| The ceiling in the Palacio Real (Royal Palace) was intricately carved in this room - Glenn wants to do this in our next house too! |
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| Erin's Madrid Journals 6-17-02 Ah, our last day in Madrid! Finally. It was so hot here, and so noisy in our hotel room, that it was taking a definite toll on our tempers. We were both just as happy with the idea of leaving for the cooler beach town of San Sebastian that night. First thing after waking up, we showered and Glenn went down to the Atocha station to reserve our tickets to San Sebastian. I packed up while he was gone, and got permission to leave our big bags in the front room until 8pm. I knew our train wouldn't leave until around 10 that night, so this was a big relief! When he got back with breakfast, Glenn and I scarfed some pastries, then took our bags out to the front and set off to see a few more sights before leaving. First stop was the Plaza Mayor, where we shot a couple of photos. We only had 10 left on this card, and were stopping at each camera place we passed to see if they could transfer the photos onto a cd for us. So far, no luck. So we went on to the Palacio Real, or royal palace. It was an imposing building from the front, surrounded by tall gates and commanding a very nice view of the relatively flat countryside. We payed a little extra to get on the guided tour, and met a few other travelers while we waited for our tour to start. Inside, the tour took us through about 30 rooms of the immense complex, which apparently has almost 200 rooms in all and is only an occasional residence for today's king & queen. In fact, there are only a few events that warrant its use any more, probably about 10 days of official use a year. But the collections of art and finery were impressive, and we went back after the tour to have more time to look at them all. We then toured the royal armory, which had some awesome specimens of the armor worn by the men and horses of the Spanish army since the 1400's. Quite an array! Very elaborate stuff, too, including some official armor of King Carlos V which was elegantly carved and decorated with ancient Greek mythological themes. Cool! But outside it was HOT, so we exited and looked for a place for lunch with air conditioning. As we walked back toward our area of town, we found a TelePizza place, which turned out to have pretty good (but more greasy and American-style) pizzas than what we were used to from Italy. Starved though, I wolfed down half a medium while Glenn worked his way through his half at a more reasonable pace. Yum. Then we were heading for the fountains we wanted to get photos of, and happened to find an internet place along the way that could transfer the photos from my first disk to a cd for us! Luck! So we stayed there doing that and email for almost 90 minutes, then headed on for our photos. It was getting to be late afternoon, and we got the first shot, then headed into the Parque de Retiro to see if we could find a photography exhibition I'd read about. Sure enough, we found it and wandered through some somewhat shocking pictures. Most of them were either sexual in nature (as in, people, during...) or were shots of people in drag or hooking or dying of AIDS. So it was a semi-depressing exhibit, and we left after we'd seen most of them, eager to take photos of more fun things. We were getting past 7pm by now though, and had to get back to pick up our bags. So we grabbed our stuff, walked down to the Atocha station and took a transfer up to Chemartin station, where our San Sebastian connection would be. We got there 2 hours before our train, but spent most of that time being frustrated and amazed at the incompetence of the information employees there. We had figured it would be a perfect chance to get the details and possibly reserve our seats on the trek back to Milan on Friday, but we found that the train schedules throughout Spain had been changed on the 16th, and nobody had a clue as to what was now running when. The computers hadn't been updated with the new schedule, and the guy helping me kept trying to look up a connection through Paris (?!?) to Milan. So we decided we'd have to wait until we got to San Sebastian to book those, hoping we'd find someone with half a brain and the willingness to help there. We boarded our train around 10:30pm, sat in our crappy uncomfortable seats, and read books for a few hours before trying to sleep. I didn't get much that night! |