Day 1 in Madrid

Walking tour of Madrid this morning. It was hard to walk in a straight line because I kept staring at everything, especially the architecture in some of the older buildings. An example of the splendor:

First on the tour, we went to the museum of El Prado where I saw this famous painting:

And only recognized it because of this advertisement for El Corte Inglés (a department store) that I had seen the day before:

Next we had a tour of the royal palace and marveled at the extravagance. Wallpaper? Forget it, these people have wallsilk. Every ceiling was bursting with paintings of naked men that were, for lack of a better word, voluptuous. I started to process how old everything was by the third room or so--most of the tapestries and chandeliers were from the 16th century! It was just strange to think that there had been people walking through the same rooms for centuries, dancing and talking and probably bumpin’ uglies.

Then the tour guides stopped holding our hands and after I pulled out my map, we found our way back to the plaza where the hotel is and a few of us went to go eat lunch at the typically-Spanish lunch hour of 2:00pm. A bit intimidated by the choices, we sat down in a fast food type place that served sandwiches for a comparatively-cheap 5 euro. They were pretty nasty, actually--we should have gotten something a little less...sandwichy.  

After lunch we returned to the hotel to participate in that oh-so-glorious Spanish tradition of siesta in preparation for our night out on the town which was, by the way, also glorious. We accidentally stumbled into a salsa bar--at nine o’clock, I might add, and because Spaniards apparently don’t go out until midnight it was pretty dead. Except of course for the class they were holding, which we may or may not have crashed quite enthusiastically after imbibing some chupitos.* All in all, a good night--those of you who know me will be proud of the fact that I stayed up quite late past my bedtime, finally succumbing to sleep at around 5am. 

Great first day in Spain! They say this is the honeymoon period, when I’ll be most delighted with everything, and I hope it lasts for a little while before I have a fight with my vacation-husband over metaphorically taking out the trash.

*Quick vocab lesson. In Spain, a “chupito” is a shot. In Latin America, apparently it’s like a pimple or something, which I don’t really understand because it comes from the verb “chupar” which means to suck, like a liquid. Such descriptions stir some interesting images. http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=1490586