Palace, park and piano accordions

Lyn woke at 9.25! She announced it was hair washing morning and so we didn’t leave the hotel till 11.13! While Lyn did whatever it is she does, I bought two senior ‘hop on hop off’ tourist bus tickets. 

We’d decided that this would be a relatively stress-free way to see Madrid. The bus was packed but we managed to see some of the grand buildings along the way and then got off at the royal palace. It is huge and there was the usual double queue you see in Spain. A long line for those waiting to buy tickets and a shorter but equally slow line for those with pre-purchased tickets. The whole thing moves slowly because everybody has to go through airport-like screening here. At railway platforms, palaces, art galleries, castles... the drill is the same. If a terrorist targets Spain again, they won’t get inside undetected but they could always target the queues.

The other interesting feature of life outside the palace was a Japanese tour group consisting of 20 or so young women wearing faux leopard skin. I cannot explain this.

This is the cathedral which faces the palace.

While we waited the American husband and wife in the queue ahead were in dispute. “I’ve spent three weeks planning this trip and now you want to change things!” he said. Otherwise, the queue moved along quite cheerily by Spanish standards, perhaps because a gentleman with a piano accordion kept us all amused. Everybody who walked passed him did a little jig of some sort.

The royal palace turned out to be the most luxurious place of its type we had seen. I could only take photos of the outside and the entrance staircase. 

There was a 144 seat dining room. The royal chapel was staggeringly luxurious. One room had porcelain walls. Everything was draped, frescoed, plastered, gold-leafed ... There was a room just for stuff made of exotic timber. Guards patrolled vigorously to ensure nobody took photographs. In my view this might have been to prevent the world knowing that the Spanish royal family had such ghastly taste. Probably the best exhibit was a long table with the winning entries to a contest called, “What a king means to me”. They were genuinely creative and fun. Maybe the latest king shouldn’t be blamed for the previous few hundred years of bad taste.

By the time we escaped the palace we were both seriously hungry. We caught the tourist bus toward food. From the traffic jams we watched the antics of the hawkers outside the main tourist spots. They all spread their stuff on a sheet on the ground. Ropes are tied to the edges of the sheet and attached to one wrist. If the police come in view, they simply haul the ropes over a shoulder to make a sack and all run off like nefarious Santas.

After a very late lunch, we took the bus to Retiro Park. This is Madrid’s lungs and playground. We watched the people and ducks on the huge artificial lake. We took in a free art exhibition at the Velazquez Pavilion, admired the beautiful little crystal palace by a lake full of tortoise, stumbled on the rose garden, passed a whole area devoted to young people exercising and listened to a young women playing the piano accordion under a tree, not busking, just playing. I got a little lost looking for the unusual statue of a fallen angel; unusual because who would have thought of making an attractive statue of Satan? I read somewhere that somebody checked its altitude above sea level ... wait for it ... 666 metres.

We have some packing to do. We leave Spain for Portugal tomorrow.