Got woken up by a phone call from Mom and Pop. What a nice surprise! Got ready and headed out to Starbucks near by for breakfast. We had spotted it the day before and thought it would be a better bet than pancakes at McD again! We were right......! Coffee and criossants and carrot cake! Yum! Determined to see Palacio Real, we walked again via Plaza Mayor but once again it was closed for the same darn official ceremonies. The guy had failed to tell us the day before that the ceremonies were continuing! But while we were there, getting ready to head back, we saw horses and carriages and marching guards all lining up for the cermonies. We watched the fun for a while....the weather was better than the day before and the sun was out. We went into a church next door - Iglesia De Almundena - saw some gorgeous stained glass windows and the beautiful interior. Since our Palace visit failed again, and we had the morning free, much against our will we decided to visit the Reina Sofia, another museum everyone kept insisting we see. Our guide book listed it as one of the best museums in Europe, so we caved in and headed towards it. We took another interesting route getting back thru some small narrow streets. All the streets are named with this plaque made up of 9 tiles - see pic above. very pretty. It WAS a fabulous museum and in addition to more of Dali and Picasso - including his famous Guernica, which is much much bigger than I thought - we saw lots of paintings by Joan Miro and Kandinsky! Spent about an hour there and had lunch at Pinocchio Trattoria outside the museum. Terrific pizza and salad, it ended up being one of our best meals!
We got back to the hotel, dumped our stuff and headed back to the Botanical Gardens for a better look this time. We bought some lotus seeds (yes, in Madrid) and some other exotic flower seeds, walked around the garden and came back for our mandatory siesta at about 4pm. A bit late actually.
Woke up at 6pm and left for Plaza Mayor again, determined to find Mason De Las Guitarras! We stopped at an internet cafe on the way and then continued on. Finally we got to Cava San Miguel - the street lined with these so called caves redone as bars. A bit more searching finally got us to Mason DL Guitarras. Yay! We were told the music began at 9pm and it was about 8pm by then, so we decided to have dinner at a neighboring restaurant. All restaurants in Madrid have their menu posted on the door and its quite common to see customers perring at them to see what they have. Most of the time they were meat filled dishes, so we were thrilled to see veg soups and egg dishes. When we went in we were the only ones...we attributed that to the fact that it was way too early for the locals to eat dinner! Wrong! I ordered a Castillian soup for myself. It sounded good....paprika, bread cubes, onion, garlic...yum! R ordered a Spanish omelette. It took a while...we could hear the cook in the back cranking up the stove and finally the food arrived. The soup was a virulent red..probably the color of the paprika. It had garlic pieces floating on top along with chunks of bread in a thin film of olive oil. Not too bad, i thought. Then I saw it.....something like an eye looking back at me!!!! They had dropped a raw egg in the hot soup just before bringing it to the table, and the yolk was glaring at me. A baleful yellow eye in a sea of red! Thats it.....i took a spoonful and gave up. R's omelette turned out to be more potatos than egg.....so he too took a mouthful and gave up! Bad meal # 2!!! We left most of it, paid the guy and scooted out of there. We wandered around for a while listening to the stray sounds of guitar strumming and lusty singing from various bars, then went back to MDLG at 9pm. The guitarist had just arrived, and he took a few minutes to set up and started playing. Amazing!!!! We had ordered a pitcher of sangria and a plate of tapas - fried pimiento peppers! The combo of the amazing drink, the food and the music was heady! We stuck around till 10.30pm, then called it a day and walked back to the hotel.
More pics of the Palace and Madrid........you may need to create a photobucket account :-(
1 comment:
Food for vegetarians a not good at all in Spain and Portugal.My husband doesn't mind non veg, but my daughter and myself we have to have only vegetarian food. But most of the places had good pizza, and they used to be quite huge, and we managed with that. I really loved Sangria, and was always drunk on that. We did have veg paella in Barcelona and it was good.
All hotels we stayed were very good, especially in Barcelona, where we had to plan the trip ourselves.
We fell in love with Barcelona, it is the best place in the whole world.
Nice reading through your blogs, a good walk through the memory lane.
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