Holy Toledo! (and Madrid)

In front of Palacio Real

Sorry for the delay in this post!  I got back from Madrid late Sunday night and left for Greece Wednesday night and the time in between that I spent recovering/getting ready to leave again.  Anyway, more on Greece in the next blog.  So, two weekends ago Kelsey Julie and I made last minute (and when I say last minute I mean we decided to go about 5 hours before me left... I'd say that's about as last minute as you can get) plans to go to Madrid for the weekend.  Took the overnight bus Thursday night and had all day Friday, Saturday and Sunday.  Friday we started out at the Palacio Real (aka: Royal Palace).  After a bit of miss communication and waiting an hour and a half (for no reason, due to the miss communication) we took a self-guided tour (or not so much "tour") through the Palace.  The place was gorgeous!  The only thing I didn't like about it was that there was not much furniture or artifacts of any kind inside.  The walls, ceilings and portraits were nice though.  After the Palace we headed over to Plaza de Mayor, which reminded me a lot of a Plaza in Venice (can't remember the name).  Anyway, we got lunch here, which was delicious and decently priced.  I got a huge chicken with fries for 6 euro I believe?  I was pretty proud for finding this because Madrid is expensive!  After lunch we made our way over to Real Jardin Botanico (aka: the Botanical Gardens).  It was really nice inside, but you could tell it's a lot prettier in the summer when everything has bloomed.  We got some cute pictures while we were in there though and I got some close ups of the flowers that were there.  After the gardens we found our way to Parque del Buen Retiro.  According to the map there was supposed to be a lake somewhere around there, but we weren't able to find it before we had a unfortunate run-in with some teenage scums.  I won't go into detail with this because it is not the highlight of the weekend (more like the absolute downer of the weekend), but they did not get me personally, and we'll leave it at that.  Once we recuperated from that run-in we did some shopping and made our way to Reina Sofia, a modern art museum.  By this time, it was pretty late and we were exhausted.  We went around the museum for about 30 minutes until we called it quits.  Got some dinner and headed back to the hostel to sleep.  The next day we decided we had had enough of Madrid and made plans for Toledo. 

In front of the bridge connecting the two sides of Toledo 

Toledo was much better than Madrid.  We had a lot of trouble finding things because the map Rick supplied us with was relatively vague, but we eventually found our way around the town.  We walked along the city walls, went to the Santa Cruz Museum, saw the Cathedral from the outside (we were feeling too cheap at the time to pay for the entrance fee), saw the Mosque (again, from the outside) and found the escalators.  Unfortunately, us being as bright as we are, walked up the to top of the escalators to ride them down... not our brightest moment, but it was good exercise climbing to the top.  After this we headed back to Madrid so we could get into the Prado Museum during the free hours and before it closed.  This was the only place we went to that I had wished we had had more time for, but on the flip side we did get in for free! Again, after a long day of touring we were exhausted and headed back to the hostel to get a good nights rest.  Sunday morning we went to the local Flea Market, which was huge!  And definitely one of my favorite parts about Madrid.  We got there right around when the stands were opening up so we were able to avoid the massive crowds for a good portion of it.  I got a really pretty Arabic tapestry I'm excited to use in my apartment semester!  All in all, I'm glad I went to Madrid, but what I've been telling everyone that has asked... I never feel the need to return.