September 11: Barcelona to Madrid

This morning I wanted to try and get some gifts to take home so I walked down to Mercat de la Boqueria and when I got there it was closed. So then I walked to Cacao Sampaka to buy some chocolate, but that was closed as well. It turns out that today is the Catalan National Day so most shops were closed. Once I got back to my room I finished packing up my stuff and then we headed out to the train station to go to Madrid. The three and a half hour train ride went by really quickly and the countryside we traveled through was spectacular. We went through some arid canyons with olive groves growing in them, pine forests, and villages that had cathedrals and buildings that looked centuries old.

Once we got to Madrid we took a taxi to our hotel, which my dad loved because our taxi driver drove a lot like him and we beat Auntie Shirley and Auntie Bev to the hotel by at least three or four minutes even though we left train station at the same time. After we got settled in we headed out to the Prado Museum to check out some of the art that Madrid is known for.

The Prado contains thousands of works of art from artists like El Greco, Goya, Velázquez, Rembrandt, Rubens, Caravaggio and Raphael to name a few (or at least the ones I've heard of). The two most displayed artists were Spaniards Diego Velázquez and Francisco de Goya. In fact the painting that was interpreted so much in the Picasso Museum in Barcelona, Las Meninas, was displayed in the Prado. As I walked through the museum and looked at the different styles each artist had I've found that I'm not as big a fan of the Spanish artists as I am of the Italian artists (with the exception of Picasso and Dalí). I'm no art buff, but the Spanish works seem more rough and they have a kind of dark quality that makes even the most pleasant scenes seem a little disturbing, whereas it seems that in the Italian paintings no matter how unpleasant the subject is the use of colors and lighting seems to soften the blow, and when there is an enjoyable subject it makes it that much more pleasing to the eye.

An El Greco painting

Once the museum had closed we headed over to Restaurante Sobrino de Botín for dinner. According to the Guinness Book of Records it is the oldest restaurant in the world since being founded in 1725.

They are famous for their cochinillo asado or roast suckling pig, so of course I had to try that and my dad got their roast baby lamb. Both were really good, but the suckling pig stood out in my opinion. The skin was extremely crispy and the meat was still really juicy.

Once we finished dinner we grabbed a taxi to take us back to the hotel, but the driver didn't even know where our hotel was! He ended up dropping us off two blocks away, but I guess after the rich dinner we had the extra two blocks of walking was warranted.