Madrid

On our running tour

Aaaaah how I do like Spain, so warm, and the people are so great. If only it was a financial hub I would be set. Perhaps the only bright light with Britain steering towards exiting the EU will be if the financial capital moved to Spain. Unlikely I know (it'll probably end up in Dublin), but how good would that be. Living somewhere with great nature, great food and great weather. I think it's the only positive from a Brexit.

There must be something about Spain, it's the country I've visited most whilst I've been in London (after Scotland, but that's the same country). You seem to be guaranteed good weather, which you definitely can't say about Scotland. The people are more friendly than in France, and there seem to be fewer tourists, at least where we go.

I was pleasantly surprised by Madrid, I'm not sure why I hadn't visited earlier. I think I thought it was just a big city, with nothing to see or do. With nothing really going for it. Perhaps Barcelona just has much better PR, but after this visit I am definitely going to try and see more of southern/central Spain. For too long I have restricted myself to the north of the country.

Our impression of ABBA

After a long, cold London winter, there is nothing like 4 days of total warmth, with no clouds in the sky. It was Rosè time for sure. The first morning we were there it was up early for a running tour. I think these rival walking tours for me, they are generally a bit smaller and you get to see so much of the city. We basically covered everything, and it set us up for the weekend. Suddenly you feel like you know the city, we got a bit of everything with this tour, history, sights, and parks.

I wasn't aware that Madrid has this great city park right in the middle of it. It's definitely something pretty special. I also wasn't expecting all the great buildings either, there is a bit of a fascist twinge to them, you could definitely imagine Gotham city here.

It was interesting to hear the guide's view on Franco. He was the dictator up until 1975 when he died, and I always found it interesting that when he died it was as if Spain kind of shrugged it's shoulders and went, hmmm glad that's over. They then just transitioned to democracy and re-introduced a whole bunch of laws. There was no blood-letting or civil war, it kind of just seemed to go back to what it was before he was in power.

The royal palace

The beautiful botanic gardens. Nice and cool

I think I may prefer Madrid to Barcelona, Barcelona is way too full of tourists, and you always feel like you have to watch out for scammers there. Here they just seem to love food, there aren't that many people around, but since it's the capital there are heaps of things to see. We saw a few of the sights, but really I think you could easily spend a weekend just admiring the buildings and eating.

The ticketing hall at Kilburn underground station - captures the
mood of the underground perfectly

One thing I noticed was how it didn't feel like a city in a country with such a high unemployment rate as Spain is meant to have.  They could really do with hiring a lot more people everywhere we went. You go into a cafe and it would be packed, but there would be one server. There would be one person selling tickets at museums, that sort of thing. Everywhere you went you had to wait because there just weren't enough people employed. They could easily drop their unemployment rate a few percentage points by employing people where they are most obviously needed.

We spent a lot of time in the parks, mainly because we happened to be there on a holiday again. In England they have the early May bank holiday, which I think is the first Monday of May. This is going to occur around the 1st of May for some of the time. And you forget, living in the capitalist UK, that the 1st of May in the rest of Europe is Labour day, and is a super important holiday. So we always forget that everything elsewhere is going to be closed on the 1st. And end up wandering around these foreign cities going why is everything shut, this is so weird. Until you remember where you are and what the date is.

Fascist buildings everywhere

Luckily there were some great places to walk around in Madrid. The city park, which has a full on boating lake in the middle of it. The main street, which is just full of these grandiose buildings, the botanic gardens, which were so cool after the heat of the streets.

We also did the three main museums; Prado, Thyssen-Bornemisza and the Reina Sofia. The Prado is kind of like the Louvre or the National Gallery, the main museum with the older style paintings. It's not as big as the other national museums, but still has 2 large floors, with paintings from 1100 through to 1800. This is definitely the museum of the tour buses, so either go early or order your tickets online, since the lines stretch round the building.

The Thyssen-Bornemisza was my favourite museum I think. Probably because it was both quiet, you can just turn up here and buy a ticket, and has slightly more modern paintings. It also has a great terrace, so kind of a cafe, but way more relaxed and attractive. I would visit just to have drinks here, which you can't say for many museum cafes. Finally there was the Reina Sofia, which was definitely the weirdest of the museums we visited. This is the modern art museum of the city. And even the visit was very modern, in that there were these big floors, but it was kind of hard to work out where the art might be. There were strange corridors, and empty rooms.

We had some great food there too, I'm never very good at finding restaurants in foreign cities, I never book anything, and so I just end up wandering around for ages until hunger forces my hand. Luckily the people of Madrid seem to really like their food, so even the obviously touristy places were tasty. We went to one place which did this super slow cooked lamb, oh that was so good, it just fell off the bone. I think it's really a town of tapas though, I've never seen so many tapas bars. And the thing to do, apparently, is they each do one specialty, so if you want mushrooms you go to one place, if you want prawns you go somewhere else. And you can spit your olive pits on the ground. That seems to be why they are so open, for ease of cleaning out the pits at the end of a night.