Madrid 20th May

Thursday 20 May
 

Today we woke up early to get the train to our day trip destination – Toledo. We headed down to the Atocha train station about 20 mins before the train left and stood in line. And then we were told to stand in another line. And then another line. Until we finally got to the front of the queue and were told that the 9.20am train had gone and then 10.20am train has been sold out. Unbelievably bad system and communication.
 

Louise decided that she needed a coffee at this stage so she ordered a café mocha and was presented with a shot of melted chocolate, a smaller shot of coffee and then filled the rest of the cup up with whipped cream. Not ideal.
 

We then headed to a park bench in the sun to decide what we were going to do, and to have our breakfast that we had bought from a local café. Not understanding the question we were getting asked when we bought them, we had cold cheese and ham toasties. Again not ideal.

We started walking to the West of Madrid and came across the CBD district which was very different from the old part of Madrid where we had spent most of our time. There were many more newer buildings and modern shops; it could have been any city in the world. We walked through the Plaza de Espana where there is a monument to Miguel de Cervantes, writer of the world famous story of Don Quixote de la Mancha and his trusty squire, Sancho Panza. Below is a picture of Don, Sancho and Hamish.

From Plaza de Espana we headed to the Templo de Debod in the middle of Parque del Oeste. This was really interesting, mainly because it was an Egyptian temple in the middle of Spain. The temple was built in the 2nd century BC and was given to Spain in 1968 by the Egyptian government as a tribute to Spanish engineers involved in rescuing ancient monuments from the floodwaters of the Aswan Dam on the River Nile. It had some pretty mean hieroglyphics in it too.
 

We spent the rest of the day wandering around the streets, having ice cream and the most amazing strawberries ever. Below is an artistic picture by Louise...

 

That night Louise got to pick the activity, so we trotted off to a Flamenco show at the Cardamomo after a quick tapas meal (we were slowly getting the hang of this tapas business). This was incredible, we were squeezed into a tiny bar with a little stage at the front where the band and singers (5 in total) and 2 dancers. The passion and dancers were so intense it was amazing and I think we were both quite blown away by it. We also learned that you can say ‘Ole’ at any stage and you don’t sound weird.

  

Again we had the argument about if Hamish could be a flamenco dancer. Him trying to show me his moves and then falling down the stairs proved my point.

Highlight: The flamenco show – much better than expected.
Lowlight: The antiquated train system in Spain.

Interesting fact: Parque del Oeste (where the temple is) is a place where many Spaniards lost their lives to Napoleon in 1808.