Friday – Madrid es Cerrado (Madrid is Closed)

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Susan and I are smart but not smart enough to figure out this stupid heater. It’s cold. We try all the settings. No luck. We just give up.

Everything is closed but we finally find a churros place that is open. So we had churros and pastries for breakfast. Nicky and I had the hot chocolate that is as thick as chocolate syrup (thicker I think). We didn’t see the orange juice machine so we thought they didn’t have the fresh orange juice. Susan ordered juice and got good fresh juice. I think I ordered wrong.

So one thing I’ve learned is to not walk behind Tim. He walks over the poles in the street and if you are behind him, suddenly a pole is in your path and he has simply walked over it. Just don’t follow him or you might regret it.

We are walking towards the palace and see this cool building. We get Nicky to pull her book out to find out about it. We call it the “Nothing building” as there is nothing spectacular about this building.

We get to the palace. Nicky had looked up before we came and it was supposed to be open, but noooo, it’s closed. (Typical Madrid as Tim says). So we went into the king’s cathedral. Mass was just getting ready to start but we could go it. I really liked this cathedral. I is very colorful. We stayed thru the portion of the ceremony where the bishops… all walk in with the smoke… On the way out I saw a sign that they cathedral had wifi. I guess it is so people won’t get bored during the service. ;-)

We then walked the length of the palace (outside of course since it was closed) and Nicky ready the text to us. There are 2800 rooms. We decided we could invite all the people we know and there would still be empty rooms. The palace was finished in the early 1800’s. We then headed into the gardens. Hey, it’s winter and nothing is growing but it was still nice.

Our next stop was the Egyptian temple. Guess what, it was closed too. When Egypt flooded the valley for the Dam, they let countries come in and move temples …. That would be flooded. This is the one Spain preserved.

We then headed to the to the market which had different stalls for different foods for lunch. Susan saw someone with a Panther’s hat on. Go Panthers. We had a homeless guy come up to us and I offered him 1/3 of my sandwich (it was large). He didn’t want it but wanted our pastry which was for Nicky and Tim. He finally took the sandwich when we said no….

Since everything was closed, we headed back to the hotel - google – nothing to do. We play Farkel. Susan has a travel Farkel game so we start to play. We decided to open a bottle of wine. It’s not like we don’t have any. Nicky and Tim brought a bottle for the trip and gave Susan a bottle of cava, but then Hector gave us 4 bottles of their killer wine. We opened the bottle Nicky and Tim brought (hey we are playing Farkel, we don’t need anything fancy). We laugh because we are using the big cups from the bathroom and say we have a vaso of vino tinto, not at copa.

Tim figures out our heater. You have to turn the fan on to manual (not auto) and of course set it to heat (but we had done that) and now it works.

Tim finds the “plaza ??? “ the closed plaza. We should go there. It is correctly named for Madrid.

Claire wins the first round of Farkel with a come from behind at the end and double hands… In the second round Susan jumps ahead with a major hand that none of us can even come close to.

We head out to dinner to the oldest continuous operation of a restaurant. It opened in 1725. Our dinner was great and we took a couple pictures but when I tried to take one downstairs they said no, right as the camera snapped. I got a very blurry picture of the waiter’s hand.

We walk out into a pretty good rain. We have 3 umbrellas but Tim’s breaks pretty quickly (actually I guess that is Baroque – Everytime we hear something is Baroque Tim says it should be fixed)

We head to a Flamenco show. I keep calling it flamingo show. After the show Nicky and Tim were saying what they heard the dancers singing – there were some words they couldn’t understand and Tim said well it’s Spanish’ish. I guess it just sounded like Spanish. The rain had stopped and we walked back to the hotel and crashed.

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Photos

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nothing building

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the palace (not sure if the front or back)

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King's Cathedral

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the other side of the palace

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Egyptian Temple

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nicky and tim relaxing on a bench

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Farkle and wine

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the oldest restaurant

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Nicky and Tim at dinner

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Flemenco