Day 1: Arrival in Spain and Exploring the City

Our travel to Madrid was mostly uneventful. The plane was delayed for about 20 minutes in Philadelphia (our layover city) because there was a problem with the screen where they show movies and they were worried it might fall on people. In my Prague entries, I mentioned how the airplane was not up to the standards that we had previously seen. US Airways was even worse! If this trend of decreasing modernity in the transport we take to Europe continues, pretty soon we'll be going over in steerage.

Here I am, in the Philadelphia airport, posing next to a replica of the Liberty Bell made out of Legos:
Once at Madrid's airport, we took the metro to our hotel. The trip was less than 30 minutes, and quite convenient. We went straight to our hotel, and were shown to our room. After showering, we headed out to explore the city on foot.

Here is Plaza Mayor, where the weekly stamp, coin, and bottlecap market was taking place. Apparently this is a big place for pickpockets, but we escaped unscathed.
There was quite a large police presence in Madrid. We're not sure if something out of the ordinary was happening (they are in the middle of election season and we did see some people coming out of fancy dark cars that were being followed by what looked like secret service agents), or if this is normal. However, it was not oppressive and we didn't have any encounters with the police.
We ate lunch in a little cafe that we stumbled upon. We returned here for dessert later in the week.

We then walked down to the Prado, thinking we might stop in and see some of the paintings (it's free Sunday evenings, so we thought we'd chop our visit there into two pieces while only paying once). However, the line to enter was ridiculously long, so instead we went to the nearby Botanical Gardens. I'm sure the gardens are much more impressive during other times of the year; however, we still had a great time.

There were quite a few feral cats hanging around the gardens, which was surprising.

Who knew that botanical gardens could be such dangerous places?
Here is Brian, looking at some of the plants that were growing in the large greenhouses. There were also many plots of land where plants will soon be growing, as Spring arrives. We were lucky enough to be there during a bonsai exhibition as well.
After walking around the city some more, we stopped and had dinner. This picture didn't turn out so well, but you can kind of see the ambiance of the place. In Spain, people eat much later than what we're used to. Many places don't open for lunch until 1 pm and dinner until 9 pm. There were a few days when we started eating lunch at 3 pm or later! Due to this, we'd often stop for a snack around noon or so.We wanted to go to a churros place that was mentioned in our guidebook. Brian is trying to figure out which way to go on Madrid's rather confusing streets:You may have noticed that his jacket is wet, and that he's wearing a hat. The first part of our trip coincided with cold, wet weather. We were determined not to let this get us down, and the end of the trip saw sunny skies! I guess that's one of the trades you make with off-season travel. We've decided that we'd still rather travel off-season. First, it's cheaper, which means we can afford to go on more trips! Second, there are fewer crowds to deal with, and that's important to us.

And here is what we had for dessert on that first night. Churros are kind of like straight donuts, and you dip them in hot chocolate. But this hot chocolate is not like what you see in America. It's very thick; almost a pudding consistency.
After this, we headed back to our hotel for some much-needed sleep.