Study Break in MadriD

April 17-19, 2019

Sunny & 75:

Waking up at 3 AM to catch my flight to Madrid was worth it to see the sun and not need a jacket during the first time this whole semester. My sister was meeting me in Madrid for study break, so I met up with her at the airport and we headed on the metro to our airbnb.

Mid 70s is ideal walking weather, so we went to the lake at El Retiro Park to walk around and rent one of the small row boats. The line was pretty long for the boats, but it went really quick since there were probably around 50 of them out on the lake. And renting a boat for 45 minutes was only 6 euros!

Sadly, it looked like it was going to rain the whole next day, so we decided to stop by a lot of the tourist sites today. We saw Plaza Mayor then walked the street of Gran Via and browsed some shops. We had to get some paella while we were in Spain, so we stopped by one of the dozens of restaurants that had good pictures in the front. Luckily, I didn't need to use my 5 years of terrible high school Spanish in Madrid, but I had to try a few phrases when we went to Bilbao.

El Retiro Park Lake

Plaza Mayor

Gran Via

rainy day plans:

The nice weather went away as quickly as it showed up, so we did some indoor sites on Thursday. The city is definitely walkable the entire time, but we bought a 2-day metro pass at the airport. The pass worked out well when we wanted to bus/metro instead of walking in the rain.

We started the day by grabbing some breakfast at Mercado San Miguel. The market is basically like the Torvehallerne Glass Market in Copenhagen with tons of food stalls inside a covered building. I got a juice and some empanadas and they were super good. After breakfast/brunch, we headed back over to the Prado National Museum near our airbnb. I've never seen a line for a museum (except to see Michelangelo's David at Galleria dell'Accademia on free museum week in Florence) but the line for the Prado was pretty long. **Also the museum was covered with some type of scaffolding near the El Retiro Park entrance so that was sad**

We thought we would come back to the Prado if we had more time later and went try our luck at the Reina Sofía to see their collection of 20th-century art. Funny enough, the line at the Reina Sofia was even longer ~ yay. I wanted to stand in line instead of trying to walk back the the Prado, so we eventually made it inside after 45 minutes in the freezing rain. The Reina Sofia turned out to be free today, so the rain and the free entry was probably why the line was so insane. Honestly, I didn't love the museum though. I usually like to see almost every part of a museum for some weird reason, and this place was huge so I couldn't do that. It also seemed to be a little too repetitive from my perspective, but they still had some interesting exhibitions. The exhibit on the Peruvian journal Amauta that explored different movements of social transformation in Latin America from 1926-1930 stood out in my opinion.

**The Reina Sofia and Prado are free for students & Picasso's Guernica is at Reina Sofia

After the Reina Sofia, I was so spent so we decided to go for a mid afternoon snack - a classic churros with hot chocolate. Yelp said Chocolatería San Ginés was the place to be, and they weren't wrong. I got a cup of coffee too, and the churros were warm, crispy, and floofy at the same time. The food coma set in so we stopped by to see the Puerta del Sol Square real quick before we headed home to rest up before dinner.

A few of my friends who study in Madrid are also on travel break, so I didn't get to see them :( But they gave lots of great recs of things to do and places to eat. One of them suggested tapas at La Sifoneria and it was delicious. It wasn't too pricey and had 2 euro glasses of wine. We ordered 4 tapas and couldn't even finish them. All-in-all, Madrid was a fun start to travel break, and I was so excited to get to Bilbao on Friday.