Sightseeing in Madrid

What’s interesting about arriving in a new city is how confusing everything can seem then, after agonising over whether to buy a tourist metro card or not and staring at maps of railway lines and metros, it all suddenly makes sense.  Madrid is a sprawling spider-web of a city where no road goes in a straight line and there seems to be small odd shaped plazas at every turn.  The main plaza, Plaza Mayor actually manages to be a huge rectangle.  It all seems so old; magnificent, grand, imposing facades.  We travelled three times into the centre of Madrid from Alcala de Hernares and quickly became experts on a very efficient and frequent train and metro system.  Sightseeing highlights were just wandering the streets and observing everyone else wandering the streets and visiting two of the big art galleries, Museo del Prado and Museo Centro de Arte Reina Sofia.  The masterpieces in the Prado – paintings by Goya, Velasquez, Bosch etc. – are all so familiar but breathtaking when you see them for real.  Picasso’s Guernica, in with the modern art in Reina Sofia, is such a complex painting and said so much about the Spanish Civil War, it needed about half an hour of contemplation.  Churches, gardens, small Tapas bars tucked in side streets – it’s all here and we put in the leg work to see it.  We’ve adjusted to eating all our meals later and have been amazed by the way Madridians spend so much of the evening dressed up and strolling the streets and standing in groups chatting.  This was especially apparent on the weekend in Alcala de Hernares.  I guess it is a very cheap and social form of entertainment.  The train trips into and out of the centre have also been interesting.  A particular style of begging is for an unemployed person to move through the carriage handing out a card explaining their plight then returning to collect money or standing in the middle of the carriage and telling everyone about their straightened circumstances then moving around for donations.  Our fourth day was spent closer to our hotel and taking our bikes for a test ride.  A bike path leads out of the centre and starts about 500 metres from our hotel so we can avoid the busy roads in the morning.  Chris is coping well with the Spanish and I’m gathering confidence.  There’s so much of it we can read and understand but so little we can say!!  Chris has started his own blog and will, no doubt, provide more technical information on the riding.