The bus ride to Madrid was 6 hours long, leaving Seville at 11pm friday, and arriving in madrid 5am on saturday. It was a cramped and uncomfortably warm ride, resulting in a less-than-restful night. When we arrived into madrid, we crashed at the bus station for a few hours before heading out into the city. The station in Madrid has this odd rule that you can't put your head on the ground, probably to avoid the station from being overrun by miscreants and ne'er-do-wells like us, but we tried to get a couple hours of sleep anyway. A bit later in the morning, we walked through the Parque del Buen Retiro, and saw the historical highlights downtown, one of which was the Royal Palace of Madrid.
Some claim this palace to be the largest inhabited palace in the world, but as I later learned on the definitive wikipedia article on the topic, this title is up for heated debate. The royal family doesn't actually live in the palace, but it is still used for state functions. At the least, it is the largest palace in Europe, which is nothing to wag a finger at. (Just in case you were considering wagging a finger at the Royal Palace of Madrid).As mentioned in an earlier post, during my trip to Belgium my stuff had been stolen, and later returned to the venue of the event I was attending during that trip. I received my bag back the same Monday that we left for our trip to Spain. This was great, because I had my passport, so I could actually fly, and my wallet was still in my bag (devoid of cash, of course). The weekend that my bag was taken, I canceled my bank cards, and had not yet received new ones by the time we left for Spain, so I had to go to a place that exchange cash for euros. This is a lot more expensive route than withdrawing money from an ATM, so I was trying to make it the rest of the trip without exchanging money again. The rest of the group was trying to keep the trip cheap as well, and so for the most of the trip we eschewed street vendors and restaurants for local grocery stores and street markets. Eating like this worked out great, as we ended up buying a lot of fresh bread, cheese, and produce on the cheap, and checking out the local markets.
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| Temple de Debod, a rebuilt ancient Egyptian temple in the Northwest of Madrid |
One of the last things we checked out was the Museo del Prado, which has a lot of really interesting art, including pieces by Goya and Rembrandt. At this point in the trip, everyone was really exhausted, so we didn't spend too much time in the museum, but still had the chance to view a lot of interesting pieces. Side note: Goya's Black Paintings are pretty crazy, in a dark and creepy sort of way. He painted them on the inside walls of his house. They were meant to be expressive of the panic and hysteria caused by the social unrest at the time, though I feel that if he was stressing out, seeing paintings like "Satan Devouring His Son" while Goya was grabbing his morning coffee probably didn't help much with the stress.
After the museum, we walked to the bus station in order to find a ride to the airport. This station had a feature I haven't seen in any other bus stop: a giant greenhouse area, complete with turtle pond. We watched the turtles for a while, and finally grabbed the bus to the airport, where we would spend our last night in Spain. |
| Where we stayed saturday night |
Final thoughts about the trip:
Seville was my favorite city that we visited. Its a lot smaller than the other two, so I think you get a better feel of a spanish town, whereas larger cities have a less unique feel. Although it didn't have the most to see or do, I think it was the most beautiful of the 3 - it was really enjoyable just walking around the town and looking at the old spanish houses or streets, or hanging out on the terrace on the top of our hostel. It also helped that it was more sunny and warm when we visited than the other two. However, all three
Before I embark on my next journey, I'm definitely going to research where I'm staying more - at the very least, find out if the bus stations or airports are open overnight. Sleeping outside = not fun. Also, I need to find out where the tourist stations are beforehand. Strangely enough, we had trouble finding them in every city we visited; you'd think that they would be really easy to find.
This was a really exhausting trip, but also a really great one. Its definitely one of the highlights of my semester so far.
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