Andar un Paseo

Last time I posted about how today is the giant celebration of all things Spanish, and how awesome Spain is. Since Meagan, Melanie and I do love Spain we decided we were going to participate in the celebrations. Our intention was to go see the military parade that goes down Paseo de la Castellana and passes the Royal Family at Plaza de Colón. Plaza de Colón is about a 10 minute walk from my apartment, so we just walked down. The parade started at 10:15, we didn't leave our place until 11:30. Needless to say, we missed all of the parade. What we did catch was the Royal Family driving back to the Palace. Each time a car sped past the crowd throngs of people would start whistling and yelling.

After we realized that the parade was a bust we started to walk to the Royal Palace. This took us through a series of book sellers on Paseo de Recoletos, which is adjacent to Paseo de la Castellana. For several blocks there were little stands set up to sell all kinds of new and used books. Meagan, who wrote her senior thesis on One Hundred Years of Solitude by Garcia Marquez, was on a hunt for a copy of it in Spanish. Unfortunately there were no copies in any of the stands. It was still a good time.

When we reached the end of the books we were at Plaza de Cibeles with the giant Post Office building. I honestly don't know if the building is actually used for postal services or not, but it is huge. Cibeles is also a transportation hub, including where the night buses depart from. When the metro closes down at 1 am, people use the buhos (Spanish for owls) to get around. The N3, N5 & N7 all service my neighborhood.

From Cibeles, we started up Gran Via towards the Palace. The walk up Gran Via was nice, though there were huge crowds everywhere. Gran Via is Melanie's old 'hood, and she was shocked when we passed by a vacant lot. Apparently in the past 2 years an entire building had been ripped down. To be honest, this was the first time that I encountered Spain changing while I was gone. Up to this point everything had felt oddly familiar; like I had never left.

Our walk built up a decent hunger, so our goal became food. We got stopped a few times to take pictures and then we swung past the Royal Palace; we saw the gardens attached to the back and caught the changing of the guards. We didn't know what was going on at the Royal Palace, but saw a huge crowd gathering. It has been my experience that when a large crowd gathers outside a hotel or a palace something is about to happen. Two years ago in Rome a group of us got a little lost on a walk and happened upon the hotel where Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes were staying for their wedding. We waited around, behind the fence, and ended up seeing a a handful of celebrities including Brooke Shields, the Beckhams and Will Smith.

Finally we stopped for Kebab, which was delicious. We saw several restaurants with a Menú del Día, but they were wicked over priced. Usually a Menú should run about 10 euro, we passed one place that was asking 17. Clearly we are not made of money, plus we love Turkish food.

After eating our fill, and letting the daze of the food coma wear off we were back on the road. We walked from Opera to Puerta del Sol. Along the way we stopped to check out a 5 piece strings group performing just down the street from our favorite churros location. We also noticed that many of the apartment buildings along this heavily traveled path had decorated their balconies with yellow and red flags, basically the Spanish flag without the crest in the middle.

Once we arrived at Puerta del Sol I took a photo of the Bear and the Strawberry Tree statue, but I really can't remember why that is the symbol for Madrid. I will google that for you and report back later.

This basically ended our walking tour of the city. Four hours later we were back in our apartment, discussing how lucky we are to have this opportunity.