Sunny Madrid

Now that we're going to spend our last two days in museums in the big city, the weather forecast is sunny weather for the next week.  Not a cloud in the sky.

After dropping off our rental car at the airport we took a taxi into the city.  It was strangely deserted even for a Sunday morning.  Then the taxi was stopped at the intersection with our street by the police.  What was going on? (Insert thoughts of terrorist attacks here.)  The taxi driver explained we would have to shlep our bags to our hotel.  Marathon in downtown Madrid!  It was only half a block to our hotel.

We have an apartment on the 4th floor looking down into the courtyard of the building.  It's very spacious, but tenement style, meaning the living area leads to the bedroom leads to the bathroom, so Janet has to go through our bedroom to get to the bathroom.

After checking in, we headed into the streets to find downtown a vast pedestrian mall for the day.  The first thing we saw was three bakery cafes with real bread and pastries.  Extremadura was a strangely pastry-free land and the bread was like gluten-free cotton batting.  Serious matter for three tourists basically living off bread, cheese, and pastry.  Well, and the occasional bag of homemade potato chips.  And bags of dirt-cheap juice oranges (delicious).

We checked out downtown Madrid as best we could while being boxed in by the marathon.  Most of Madrid is fairly modern, 18th and 19th century, compared to the other cities we've visited.  The royal palace resembles Buckingham palace.

When the marathoners thinned we were able to cross the Paseo del Prado where the impressive museums are situated.

The Caixaforum, modern building with its impressive vertical garden

Here we found a group of Spanish bagpipe players serenading the marathoners.

Leo's two favourite things in one shot!

Then we crossed over to the Retira, Madrid's big park, full of Madrilenos enjoying the first sunny day in a month.  It was packed.

We came across another group of bagpipes busking in the park, introduced Leo as a fellow bagpiper, and Leo got to play a Spanish bagpipe! Their bagpipes are much smaller and pitched much higher and have slightly different fingering.  But Leo was able to belt out a recognizable Scotland the Brave with a few bad notes.

Then we reached the central pond, chock full of rented rowboats.  Here there was a really good jazz ensemble busking for the crowds.