- This was our last full day in Madrid, so we made a full day of it
- First thing in the morning (I think we met at 10 AM), we went to the Palacio Real. We bought tickets (and paid the extra 100 pesetas to get the guided tour!) but they said the next tour in English wouldn't be for an hour and fifteen minutes (at 11:45). We had some time to kill so we toured the palace pharmacy (we've never seen so many glass jars before) and the palace armory. The armory had an unbelievable collection of suits of armor (including those for the horses), swords, and other equipment. I wasn't feeling very well, so I went and sat outside for a while (despite what Ari and Steve thought, I wasn't hung over!)
- We showed up for the tour at 11:40 and they told us it had started at 11:30! We could have caught up with the tour, but we decided to wait another twenty minutes for the next one. The tour was unbelievable--the paintings, the frescos, the carpets, the walls, the floors, the furniture, the chandeliers... I tried to take pictures, but we weren't allowed to use a camera flash so very few of them turned out. The tour lasted an hour, so we only saw about twenty or twenty-five rooms (the palace has more than 2,800 rooms!)
- Steve taking self-pictures with my camera
- We decided to walk across town to the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza. Along the way we had lunch at a pizza place where Steve could get some hot wings. It was quick and easy but it wasn't very Spanish
- The pizza place was on a plaza that we mistakenly thought was the Puerta del Sol, so when we left the restaurant to continue our walk, things didn't look familiar and we thought we might be heading in the wrong direction (not that Lisa or Ari cared enough to help--they were too buy mocking Steve and me doing the real navigation work). We finally realized our mistake and headed toward the museum
- We spent a full four hours at the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza (3 PM to 7 PM when it closed). The museum was fascinating and laid out in a way that encouraged you to follow along in order. There were a total of 48 rooms that were arranged in chronological order from the 15th century all the way through the 20th century. We had learned our lesson from Del Prado, however, and we made sure we each had an electronic tour guide--throughout the museum there were signs with numbers that we could enter into our hand-held device. When we did so, the tour guide would provide an overview of the time period and the art work in a given room or it would provide a detailed description of a specific work of art.
- In the section on American 18th and 19th century art, they had two pieces that showed St. Anthony Falls in Minnesota and another one entitled Summer in Blue Ridge (which is the town where Aaron Zimmermann lives). I was constantly behind the others but they were remarkably patient, stopping at the end of each floor waiting for me to catch up. On the ground floor, there were eight rooms dedicated to 20th century art. Everyone else was ready to head to the gift shop and take a break from the tour, but they were nice enough to let me finish the tour. There were a couple of Picasso's and Kandinsky's and all sorts of modern art. All and all the modern art was the most challenging and tiring--by the time I finished it, I was ready to go too.
- We walked back to Puerta del Sol. While Ari and Lisa did a little shopping, Steve and I found a deli with a bull's head on the wall and pictures of famous bull fighters
- With a little effort, we found Plaza Mayor where we went for a cervesa and a chance to look through the tour book for a good restaurant. We finally settled on El Cuchi which was just off the plaza. We must have been in a bit of a party mood because we each had several margaritas and didn't seem to notice that dinner wasn't nearly as good as the other nights. A shot-girl came around and spotted us as a likely (American) victim for her tequila shots--it was quite a production (we each, in turn, put on a hard hat, she poured the shot and slammed it against our head, we drank the shot, and then she used a towel to roughly dry our face)
- After dinner we roamed for a bit looking for another bar. We were trying to find an old bar on one of the tiny side streets (like we had found our first night near Botín Restaurant), but we ended up going to a busy coffee shop/bar that looked a bit like a Spanish Starbucks (is wasn't as bad as that sounds). There, we had HUGE sangrias and had the most intense discussion on religion--good and evil, who gets to go to heaven, evolution versus creationism, atheists versus agnostics versus everyone else, do you need haircuts in heaven, etc.
- Since it was our last night in Madrid, I think we were determined to keep going. We wandered around the outside of the Plaza Mayor looking for yet another bar. It was after 1 in the morning at this point, and we were a bit surprised that things weren't hopping a bit more than they were. We finally found this small bar that wasn't more than eight feet wide and maybe thirty feet deep. We each got a cervesa (no point sticking with one drink at this point) and continued our conversation. They started to close the bar around us, so we finished our drinks and made our way out to catch a taxi back to the hotel