Hola chicos!
Yep, we spent another day and a half in Madrid (September 4th and 5th) walking around the city π
The first and only full day passed quite fast I would say. We went to see the famous Plaza Mayor, quite in the middle of the old city and then we decided to walk towards some other interesting old buildings. But then we found some kind of mini-super-market where we went to buy some water and we ended up buying a lot of fruits and food and other stuff π After going out we realized that our back-packs were to heavy so we went back into our room, left everything there and went back into the city. This made us lose about 1 hour, but the things we bought were very good in the next morning π
Basically we managed to cover by foot the eastern side of the “old town”. I have to say that it’s very interesting, a lot of nice streets and we liked a lot the street names which are written on porcelain plates and each of them has some drawing connected to the street’s name. We spent quite a lot of time in Parc Del Buen Retiro, maybe the biggest in Madrid, but very beautiful, especially the Cristal Palace with its lake full of birds, fish, turtles and tourists π
Then we saw the nice train station that my wife was describing in the previous post, impressive I would say and worth seeing if you ever pass Madrid.
Moving to the next day, Wednesday 5th – we were quite in a big hurry trying to cover the western part of the old town and maybe some other “far away” points of interest. We saw Plaza del Torros, but only from the outside since our time was limited, then we went by metro to Puerta de Toledo (excellent down-hill view) finalizing with Palacio Real. In here we were actually very lucky as on Wednesdays the entrance is free for EU citizens and we took this opportunity to check the inside of the palace. The armory was really great, even if I expected some newer stuff as well (not just armors and spades) and the palace rooms were very nice, very big and full of interesting stories.
A short look at the Opera and Plaza de Espania ended our stay in Madrid as we had to go back to the hotel, take our luggage and head to the airport with destination Barcelona. In there we managed to get the least amiable check-in guy, who said that we are 6 kg over the weight limit. Ok, we admit that we tried to stuck into the bags everything :-D, but anyway the things we took out finally ended up in the airplane, occupying more space in the cabin … I won’t comment anymore on this as the tickets were 20 Euros/person π
Finally we reached Barcelona, waited quite some time for the train to take us to the city and then we went up and down on a loooot of stairs when changing from the train to the metro and so on π In the end we managed to reach Anna and Irene’s place, our very welcoming hosts for Barcelona π After having dinner we got a really nice surprise consisting in two small bottles of champagne and some very good chocolate π Thanks a lot for those Irene&Anna and also for the great tourist info you provided us π
More to come tomorrow (morning I hope) from my wife after the first day in Barcelona, capital of Catalunya (I think she liked it a lot :-D)
Kisses,
P&E