End of the Day - Sunday - The Royal Palace

Today was a great day. After a late sleep in and breakfast at 11am, we walked to the Royal Palace Spain. We took a tour and the opulence is unlike anything I have ever seen. I have been to the Tower of London and seen the Crown Jewels of England, and, believe me, compared to this palace, the Tower looks like a homeless shelter. We toured around twenty rooms, each of which was filled with more gold work, in the form of art, chandelliers, gilt, etc., more tapestries, art, and sculpture than I have ever seen. As a Social Studies teacher, what ran through my mind is I can completely understand the peasants of France/Spain, etc. revolting and beheading because all of the wealth came from somewhere, and I don't think it was investing wisely in hedge funds.

The pictures on the previous entry are the five mini-groups when we break up into small touring groups. This blog has a picture of all of the group in front of the palace.

After touring the palace, we broke into our small groups to get lunch and to sight-see. We are totally continental at this point - we had breakfast at 11am, lunch at 5pm, and dinner at 9:30pm. In any case, each group is firmly convinced that it found the hippest, tastiest lunch, which is a great sign that all groups did well. My group and Karrie King's group ate at the same restaurant, although we didn't even know it until they were half way through their meal. Many of us tried paella, which was spectacular. My group was served goose liver pate encrusted with peppercorns as a free appetizer and it was delicious. All of my group tried it and loved it until we told them what it was, then, even though they had enjoyed it, some decided they had had enough. After that we window shopped, searching for the wild gelato - success!!

From "lunch" we took the Metro to La Prada, the national museum of art of Spain. It is magnificent and, unfortunately, we only had one hour to see incredible Goyas, Fra Angelica, Bosch, etc. This museum is classical art, great masters. In Barcelona we will see Picasso and Dali among others.

After La Prada we took the Metro back to our hotel neighborhood and had dinner at a restaurant need the hotel. We had a delicious steak dinner with sauteed vegetables and creamy cake-like dessert. Quite yummy. The restaurant had a lot of bull fighting photos, a real toreador outfit, and the head of an actual bull. Many pictures were taken with the bull. I included one sample. We then wandered around to a park we had seen earlier, but all of the booths had closed. Kids are milling and mingling in the lobby of the hotel, I came up to my room to compose this blog.

Tomorrow we will have the morning for sleep and to try again at the park. At 1:30 we board a bus to Barcellona - the adventure continues.