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100 Days in Spain

Madrid Oct 27, 2009

With the 70 plus students from my program and on its dime, I visited the surprisingly clean city of Madrid this fin de semana pasada(past weekend). The program flew us to this city of no beaches and put us up in a very nice hotel a rocks throw from Puetra del Sol (the main square in the center of town), the Royal Palace, and Plaza Mayor. The hotel was situated on Madrid’s 3rd street promenade, which was filled with La Rambla type street performers, and was great for people watching.

The trip being sponsored by my program had its pluses and minuses. I had an excellent and easy on the eyes tour guide that provide wonderful and interesting information on both the walking tour of the city she took a small group of us on and a tour through the overwhelming large Museo de Prado. But my free time to explore the city for myself and visit with some friends that were studying abroad in Madrid was limited. I was able to see all the top sights Madrid had to offer: the Royal Palace (definitely fit for a king, if not 2 or 3, seeing as it contains 2,800 rooms), the Prado Museum (filled with all-star painters like El Greco, Goya, and Velazquez), Plaza Mayor (a massive square), Retiro Park (the brother of New York’s Central Park), and Centro De Arte Reina Sofia (houses Picasso’s famous Guernica, which is bigger than the entire layout of my home stay apartment). But the three parts of Madrid I enjoyed the most were: the restaurant called Botin, the flea-market El Rastro, and the discoteca called Kapital.

Botin was founded in 1725 and is officially, according to the Guinness Book of Record, the oldest restaurant in the world. I had my old buddy, Alex George, make reservations and we had a late dinner Saturday night. Knowing that the bill from this nearly 300 year-old restaurant was not going to fit well in our swallow college pickets, we snacked before-hand and between the five people that ate this, beyond traditional, meal we spilt three dishes. Botin’s specialties, and what we naturally ordered, are their Roast Suckling Pig and Roast Baby Lamb. Roast Suckling Pig was like sweet honey bacon without the fatty taste; it was orgasmic. The lamb was extremely tender but was totally out shined by the Roast Suckling Pig. The building itself looks like it would have horse-drawn carriages parked out front. The inside was filled with evidence that this place was truly 300 years old, complete with slanted stairs, creaky wooden floors, and dungeon wine-cellars.

El Rastro is Europe’s biggest flea market. It was filled with hundreds of different booths, selling sunglasses to fur coats, and was as congested as New Orleans’s French Quarter on Marti Gras. My one knock on this market of flea is that it wasn´t just one long street where one could see all it had to offer, but it had other small side streets where you had the potential of missing something good.

The night club Kapital was where I went both of my nights in Madrid. It was a 7-story club that had a different theme on every level. On the main floor there was a giant mist/flog blower attached to the ceiling that would douse the dance floor in cold-smoke according to the beat of the music, making it so you could see anyone around you for a couple of second. Also, throughout the night and early into the morning they would have performer come out and do Circus Ole (or is it Cirque Du Soleil) type routines and different musical acts.

It was a fun weekend and with that trip, I have now seen most of Spain. The only thing leave to see is the Southern part, which I plan on going to in late November, specifically Seville, Gibraltar, and Granada.

¡Yo quiero ver una corrida de toros!