On my high school trip to Madrid, we took an overnight flight from New York. The flight probably lasted seven hours, but it was by far the longest flight I'd ever taken and it felt like twelve days. Needless to say I was completely exhausted, but Mrs. Young had different plans for us. We went straight from the airport to the Prado Museum, where we were met by a museum guide and embarked on a three hour tour of the museum. My previous museum experience was limited to the Barnum Circus Museum in Bridgeport, Connecticut, so I was wholly unprepared for this double whammy of jet lag and lengthy docent-led art museum tour. It was every bit the nightmare you'd expect it to be, so I was pretty impressed with myself that I voluntarily returned to the museum this time around. Of course it helped that there was no guide this time to hold me hostage, and the museum was 45 steps from the hotel (I counted beforehand.) This time around, it was entirely painless, and in fact even a bit enjoyable. The museum is one of the top five art museums in the world, and, as you'd expect, has an amazing collection of the key Spanish artists El Greco, Goya and Velasquez. These artists aren't particularly well represented in museums outside Spain, so seeing so many of their works together was quite interesting. Having said that, the Prado doesn't go out of its way to entertain, with none of the architectural grandeur of the Louvre, or captivating exhibition spaces like the Met or MoMA in New York. It's just many smallish rooms of great paintings, not particularly well organized. The brown and white classical building is the side entrance of the Prado, as seen from our room, while the longer, more columned building in the other photo is the main entrance. Also shot from our room is the third photo, showing a church and a big brick building. This whole area is a huge construction site, and will eventually be combined with the Prado in a massive museum expansion project, so hopefully they'll be able to use the extra space to enliven the museumgoing experience.