Our first full day in Madrid

Truly an amazing first day in Madrid. We woke to a cold, but sunny day and it was perfect weather for getting our bearings and seeing some of the major sights. We're staying at the Hotel Europa, which is situated on the Puerto del Sol square (Gate of the Sun) which also happens to be the geographic center of the city. Great suggestion, Pat & Julie! Of course, I had to include a picture of the room as well as the view from our very small balcony - we're talking just wide enough to stand on and see what's happening!

My first impression of Madrid is that it’s a very clean city and very, very walkable. I saw virtually no litter as we walked around and there were a large number of city works going on the streets cleaning and sweeping. The old part of the city certainly has that “old European” feel with beautiful boulevards punctuated by magnificent fountains and amazing amounts of architectural details on the buildings. It seems everywhere you look there is a statue at the top of a building or some other interesting detail that catches your eye.

Our first big stop was the Prado Museum, which I have to confess I knew little about before coming here. Turns out, it’s one of Europe’s most significant museum and ranks right up there with the Louvre in Paris. They were featuring a Renoir exhibit so we knew we would be viewing some amazing works of art. Now, the beauty of visiting Europe in the winter is you miss out on the massive crowds that are typical when you come here in the summer. Consequently, we only stood in line for about 15 minutes to get tickets to the exhibit for later that afternoon. We had tickets for 2:15 this afternoon so we had a couple of hours to kill and decided to visit the permanent collection at the Prado. They had a fantastic collection of Ruben’s paintings a well as a handful of other artists. When it came time to view the Renoir exhibit, we found it just as impressive. You’ll have to trust me on that since we couldn’t take any pictures inside!!

Our visit to the museum took a few hours and when it was over we took our time and casually strolled back to the hotel, taking our time to look into the windows and admire the beauty of this magnificent city. Then it struck us - what would be a better way to top off our first full day in Spain than with a tapas crawl and a flamenco performance??? So we popped into the first of two really great tapas restaurants. Actually, it seems every restaurant has a tapas menu and there are wonderful little restaurants all over the city. We found the tapas menus to be really quite reasonable - we have found you can typically get enough tapas to share between four people and a great bottle of wine for under 30 euros. Not a bad way to work your way through the city!!

The flamenco performance was really enjoyable as well. It took place in an intimate dinner theater space and we sat at a table that was no more than 10 feet from the stage. I would say the whole place only had about 15 tables. The performers consisted of two men singing traditional Spanish songs and three woman and one man dancing flamenco. All I can say is that if you haven’t had a chance to see a good flamenco performance, you HAVE TO GO. There is so much remarkable energy and intensity that comes through in the performance that it just draws you right in.

After the performance we stopped into another intimate restaurant for a late night dinner, which is also normal for the Spanish people. Typically, most folks here don’t even think about going out to dinner until after 10 p.m. and most restaurants stay open well after midnight!

Well, I can see this entry is probably dragging on WAY too long so I’ll wrap it up for now. We decided to take a day trip to Toledo tomorrow so that should be lots of fun…….