Down town Madrid

19/0/11

A sleep in, arriving for public transport seconds late, the Prado Museum, locating a lost back pack, defending our square metre in the Cibeles Square and tapas.

I decided to sleep in and tag along with whoever was still around in the morning. I found Scottie, Keith and Michael and we kept just missing things- the bus and train and arrived at Goya quite late – luckily we just got in. Afterwards I met up with Emyr and Bertie to check out the Prado Museum and nearby church. One slight problem though – they didn’t have back packs and I did and the museum doesn’t allow back packs in!  I decided to risk it and hide my bag in the bushes and hope it was still there when I returned. We went in and weren’t allowed in most of the rooms without a special ticket. We found a floor we could go through and it had many 1500s pictures of Christ’s life. The only downside of visiting the Holy Land is now I now where things occurred and what it looks like when I see some of these images, I think – wrong, it isn’t like that, it was a t shaped cross, they look to European etc

 I preferred the statues especially some Greek and Roman ones 2000 years old. I was having trouble looking up as my neck is starting to give me trouble so we tried to bend back from the hips – we must have looked quite funny. Lucky we went when we did as when we came out there was a huge line up and I couldn’t go back to my back pack bush. When I walked around – my back pack wasn’t where I left it and I started to get a little anxious. I looked all over the side of the hill I placed it to no avail and then thought I will have to check all the ones on the other side. Thankfully someone had moved it to the other side and I just caught the end of the ‘Australia’ I wrote on the back pack. We quickly checked out the church before heading down to the Plaza Cibeles to attempt to get a spot for stations of the cross. We accidently stumbled write into the main area and found a spot. I tried to mark our territory with my Italian sheet, it was very hot but as it wasn’t too crowded I was coping and we survived. When Pope Benny finally arrived I went on Emyr’s shoulders to try and get a better pic but the waving flags in front of me and his little umbrella pretty much thwarted my attempts.

To avoid a jam packed train station we had dinner at a local pub and enjoyed some really tasty tapas, a Spanish omelette that was in a cup and egg plant fries that were really tasty.

I can’t believe how fast this week is going and tomorrow is the sleep out!