Madrid and Escorial

Today, we had another day in Madrid. We walked around some more and saw some contemporary buildings around the city. We got a special tour of the construction of an extension to the Prado Museum. It was lame at first because it was a construction site, but as we were told things about what was being done, it became pretty interesting. I’d like to come back sometime after it’s finished to see how it turned out...

After that, we got on the bus and headed to Escorial to see a monastery. It was the biggest on in Europe (if I recall correctly). It was really neat. When we got to the city, we noticed that there was snow all over the place. Apparently it had snowed recently, but when we stepped off the bus, it wasn’t really that cold at all. But we had fun throwing snowballs at each other on the walk up to the monastery.

Inside, it was basically a museum that went through the history of the monastery. It was pretty interesting. I took some good pictures of the building with snow on the ground and on the mountains in the background. Very pretty.

Then we came back, and did the usual: found something to eat, take a nap, etc. We didn’t have to check out of the hotel until 11am the next morning, so there was talk of going out. I didn’t really bring anything to “go out” in, so I headed to the mall to go back to a store where I had found a good sale a few days ago. I was able to get some pants and a nice shirt for only 9.90 EUR each. I almost got some shoes, but I wanted to look around more before buying some. By the time I was going to go back to the store to get them, it was closing up, so I took that as a sign to wait. I went back to the hotel room and got ready in my new European clothes. I was hanging out with people and then I had heard that it was going to cost like 15 EUR to get into the club that they were going to and I was like “forget it!” I wasn’t alone, so that was good. Those of us that decided to sleep instead, got together and watched some episodes of Family Guy before going to bed.