Madrid, Spain!

We had a long day of traveling to Madrid so we were exhausted when we arrived. Our train ride to Geneva was beautiful and we had a nice flight to Paris but our flight to Madrid was delayed once because they had to change the tires on the plane and a second time because of weather so I was pretty cranky when we arrived late in Madrid.

Mt first impression was that it was very modern although there was some beautiful architecture. Madrid is currently bidding for the 2016 Olympic games so there was a lot of construction and refurbishing going on while we were there.

We took an open air bus ride, Madrid Vision, with some friends and were able to see a lot of the city that way. This picture was taken in front of the royal palace, Palacio Real. It had just started to rain a little so we had to duck into a little place for Tapas. They eat their meals from 11-4pm and then everything shuts down from 4-8pm for Siesta. We had some amazing white wine and tapas (appetizers) while we were waiting for the rain to pass.

After that we walked past the Cathedral which was right next door to the Palace. It was raining pretty hard so we just hopped on the bus to see the next stop which was the Prado Museum. We weren’t able to take pictures inside but we saw some beautiful works by Raphael, Goya, El Greco, and Rembrandt.

These are some more pictures taken from the bus before it started to rain. There were lots of circles with fountains and statues in the middle so it was really beautiful. For dinner that night we went out with friends and had the most amazing Paella. Restaurants didn’t open until 9 or 10 at night so we had some really late nights in Spain.

This was one of the churches that we passed on the tour. The stone work was so beautiful.