The park's highlight was definitely a couple of old Victorian era greenhouses, much like Kew Gardens in London, which are quite an architectural spectacle. But the action revolves around the large lake and the overwrought memorial to somebody lording over the lake. The shores are teeming with teenagers, the lake full of couples rowing, and there was a big concert going on behind the memorial. It was probably the most crowded place we've been in all of Madrid.

We went back to the hotel for a grand brunch. Much of Madrileno society comes here for the Sunday brunch, and it's a most elegant affair, but you can still pig out just like any Vegas buffet, just with panache. We then spent the rest of the day at the nearby Buen Retiro park. The park is huge, along the lines of New York's Central Park, which is a good thing because all of Madrid comes here on the weekend. It's a very pretty park, although very manicured and filled with lots of monuments and grand buildings, so you don't really feel like you're escaping from the city.

We went next to the Thyssen-Bornezisza Museum, the last of Madrid's three great art museums (the Prado and Reina Sofia being the other two in case you forgot over the Christmas holiday). This museum houses the private collection of the Thyssen family, who control one of Germany's largest companies and, more controversially, were Hitler's main financial backers. When the family wasn't supporting Nazis it was collecting art, and their eclectic collection ended up in Madrid due to the Baron Thyssen's wife, Tito Cervera. I think she started out as a flight attendant, and definitely won Miss Spain one year, but is now the Baroness Thyssen. She persuaded her husband to build their museum in Madrid, which was a great coup for the city, although she's a bit of a pain in the ass so the city may now regret this. She chained herself to a tree in front of the museum to stop the city from cutting the tree down, and she's now in a big fight with the city about the expansion of the Prado Museum. I think she's miffed that the Prado is overshadowing her baby, so she's now threatening to move the museum, although I'm not sure she's allowed to do that now that she's given it to the city. Anyway, it's a very nicely laid out museum, and very comprehensive, with the collection having a little bit of pretty much every art movement in history. In addition, they go more in-depth in a couple of areas, in particular nineteenth century American landscapes. Skip that if you visit.

Sunday was pretty much a wasted day. We planned on spending the morning at the Rastro, an enormous weekend market that fills most of the streets of Madrid. It's supposed to be a fantastic market and local event, about the biggest of its kind. There's no denying that it's big, but that's just one of many negatives about the experience. It's basically mile after mile of people selling a can of tuna, a carburetor, a fork, cement, etc. One guy was selling his old prescription glasses, which were broken, so the buyer would have to have his exact eyesight, and not mind wearing broken glasses. He's probably still there selling them. Anyway, because it sprawls all over the place we kept walking expecting that the real Rastro, the one written up in all the guidebooks as a must-do event, was around the next corner, but instead we'd run into a pile of buttons or something. We tried to pretend this was interesting for about a half hour, then gave up and had some tourist breakfast at the Plaza Mayor.

We hung out in Chueca Plaza, pictured here, which was packed with gays, and becomes an open air mosh pit in the evening, way past our bedtime. Then we did even more shopping on Calle Fuencarral, also pictured here. It's a long, fun road of trendy/gay/teen shops and Somchai scooped up lots more stuff so he could accumulate enough shopping bags to hide the stuffy ones he had accumulated during the morning Salamanca shopping. The best shop on the street was Pleasure and Punishment, which, contrary to what you'd expect from the name, had a great selection of up and coming designer names.

We headed over to Chueca, Madrid's gay district, in the afternoon. First we had a late lunch at 26 Liberty, a gay restaurant that got good reviews. It wasn't very good, apart from the fact that it was gay, and I don't have any photos because I couldn't find it on the web, so I think it's not around anymore. Again since we were camera-less I snagged these pics from the web, which should give you the idea that Chueca is very, very, very gay.

We spent most of the day shopping (surprise!). Lots of swanky shops, although we avoided the usual Gucci/Prada/Louis Vuitton because they're everywhere. Somchai went to town at Carolina Herrera and Miro, two local brands that have managed to make an impression internationally. But it was easier to find web photos of the great food market on a small side street in the area. As I've noted previously we love wandering around the markets, and this one was on the small side but very high end. Usually Somchai makes a beeline for the vegetables, but since he's addicted to Spanish ham (jamon serrano) this was really heaven for him. I included the jovial woman playing with the octopii(sp?) just to elicit a nasty comment from Stoli.

We spent most of Saturday in the Salamanca district, Madrid's toniest shopping and residential area. Madrid used to be a walled city, but when the walls were pulled down in the nineteenth century, the wealthy immediately moved to this area, which was just outside the former walls. There's some derogatory term for the people who live here, something like the English "yuppie" but I can't remember it. It generally resembles a cross between Manhattan's Upper East Side and Rodeo Drive. Somchai didn't take his camera around because we were trying to blend in with the yuppy-equivalents, but I found a few pics on the web, mostly of the business district here. Weirdly, the incredibly ornate building you see in the one photo is the post office.

We returned to Madrid for dinner at Terraza del Casino. The building is a beautiful nineteenth century private club, and the acclaimed restaurant is the Madrid outpost of Spain's most famous chef, Ferran Adria. So we were expecting big things as we ascended to the top floor. The elevator opened, and we deflated a bit, as the soaring ceilings and elaborate detailing of the building were obscured by drab carpeting, beat up furniture and a dirty brown color scheme. The food, however, was excellent, really interesting ideas, some of which were too wacky but overall very enjoyable. We did a very long and elaborate tasting menu, which was too much for me to write down, so I only have the rating I gave it to attest to how much I liked it (Food-20, Decor-11, Service-16). Interestingly, as I was scouring the internet for photos of the place, I came across what looks to be a new design for the place. I've included photos of the old and new, but clearly the new looks much more interesting and more in keeping with the idea of the place. I also checked out the current menu, which includes such classics as Nitro-corn with foie gras air, cod intestines with curry, and a paella of Kellogg's corn flakes.

We decided that if we returned to the hotel, we'd just fall asleep and be sluggish for dinner, so instead we stopped at Plaza Santa Ana for some drinks. The plaza is a big open space, not particularly attractive, but it's lined with interesting old bars with lots of outdoor seating. So we sat and drank some wine in the square in a successful effort to stay awake for our late night dinner.

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.

After lunch we visited one of the most beautiful and inconveniently located parks in the world, the Campo del Moro. It's a huge expanse of greenery, with well manicured lawns and beautiful flowers, as well as a fair amount of ornamental statuary and nice walking paths. It's directly behind the royal palace, as you can see, and is connected to the palace by a graceful set of steps and patios. Unfortunately the powers that be have for some reason made it impossible to get from the park to the palace, and located the only entrance to this park as far as possible from any people. It's a few miles' walk from the palace, as you walk around the endless walls surrounding the park, continually expecting an entrance that finally emerges once you've left the city behind. The only upside to this is, if you manage to get there, you'll have the park to yourself.

Considering Spain was almost singularly devoted to defending Catholicism and rooting out heretics around the world, it's surprising that it's capital has such a sucky cathedral. In the blog about the royal palace you saw a photo of the side entrance to the cathedral, which is right next to the palace. But the cathedral looks much more dramatic from afar. Up close, however, it's obvious that it's a recent creation, built on what looks to be a limited budget. The cathedral was designed around 1600, but somehow the country was so busy rooting out heretics that it never got around to building it. Construction went slowly over the intervening centuries, then the building suffered severe damage during the civil war in the 1930's. Construction continued after the war, and the church finally opened in 1992, about 400 years behind schedule. While the exterior is at least entertaining, the interior is very reminiscent of St. Jude's church in Monroe, before there was an actual church and mass was held in the gym hall.



It is nicely located though, and we had a nice lunch at an outdoor cafe on las Vistillas, with great views outside the city, to the distant mountains surrounding Madrid.

Old Madrid branches more or less surrounds the Plaza Mayor until it, and the city, come to an abrupt end at the royal palace. We walked around the area for a couple of hours, which is a fun place to explore, although for Europe it's not particularly old and has lots of new development mixed in, which ruins the effect. One sight that occupied a huge part of our day is pictured here, the Monasterio de Descalzas Reales, or Convent of the Barefoot Royals. It was founded by the sister of the Spanish emperor Carlos V, the most powerful man in Europe at the time. His sister was married to the crown prince of Portugal, who died almost immediately after the wedding. She then became a nun but in very luxurious fashion, by founding a convent for royals. Each of the new royal nuns brought with them a huge fortune, which was used to kit out the place in splendor. The public spaces, such as the staircase pictured here, are very over the top, while the individual sleeping quarters of the nuns are equally interesting, each decorated in a highly individual style, often by very famous artists. The tour ends in the famous Treasury, where the convent threw all the various holy relics and treasures that invariably came with the nuns. Unfortunately they didn't care enough to track any of these gifts, so nobody knows which bones, teeth, jewels etc came from which saint. It's all just sort of a big mess, which is surprising given the extremely strict way the convent runs its tours. You have to go on a ninety minute organized tour, and be lectured at by a very strict Spanish lady, in Spanish. I tried translating some of the tour in whispers to Somchai, but she gave me such dirty looks that I gave up. Somchai further aggravated the woman when he sat down on the stairs at one point rather than pretend to understand what she was saying, and she acted like he had just urinated on a holy relic. It's an interesting place to visit, but probably not worth the hassle, and definitely not if you don't speak Spanish.

My first trip to Europe was to Madrid, with Sra. Young's eleventh grade Spanish class. And I fell in love with travel when I saw the Plaza Mayor, the most beautiful place I'd ever seen (with admittedly only things like the Amish country and Catskill Game Farm as points of comparison.) But for the next couple of decades, Madrid's Plaza Mayor retained its special place in my heart, so it was all but inevitable that it would come crashing down off its pedestal on this visit. It's not like it got uglier, I've just seen alot more and become a lot more jaded. It's still a very nice square, although not as sensorily overwhelming as the Grand Place in Brussels, for example. It's fairly staid and symmetric, and at least this morning, very peaceful as well.



Completed in 1620, it was designed as Madrid's outdoor theatre, with royalty and other onlookers observing events in the square from the hundreds of balconies covering all four sides of the square. The trials of the Inquisition and the burning of heretics took place here, as did the crowning of kings. It was also used for general entertainment, such as bullfights and plays.



I also remembered from my earlier trip that there are lots of cavernous bars under the square, and in particular we hung out at one bar that looked like a series of caves, with Flintstones cartoons on them. And I remember drinking sangria there, which seems pretty progressive for an eleventh grade field trip.

Woke up Tuesday to a beautiful sight, the sun. Since the forecast had predicted rain nonstop for our whole trip, we were very happy with the blue sky, and decided to celebrate by going to the Puerta del Sol, or Gate of the Sun. (Actually that would be pretty stupid, so to protect our honor I should stress it was just a coincidence.) The Puerta del Sol used to be the main gate in the wall surrounding Madrid when it was a walled city, but it has moved from being on the periphery of the wall to the very heart of present-day Madrid. Ten roads start from here and emanate in all directions, which understandably makes this a pretty congested place. It also houses two of Madrid's biggest department stores, and serves as Madrid's Times Square on New Year's Eve. With all that buildup, there's really not much to see here, although it's not as unpleasant as you'd think.

After the museum we hopped over to the Atocha train station, an odd choice since last month hundreds of people were killed by a terrorist bomb on the trains a couple miles before they pulled into this station. The station is a grand industrial revolution sort of space, made very funky by a huge rain forest planted in the middle of the platform. We stopped here for a coffee, then made our way back to the hotel.

We could barely keep our eyes open, so we ended up eating at the hotel, which was about the only place in Madrid that opened at the "early" 8.30 pm time we requested in order to avoid falling asleep in our paella. The room was suitably grand and the service very professional, although the food was pretty hit or miss. I had a nice foie gras starter, but my main, three somewhat smelly scallops smothered in a sour sauce, misfired on all cylinders. (It did, however, allow me to impress you with my alliteration abilities.)