Day 59: Enjoying Madrid

No work for today after our productive day yesterday, and it's Easter Saturday so most things are open again. We had some exploring to do since we hadn't really seen all that much of Madrid on our first time through, two months ago today funnily enough! First stop was the most important art museum in Spain - the Prado, full of Renaissance and earlier art.

Opening at 10, we hoped to get there soon afterwards but as usual could only manage about 10:40. Very long ticket queue already that looked like it was going to be an hour+ wait, but we were inside within about 35 minutes so not too bad. The gallery itself is enormous, with wings and halls and room after room of famous artists. Not quite on the scale of the Louvre, but definitely a lot larger than the Guggenheim we'd recently visited.

The paintings were mostly ordered by nationality, so you'd have Spanish artists in one wing, Flemish in another, then Italian, French and so on. We sort of wandered around not quite knowing where to head first. Lots of well-known artists on display, including: Goya, Velazquez, Rubens, Rafael, Rembrandt, Bosch, Titian and El Greco. We basically exhausted ourselves looking around fairly non-stop for about 5 hours, with only a short break in the restaurant for lunch.

Headed back around 4pm where we relaxed in our apartment. I headed back out shortly afterwards, as I had a ticket for a football game - Atletico Madrid vs Osasuna at the nearby Vicente Calderon stadium. I'd noticed on the map it was only 15 minutes walk from our apartment, realised that there was a game on while we were there, bought a ticket online for about 50 euros and headed over!

Great experience, with the crowd well into it singing and chanting fairly constantly. Atletico are one of the strongest teams in Spain, so it was no surprise they ran out as 3-0 winners. It should've been more as well, since they had two penalties in the last five minutes, both of which were saved!! I discovered later that this was one of the last home games they will play at this stadium, as they're moving for next season and it's into the last few games of the season. It's not hard to see why either - the actual stadium was mostly a dump of cinderblocks, concrete and rusty iron.

Arrived back home around 9pm where Shandos was still awake, surprisingly, so I grabbed half a chicken from the great-smelling chicken place a few doors away. Very tasty. Stayed up a bit too late as usual, though we're moving on in the morning. Still haven't quite done Madrid total justice, but we've made a much better fist of it this time around.Read more