Hola, Madrid.

Madrid is a few hours by train from Barcelona, and it was GLORIOUS to put on some headphones, listen to some Spanish music, and catch a lil' nap on the trip down.  I bought my plane tickets to leave from Madrid, so I knew my trip would have to end there.  I wanted to end my trip on a good note, and that I did.

My good friend, Gina--a buddy from Gonzaga--is studying for her Masters in Spanish in Madrid, so we had chatted about trying to catch up so she could be my tour guide ahead of time.  I was SUPER excited to see her--it had been years!  And she is a fabulous woman.  LOVE HER.

We got to Madrid, successfully navigated the metro, and began the short trek to our hotel.  It was a pretty nice place, up a few sets of ancient, "well-loved" (read: WORN-OUT and dangerous) stairs.  We dropped our stuff off and went to find a phone to call Gina.

After a few mis-haps (read: dumb Americans who don't know how to use a Spanish phone/calling card), we managed to get ahold of her, and made plans to meet up the next day at lunch.  She gave us a few good ideas for things to see and do for the evening, so armed with a pub crawl map we found at the hotel, we set out.  We wandered for awhile, until I saw a familiar place I LOVE: H&M.  

If you don't know about H&M, let me be the first to introduce you.  If you know me very well at all, you know I pretty much HATE to shop, especially for clothes.  H&M totally changed that (or is at least a huge exception to my shopping disdain).  I first experienced H&M toward the end of when I lived in London.  H&M is a European clothing store (I think they're originally a Scandanavian chain), which sounds out of my price range, right?  But that's the absolute BEAUTY of H&M!!  The clothes are ADORABLE, and SUPER CHEAP.  Yep, you read that right.  Cheap.  But cute!  H&M has just started to break into the American Market in the last 4 or 5 years, starting with a store in New York, then one in LA, I believe.  Next was Chicago (I stumbled upon that one when I was on the REACH team a few years ago).  Now I know there are a couple of them in Seattle, and at least one in Vegas.  I still get super excited when I see one, and have to go in!!  It's a fantastic store.  

So, of course, we had to check it out (not that Ben cared one iota about H&M, but whatever).  My sister was the lucky recipient of this trip to H&M.

Anyway, after that brief pit-stop, we continued on our quest: finding paella.  I had eaten paella in France, but I wanted to experience it in Spain.  We finally found a GREAT little restaurant and managed to get a table--it was AWESOME.  Super delicious.  As near as I can tell, paella is a basically a giant skillet with a whole bunch of stuff thrown in--seafood, chicken, a few veggies--all tossed with rice (and I think it includes saffron...or something that makes everything very yellow).  I think they seriously toss the whole chicken, etc., in, because you definitely end up picking out bones, but it was really delicious, and also quite inexpensive.  So after a little paella and sangria, we were both more than ready to head to bed.

The next morning we got up pretty early to venture out to the Prado, which is an incredible museum whose collections include masterpieces by Raphael, Rembrandt, El Greco, Goya, Botticelli, and many other phenomenal artists (the Raphaels were my FAVORITE--sooooooo gorgeous!).  I paid the extra few Euros to get the audio guide and spent three glorious hours, just me and the little speaker up to my ear, seeing some of the world's greatest artwork.  I'm no art buff, but it was fantastic.  I could have spent many more than the 3 1/2 hours we had there!

After lunch we met up with Gina!  She looked fantastic, and she's fitting into the Spanish lifestyle quite well!  After a couple weeks of stumbling through language barriers, it was fantastic to have a fluent speaker with us!  She took us to a restaurant and we had a fantastic lunch, then went to wander Madrid with her as our tour guide!!

Awesome rowboats on the pond at the park.

Random art exhibit inside a glass building in the park.

Kilometer Zero--apparently all roads in Spain originate from this spot.  (Those are my toesies.)

Royal Palace--where there are no royals, but occasional State Dinners.

Monument to Cervantes and "Don Quixote."

We spent some time in a huge, beautiful park, checked out the Royal Palace (from the outside...where apparently the monarchs do not live and rarely hang out), enjoyed the sunshine, and had a fabulous day catching up.  Toward the end of the day, Gina took us up to her favorite place in Madrid to watch the sunset.  Apparently this place is no secret, because there was no shortage of photographers waiting for Senora Sol to make her exit!

Apparently there's an Egyptian temple that was given to Madrid hundreds of years ago, so they somehow transported the buildings up there...interesting.  But Gina didn't lie--the sunset was beautiful!

We took lots of photos and basked in the end of another beautiful Spanish day, then set off to find some tapas!  Tapas are basically Spanish appetizers, but something you have to experience when you're there.  They have "tapas bars" where people stand around and eat huge varities of these little delicacies.  Interesting.  We went to a cool, super cheap (1 Euro each!) tapas bar where the tapas were served on little sandwiches, and enjoyed a cheap dinner.  It was really fun. 

After a bit of souvenir shopping, we concluded our day with churros dipped in this exquisite hot dipping chocolate, then said our goodbyes.  Thus ended my last night in Spain...