing with the fact the grapes had seeds, so I had about four. Seriously, all grapes should be seedless!

In Madrid, we got to see the Reina Sofia, the modern (post-1880) art museum; the Prado, one of the great art museums of the world; the Plaza Mayor; and the Almudena Cathedral, which took a hundred years to build and was finally completed in 1993. We weren't able to go to the Royal Palace because they randomly decided to close it on December 31, even though it had only been announced ahead of time that it would be closed on the 1st. In Madrid we also got to eat at more excellent tapas places and small restaurants. One neat place was Mercado de San Miguel, an early 20th-century marketplace that was just restored in the last ten years to make it a trendy, attractive market. You could buy little chocolates, cones of calamari, fresh rabbit, wine, or octopus. We enjoyed the atmosphere there.