Thursday, June 14, 2012

Monday: Chad's solo adventure

Guest Blogger: Chad


With Rebe working all afternoon, we decided I should try my hand at wandering around for the day.  I finally started paying attention to the metro rather than just getting on and off where Rebe did and realized it was pretty easy to get around.  I decided to go to the Prado art museum since it is the most visited site in Spain and eleventh most visited in the world.  Plus they have a list a mile long of ways you can get in for free rather than the 12 euro fee and since I still have a student ID, I qualified.  I think the only people that can't get in for free are middle aged white males so I don't think anyone in Spain pays...




The museum was pretty neat.  I'm not a huge fan of 400 year old portraits but there were a lot of paintings of scenes and landscapes that I enjoyed, and the detail in the stone sculptures with multiple types of stone was incredible. The museum has a lot of big name artists such as El Greco, Rembrandt, Goya, and Velazquez; however, I found that my favorite was Joaquin Sorolla.  He has his own small room so he might be famous, but I had never heard of him.  He paints a lot of ocean front landscapes and beach scenes so they were colorful yet simple. I can't find my favorite one on google so you will have to take my word for it.

After the museum, I walked to the Real Jardín Botanical Garden.  





Rebe suggested I stop there and once again, my student ID got me a significant discount. There were a lot of cool plants, but I think I was week late because the flowers on almost every tree and plant were wilted and most plants looked like they could use a significant rainfall.





The final task was getting food.  Rebe showed me that menú del días are the way to go because you can get three courses for around 10 euros, so we always get them.  Unfortunately, there are also higher priced menu of the days so during my search for the best value I lost track of time and a lot of restaurants stopped serving the special.  I ended up settling for a "Super sandwich" at Café  Té.  It was really good, but it was one course for the same price as the menu of the day. Oh well.







It's Rebe now -- Chad wanted me to write about our Monday evening, but first I'd like to say that I was excited when Chad mentioned liking Sorolla's painting because I went to a Sorolla museum here in Madrid this past spring!  The museum was in Sorolla's old house, and I quite enjoyed the visit (even though I'm not a huge fan of art museums either).


On Monday evening we went out for drinks/tapas in Lavapiés with some of my friends.  And just for the record, I don't usually go out this much on weeknights!  Normally my weeknights are filled with private lessons and frisbee practices, but for the past two weeks I've cancelled all of my private lessons - which is what allowed Chad and I to do things on weeknights. 




We ended the night at a kebap place down the street because everyone was hungry.  

Chad's last kebap!

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