Semana Santa-Day 1+2-Madrid

After a week of cramming too many things into too few of hours, I managed to take an early bus to Madrid with Ginny on Wednesday night to meet with up with my parents in Madrid. They had arrived there a day before and were anxiously waiting my arrival, as I was anticipating mine. I finally got to our

Hotel around 11 and was greeted by my dad chasing me down in the street and my mom waiting more patiently in the lobby. I got all settled into my room and from there we went to grab a bite to eat. We found a restaurant close by and grabbed some fairly authentic Spanish food and a little wine before heading back to get a good night's sleep. It was my first opportunity to use my Spanish, which was a little strange at first since I hadn't really spoken it in front of my parents, but it ended up being great first night.

Thursday morning we woke up and my dad and I ventured to Dunkin Donuts to grab some coffee and donuts for breakfast. We picked out what we liked and then headed back to our hotel. After breakfast, we got all cleaned up and headed out on the town. We had mapped out some ideas for where we wanted to go so we got on the metro and took it to the other part of town where there were some big museums and gardens. Our first stop was the Reina Sofia Museum, which houses Picasso's most famous painting, Guernica. For those who don't know, this is one of his largest and most prominent paintings that depicts his views and understanding of the war. It is a really amazing piece of artwork and was worth the time to go to the museum. We wandered around the rest of the museum for a while and then left to grab a bite to eat. Succumbing to both our hunger and lack of a good open restaurant, we opted for the cheaper, quicker, more American form of lunch-McDonalds. We shamelessly brought our enormous bag of salads and sandwiches to a plaza near the museum and enjoyed our food while sitting outside. After lunch, we wandered over to some Botanical Gardens that were near the Prado museum. Although I had never previously been there, I was really glad that we found it. The tulips were just recently in bloom and the rest of the place was just about to pop. We strolled through the endless gardens for about an hour and soaked up the sun and fresh air. After the gardens, we went to the more famous Prado Museum. The Prado Museum is absolutely enormous, and on top of all the other exhibits that they had, they were having special premier of the works of Francis Bacon. Bacons style of art, although controversial, was really interesting to look at. We toured that section of the museum first and then went to look for the works of Rembrandt, Greco, Goya, and Velasquez. I had been to this museum when I came to Madrid 4 years ago but going this time around the art had a deeper meaning to me since I am currently studying Spanish art in one of my classes back in Caceres. I was able to connect with the history of each of the artists and also help guide my parents around the worthwhile paintings.

After the Prado, we were all pretty exhausted. If you wanted to walk through that museum and look at every painting, it would take days. It's enormous. So, after leaving, we hopped on the metro and got back to our hotel. Grabbed some snacks and beer at a little shop and spent the rest of our afternoon on our rooftop terrace looking through our book about Italy and the plans we had for the next day. Dinner was fairly low key and we ended up going to a Spanish buffet across the street from our hotel to grab a quick bite.