Gettin' Real in Madrid

On Sunday morning, we left our broken bed behind in Barcelona and left for Madrid.
Barcelona to Madrid is about 620 km away, or 385 miles for all you Americans. Luckily for us, Spain has the nicest, newest and fastest trains in Europe and the ride took about 2 and a half hours.
As soon as we checked into our final apartment, we headed straight back out to El Rastro.
El Rastro is a huge outdoor flea market held every Sunday in Madrid, and is a must for anyone visiting. In fact, it's the main reason we left Barcelona early Sunday morning, as the Rastro closes between 3 and 4 pm.
The Rastro has an estimated 3,500 stalls selling clothing, antiques, hand-made shoes, original artwork, live animals and much more.
We had a great time winding down random streets and even bought a few cool items.
We ate lunch and got back on the train to Santiago Bernabeu. Santiago Bernabeu is the name of the stadium of the world famous Real (Ree-Al) Madrid "football" team. Sunday night they were playing their first game of the season, and we figured we'd try and get tickets to the game.
Somewhat surprisingly, for a world class team, the tickets are not that expensive. You can sit front row for about $130, something that you definitely can't pull off at Yankee Stadium or MSG.
We grabbed the cheapest seats we could find, all the way on top, and headed back home to unpack, eat dinner, and head right back out again.
The game started at 9:00 at night, which may seem late for a sports game to start, until you realize that a few nights later Barcelona played a game in Madrid that started at 11 pm. Typical Spain.
A cool feature about Santiago Bernabeu is that there is virtually no parking; everyone either walks or comes by public transportation. As a result, our subway car was packed with kids and adults wearing their Real Madrid jerseys. When we got to the stadium, we immediately spotted our good friend from Israel, Yb ehuda Nathan. This wasn't exactly a coincidence, as we had agreed earlier to meet up at the game, but still kind of surprising how we found each other so easily in the sea of thousands of people.
The stadium holds about 85 and a half thousand people, and was mostly full. Even sitting almost at the top of the stadium, the view was amazing. We were sitting behind one of the corners of the side that Real was attacking towards first.
For me, by far the best part of the game was seeing how quickly and intensely Chaya got into the game. Truthfully, it's very hard to be there and not get swept up with all the excitement. The game was surprisingly thrilling, and when Real Madrid scored a late goal to take a 2-1 lead, the crowd (us included) went nuts.
We all had a really great night, and if you ever get the chance you should definitely try and get to a game.

The next morning we had another free tour booked. Unfortunately, probably due to our amazing guide and tour in Barcelona, mixed with the heat of Madrid, we were left feeling a little underwhelmed.
Still we got to see some beautiful and interesting things, including the world's oldest restaurant (Est. 1725) and the Royal Palace.

The Royal Palace

We ate lunch, and explored Sol, which is Madrid's version of Las Ramblas (kind of) with shops, street performers and restaurants.
We went home for our usual Siesta, but woke up not feeling too well. We decided to go out anyway because the famous Prado museum was free at night and we thought we'd check it out. We left the apartment at around 7 pm, already feeling sick, and passed by a sign which informed us that it was 41 degrees out, which google informed us meant 105.8 in terms we understood.
We decided to walk around Retiro Park, which is an enormous park, but after a few minutes we really weren't feeling well, so we headed home.
We woke up the next morning feeling worse than the night before so we decided to kind of sleep in/hang out around the apartment all day.
Before we started the trip, we'd kind of expected this to happen, and the fact that it only happened once and at the very end of our trip was pretty great.
Once again, at around 6:30 we decided to try and get to the Prado museum. The museum is free starting at 7 pm, and even though the line snaked around the block, it took us around 5 minutes to get inside.
The museum is considered one of the world's finest collection of European art. It was originally the royal families collection which was then expanded.
It also contains the world's best collection of Spanish art, and is one of the world's most visited sites apparently (okay, that last one came straight from wikipedia.)
We really enjoyed the collection, specifically Velazquez, Goya and Peter Paul Reubens.
I'm no art snob, but these guys were pretty good.

We spent a solid 2 hours in the Prado, (obviously not enough, but that's about all you can do in one night for free) and headed to Retiro Park.

National Bank of Spain. Can't imagine there's much in here...

Retiro is kind of like Central Park, but way smaller. There's a large pond in the middle with boats for rent, random tree lined paths to walk around, and all sorts of chugim going on. We watched some amazing dance troupe practice, listened to some bands play, and walked around. The park is seriously beautiful. Go ahead and Google street view it. I won't wait for you, but you're free to do as you please.

On Wednesday we headed out of Madrid to a town called Toledo. Toledo is a small town, with medieval walls still intact, about 40 minutes outside of Madrid. 

Toledo was actually the capital of Spain until the mid 1500's and was a place where Jews, Christians and Muslims got along famously for hundreds of years.

You know, until the Christians kicked most of them out and killed the rest.

Toledo has a really cool Shul/Sephardi museum, which is mostly geared towards non-Jews but is still really interesting.

Ceiling of the Shul

 We really enjoyed walking around Toledo, seeing the famous Cathedral, and visiting the house/museum of El Greco, another famous Spanish artist.

Unimpressed.

 Later that night, back in Madrid, we headed out again to the famous Reina Sofia Museum. The museum boasts an impressive collection of works from all over the world, but we went specifically for the Dali exhibit. Once again the museum was free (from 7 pm to 11 pm,) but this time the demand was so high that we waited on line for 30 minutes, were given a time slot and told to come back in an hour.
So we spent an hour wandering around in the typical 9 pm 100 degree heat, found some cool things like this creepy statue of a baby's head, and came back to the museum.

The exhibit was really great. For those who don't know, Salvador Dalí was a whacked out, flamboyant, impressively mustachio'd artist, who specialised in surrealism. The museum owns many of his most famous works, and luckily for us, the rest of his most famous works were all on loan from museums around the world.
We really enjoyed the exhibit, and headed home for the night.
Thursday was the last day of our honeymoon. Bummer right?
We didn't have too much of a plan, so we headed back out to Sol, peeked our head into some stores, saw tons of ham legs hanging from ceilings, and ate lunch back in Retiro Park.

This is potentially traumatising for a young child

Kind of on a limb, we decided to head out to Las Ventas, the famous bullring in Madrid. When we got there, we couldn't resist and decided to pay the entrance fee and have ourselves a look inside. The building itself is beautiful, and regardless of your feelings on bullfights, it's a very cool and unique tour to do. They give you an audio guide and let you roam around at your own pace.

Growing up, I always thought I knew what a bullfight was. You have the Matador dressed up in a funny costume, waving a red flag, and the bull tries to charge at him, much like during bar mitzvah dancing. Guess I never knew that the whole point of the bullfight is to slaughter the bull. See, every time the bull misses the flag, the Matador stabs him with a spear. When the bull is weak and can't go on fighting anymore, they just slaughter him in the arena. Then, the crowd votes on how bravely the Matador fought, and awards him based on his performance. The highest honor a Matador can receive is 2 bull ears. Now, this might sound barbaric to you, awarding cut off ears as trophies, but don't worry that can't really be what they do, right? What? Oh...Chaya just informed me that that's EXACTLY WHAT THEY DO. They cut off the ears, and the bullfighter gets to keep 'em. They also sometimes cut off the tails and make the delicious sounding "bull-tail stew" out of them.
So ya, we were bummed out that we didn't get to see a bullfight, but the tour was pretty cool too.

We weren't really sure if we could walk onto the actual sand, but we just ducked under some tape that said something like "no entre" and walked on.

We do what we want!

We headed home to pack up, enjoy one last fancy dinner consisting of all the food we still had leftover, and took the train to the airport. Madrid was really great, and we gave it more than enough time. We were both pretty sad to be finishing up this once in a lifetime trip, but were excited to get back to Israel, where the Shawarma is Kosher.

 We wanna thank everyone who read this blog. There are too many of you to name here, but we love all 9 of you. But seriously, we'd like to specifically thank the people in the following countries and ask them to please identify themselves to satiate our curiosity: Switzerland, Netherlands, Siberia and Russia.
Also, to Micah Goldrich, who claims that he reads this blog, but I highly doubt it, so this is a test to see if you actually read them.
And to to all the people who came over to us after we got back and said stuff like "Hey! How was the trip? I read the blog! Well, I didn't actually read all of it. Like, I saw that you had a blog, but I never got around to it..." it's okay. We love you too.
And to set one thing straight, the blog was mostly written by Zvi, and for clarity sake was written entirely from his standpoint, but Chaya contributed immensely, proofread everything and even tried sneaking in a few jokes, which I promptly removed.
Alright, until our next honeymoon
Ciao Ciao Amore, Ciao
Zvi and Chaya