Madrid ~ our last city in Spain

We are in Rome now, but I am going to write about Madrid : )
Madrid was the first city that was actually cold and we LOVED it! No more humidity like in Granada, Tenerife and Barcelona. I still had my summer wardrobe so I bought some winter clothes at Zara, a store I've grown to love including Bershka and the H&M in Europe is way better than in Marin.

:The 3 main things I was looking forward to most about Madrid:
1. The Prado
2. Reina Sophia
3. the weather
AND they did not disappoint!

Our apartment here was shared between 7 people, 6 of whom were girls from Russia, Netherlands, China, Germany, Israel and USA. Every week we lost or gained one or two, but they were always girls. Tyler was a lucky guy! However, we didn't really hang out much with our roommates, which was disappointing because we had made some good friends in the past three cities and were looking forward to making more. But we lucked out in Madrid because we had three friends we met in Tenerife in Madrid at the same time we were. So we had three dinner parties at our friend Ludo's apartment (he lives there and teaches economy at the University), one of which was with my parents who LOVED our Tenerife friends! I also ran into Mr. Travis Long, a high school friend of mine whom I hadn't seen since we graduated 8 years ago, so that was very cool!

The Annunciation, by Fra Angelico

Saturn Devouring his Son

We went to Prado two different times, is so freakin huge you can't see it all in one day. We saw The Annunciation by Fra Angelico, Las Meninas by Diego Velazquez, The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymous Bosch, and Saturn Devouring his Son by Francisco Goya. The last two are my personal favorites! These are not pictures I took, just to show you what we saw, we couldn't take pics inside.

Las Meninas by Diego Velazque

The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymous Bosch

The last week of school our folks came to visit and so I played hooky for most of the week showing them special places in Madrid. We had churros con chocolate and ate at this great tapas place where you could choose from 50 different mini tapa sandwiches all between 1 and 4 euros. I took them to Retiro park which is amazingly beautiful, and we also went to the Thyssen-Bornemizsa Museum, which was surprisingly very nice. It was an exhibit about the friendship between Federico Garcia Lorca and Salvador Dali. Unfortunately I couldn't take any pictures, but here is one of the front of the museum. Another exhibit that began outside and continued on the 4th floor was about kids from around the world. The pictures were enlarged to larger than life size and written was the child's name, age, country and a short blurb about their life. 98% were from very poor countries and in very bad situations, but most were in a better place physically when the pictures were taken.