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Published: October 25th 2011
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Lake in Park Retiro
Me, Christian, and Kevin at the lake in Park Retiro. This weekend I visited Madrid with my roommate Christian. Madrid was an interesting city and there were many aspects that I appreciated about it. There was definitely a feeling of a strong government influence in Madrid since it is the capitol of Spain. I had a great weekend with Christian and his high school friends, except for the fact that my camera was dysfunctional this weekend.
On Friday we arrived in Madrid early in the morning with a few hours of sleep under our belts. We met up with Christian's cousin and friend from high school, both of whom attend Boston College. We were able to talk about some Massachusetts topics on the trip which was unusual for me because I haven't talked to my high school friends about Massachusetts for a while. I also met one of their friends who attended Pingree High School in Hamilton, MA. Proof of our small world: this Pingree guy who I met in Madrid dated a girl I went to middle school with at St. Mary's.
Later that day we wandered around the district known as City Center in Madrid. We came across a beautiful plaza called Plaza Mayor in the downtown
Botanical Gardens
Christian, his cousin Ellie, and me in the Botanical Gardens. area. It was a really cool place because I could envision the plaza being utilized for festivals in Madrid. Then we walked to Puerta del Sol, the main plaza in the downtown area of Madrid. I was a little disappointed with Puerta del Sol because it was a very crammed and unattractive plaza, but nonetheless it was an exciting place to be because there were many people hanging out here.
Christian ran the show for the Madrid trip because he contacted a lot of people he knew in Madrid before we arrived in the city. Later that afternoon we met up with some of his other friends from high school who were studying abroad in Madrid. They took us to a hole-in-the wall hamburger joint after walking for what seemed to be a few miles through the city. The burger place was alright but I definitely prefer In-n-Out or Five Guys. Afterwards we returned back to the apartment we were staying in for a short siesta.
Christian and I decided to bring his cousin and his friend on a tapas crawl that night for dinner. We went to a street near our apartment that was absolutely filled with
The Royal Palace
Kevin, Christian, and Me in our nation's Royal Palace. tapas bars. They were really impressed with our knowledge of tapas. Unfortunately the crawl ended after one order of calamari tapas because we decided to go to Cien Montaditos for cheaper food and drinks. However, Christian's cousin and friend enjoyed the cheap bocadillos and drinks at Cien Montaditos just as much as the tapas.
Later that night we found ourselves at an Irish bar called Dubliners. We tried going to a club somewhere else in the city but that failed and we returned to Dubliners. Christian went MIA for a while but a few minutes later he walked into the bar with green face-covering sunglasses he bought off a street vendor. Everyone in the bar turned their heads to this goofy site, and Christian said, "It's time to party." We all got a kick out of his sunglasses and took turns wearing the glasses in Dubliners that night.
I slept on the floor of the apartment that night because there were no more beds left. Christian managed to wake up before me and came into my room saying the same words as last night, "It's time to party." He was on a roll that weekend with the one-liners.
Christian, his cousin, and I went to the Prada Museum that morning. The Prada Museum was a very impressive art museum, probably the most impressive art museum I've seen in Europe so far. I really liked the exhibits that displayed paintings contrasting Heaven and Hell. The Wheel of The Seven Deadly Sins was pretty cool too. I saw a lot of art that day and it's difficult to recall everything I saw in the museum but I remember enjoying the Renaissance paintings that featured realism qualities in the paintings. I also enjoyed seeing paintings featuring saints or people from the Bible I was familiar with, such as Abraham offering his son Isaac to God as a sacrifice from the Old Testament.
Afterwards we went to the Botanical Gardens adjacent to the Prada Museum. This was also very impressive and I appreciated it because Barcelona doesn't have a garden similar to this. Christian, his cousin, and I enjoyed walking through the garden as we had a few "life contemplation" discussions.
After we wandered through the Botanical Gardens, we ventured into Park Retiro. The park was massive, not quite the size of Central Park, but definitely bigger than any
Park Retiro
Ellie, Kevin, Christian, and Me in Park Retiro park in Barcelona. I really enjoyed the park because the trees and grass were a nice escape from the busy city streets of Madrid. The Retiro also had a huge lake with people paddling boats with their families. My host mom told me that Madrid was able to build large parks like this because they had more space to do so; the city is constricted by the Mediterranean Sea and mountains around the city like Barcelona.
We finished our sight-seeing on Saturday with a trip to the Royal Palace. We walked there just as the sun was setting and got a spectacular show of the sun setting from the patio between the Cathedral and the Royal Palace. Christian took a video of this and provided some commentary. Again, he had a hilarious one-liner as he filmed us. He points his camera at me and says, "Mike Harney, R&D in its finest." We have a joke floating around the SCU guys in Barcelona that whenever we prepare to take a weekend trip, we do R&D on the city we are visiting to know what to see and how to navigate the city. Christian commented that I was "R&D in its
finest" because I'm usually pretty good at planning weekend trips.
That night we went to the coolest club in Madrid, Kapitol. The club is well-known throughout Spain, and possibly Europe. It features 7 floors of dance floors, bars, and lounges for young club-goers like us. On the main dance floor there is a machine that blows cool air and fog on the people dancing to relieve them from their own sweatiness. The club was also cool because there were some small performances that took place on the main stage that went along to the songs the DJ was playing. Second example of how small the world is: I ran into my friend from high school who is studying abroad in Barcelona with me, my friend Sammy Riley from SCU who was studying in Copenhagen, and a few SCU girls studying in Madrid. Yes, I'm in the right place to run into my college friends, but I still think it's astonishing to find so many of my friends in Madrid.
Christian and I went to La Reina on Sunday morning. It was a different kind of art museum: lots of modern art that Christian and I didn't really understand nor cared for. There were some amazing exhibits in this museum though, particularly the Guernica painting by Picasso. This painting displays the chaos of the town of Guernica when it was attacked in the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s. My favorite exhibit was the room with the quilts that displayed maps of the world with each country's flag placed in its geographical borders on the world map. We were lucky to see this because it was a temporary exhibit in the museum.
Christian and I had an open afternoon so we decided to take the metro in the direction of the airport. We stopped at the section of the city where the Real Madrid soccer stadium was. Since Christian and I are FC Barcelona fans, we decided not to take the tour of the Real Madrid soccer stadium. Doing so would be like a Red Sox fan taking a tour of Yankee Stadium: you can only do it if you intend to bury a jersey in wet concrete in the stadium to curse it. The weather in Madrid started to head south as it started to rain so we decided to head for the airport and call it a trip.
Madrid was definitely a great city to visit and I'm glad I got to experience the parks and art museums the city has to offer. It was also a great trip because I had some hilarious times with Christian and his one-liners.
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