POSTED Feb 3, 2024     2024 01 31 Madrid

Jan 31, 2024      2024 01 31 Madrid

Wednesday morning we took the 8:10 train from Barcelona Sants train station to Madrid.  We arrived at 10:40 at Madrid-Puerta de Atocha, the station in Madrid.  The landscape from Barcelona to Madrid is very different from the landscape we are used to in the Midwest.  The land isn’t flat like it is from Ohio all the way through Nebraska.  There are a lot of hills mixed in with the land used for agriculture.  Much of the land looks to be semi-arid and not used for agriculture.  It is the middle of winter, so I wasn’t expecting fields of corn, but much of it looked to be grass, or at least trying to be grass. Back to our trip.  The first order of business was to buy a 10 ride ticket for the Metro and the buses to get us around Madrid.  Madrid has a population of just over 3.2 million, and the city and suburbs have a population of 6.98 million, so the population is very similar to that of Chicago.  Once we had our travel card we set off for the hotel to drop off our luggage.  Our hotel was the Ikonik Gran Vía, The Gran Via is the major road where this hotel, and many others are located.  This is a very busy street, with many stores and hotels.  Most of the traffic we observed were buses, with very few passengers, many taxis and many Ubers.   We reached the hotel without difficulty, check in wasn’t until 14:00.  We left our one samll backpack, which was our only luggage at the hotel.  We had tickets to visit both the Royal Palace, and the Royal Art Collection at 14:30. But we thought it would be worth it to see if we could get in early. The Royal Collection has a Caravaggio painting, and that is why I/we wanted to visit.  As we approached the palace we could see many people out on the street in front of the Palace, and many Policia also lined up in front of the Palace.  To make a long story short, something I’m so good at, we asked one of the Policia what was what, he told us the Palace was closed because the King was having a ‘meeting’.  We then went to the information desk and asked about the Museum, and the lady told us it was also CLOSED!!!!  So just like that our plans for three days went out the window.  We then decided go to the Reina Sofia Museum, because it was the closest to the Palace.  We of course had been to this museum on previous trips.  The museum does have a 1001 painting, but of course it is not on display.  I of course took too many photos, so we were there quite a while.  Then it was back to the hotel to check in.  We had a huge room.  The bed appeared larger than a King sized bed.  There was one TV station in English: French TV news station.  Most of the news was about Israel, French farmers blocking roads protesting food imports, mainly from Ukraine, and the drought in Spain.  We could see a show we watched in Barcelona in English, but here is was dubbed in Spanish.  So we didn’t watch too much TV; and that isn’t why we were in Madrid.  We rested a bit before we went out to dinner.  Sue, who does all the important planning (i.e. not which paintings are on display) scouted out a Tapas restaurant nearby that had good recommendations.  This tapas restaurant provided a menu that we/Sue picked out several dishes to start, and of course beer.  After dinner it was back to the hotel, because we would be off to Toledo to see Caravaggio painting at the Cathedral Primada.

I haven’t curated the photo album, because it would take too much time.

2024 01 31 Madrid