Madrid: Day 2

We started the day at the Palacio Real de Madrid, used by the Spanish Monarchy up until the beginning of the 20th century. The palace is essentially one large square building, with the inside being taken up by a large courtyard. The most impressive thing to me was the Royal Armory. I’m sure I made D&D jokes here the first time around (“Excuse me, do you have any Vorpal weapons?”). This time was al WoW (“Have any of these swords received the Crusader enchantment?”). Yup 23 years of dorkdom ladies. The workmanship on some of the crafted armor and weapons was truly impressive. The armor suits were set up on purple-velvet mannequins and realistically posed to induce nightmares (especially the smaller suits for the King’s children). I felt bad for the horses that had to bear not only a plate-wearing knight, but their own heavy armor into battle. The royal pharmacy was impressive mostly by the amount of material they had on hand (“Where do they keep their MSDSs?” mused JA). Most of the Palace itself wasn’t particularly exciting either, but there were a couple of rooms that were very impressive: One in which the entire surface had been covered in porcelain and another in which much of the room had been covered in carved marble.

Being as it was around noon, we next tried to score some lunch, and found out that lunch is around 1:30 in Spain. To pass the time, we decided to have a few beers and made a wonderful discovery about Madrid: for every round of beer you buy, you get some free tapas. The guide book had suggested that this was an outdated tradition, so we were quite happy to find it still active. To be scientific, we tested the tradition at several cervezerias, all of which brought us small snacks with each round.

We ended the day by heading toward the Botanical Gardens. Not exactly the right time of year to go, but the sections in hot-houses were well-tended. The cactus section in particular had some interesting specimens. Being a botanical garden out of season, it makes sense that it is the place you want to have an exhibit on Shackleton’s expedition to the South Pole. *cough* The exhibit was rather interesting with most of the photographs taken by the team’s official archivist on display, including some rare color transparencies.

Of course the perfect ending of the day was some more doner kabobs. That and the cookies we found called “Filipinos”. Ahhh, colonialism, what fun you've caused.

Atocha Rail Station