Madrid

Kenna and I took the night train from Lisbon to Madrid.I was really excited about a sleep train, because let's be honest its totally a novelty, especially for us silly Americans who seem to have forgotten that train travel exists, AND for the rest of us who have experienced the sheer stupidity and incompetence that is AMTRAK.(flowers in Madrid)

So despite how brilliant the idea of taking a sleep train who, both Kenna and I woke up feeling sick the next morning. And not like motion sick or anything, like actually genuinely ill. I had a sore throat and I can't remember Kenna's symptoms. So we arrive Monday morning in Madrid feeling sick. We get breakfast, check into our hostal and decide to head over to the Museum of Archeology, to learn a little about Madrid.

(Kenna and I outside the wall garden of the Caixaforum bank building)

But the thing is, in Spain museums and stuff tend to be closed to the public on mondays. Go figure. By the time we realize that the museum is closed (we were standing in it and the guards told us) we were feeling more sick. So we went back to the hostal for a nap. And that my friends basically sums up the next four days in Madrid. We ate some spicy food to try to clear our systems, but we never did see the Museum of Archeology. In fact we didn't see much of anything. We were feeling really sick. I for one had a new symptom everyday. It truely sucked.

(Wisteria vine outside some fancy bank building)

Then to top it all off, the day we're leaving we head to the train station to get an 11 o'clock train to Seville. And we realize that our clocks are wrong, whether this was due to time change or time zone crossing I still can't figure it out. None-the-less, we had missed the train we wanted. So we bought tickets for the 2pm train. Luckily, we were really close to the Reina Sophia museum, which is apparently THE museum to see in Madrid. So after getting lunch we went in for 15 minutes. Later, much later, I discovered that Picasso's Guernica is housed in this museum and we could have spent those 15 minutes looking at that. BUT NO, we looked at some other stuff. Some other interesting stuff, but I would have liked to actually see the Guernica, especially because when I realized it was in Madrid, that means the I didn't see it 10 years ago at the UN building in NYC. I have been seriously confused about this painted for some time now.

To sum it up, from what I can tell Madrid is a lovely very metropolitain world city. But I feel I should make too many judgements as I didn't seem much other than the inside of my hostal and a hotel.

(Some royal palace)

Actually that's not true, we also saw this place, which is a Palace. It was pretty and had a huge collection of ceramic urns for medications. I think it housed what they called the Royal Pharmacy, but mostly it was a lot of ceramic urns, and some glass urns. It was cool seeing how they used to keep medications, and what they used to consider as medications. Some of the containers still actually had stuff in them, which was actually kinda gross, especially when I was liquid stuff - the cinnamon bark wasn't so bad.