Madrid: Full of Bears and Mulberries

When you have a very early morning train you have two options for the night before.  Be smart, go to bed early and try to muster as much sleep as possible.  Or you can choose the second option and just stay up until you have to leave.  Guess which option we took? Well, we wanted to take advantage of our time here and that included every last minute.  Our last night in Barcelona, we met a bunch of people from the United States and we hung out with them. Our adventures included playing on a huge playground structure and of course kebabs at 3am.

We took the fast newly constructed 3 hour train and immediately fell asleep.  We got to Madrid, met up with our great friend Rachel and started a free walking tour a couple hours later.  We were zombies on that 2 and a half hour tour but it was completely worth it.  We learned about the oso y madroño, the bear and a mulberry fruit.  Back in the day, people thought this certain fruit had magical powers.  Turns out, if you leave the fruit on the tree too long, it will ferment and it's possible that those alcoholic properties contributed to a bit of this "magic." You can see the bear eating off of the fruit tree everywhere around Madrid: on sides of buildings, on the sidewalks, on manhole covers, etc.  Another interesting fact from that tour: food is required to be served with every alcoholic drink you order: aka tapas.  Apparently, oh so long ago, workers had a short break in the middle of the day.  They were hungry but didn't have enough money for food AND alcohol so the obvious choice was to spend it on alcohol.  Employers were not the happiest because their workers would come back, post siesta, a bit drunk with only alcohol in their stomachs.  So the king passed the tapas law and it still exists today.  Only in Madrid unfortunately.

Here's the statue found in the plaza, Puerta del Sol

We walked by the oldest restaurant in the world as verified by Guinness World Records.  Dating back to 1725, El Botín still cooks one of its original recipes, suckling pig.  The famous painter Goya once worked there as a dishwasher and Ernest Hemingway frequented it.  He actually frequented almost every restaurant in Madrid, but apparently this one was his favs.  He even mentioned it in his novel, "The Sun Also Rises."

El Botín

We had been singing the Grease soundtrack our entire last day in Barcelona so of course watching that classic movie the next day was necessary.  That night, Rachel brought us to a Moroccan restaurant. Best thing ever: pastera de pollo, translated to chicken cake.  Topped with nuts, powdered sugar and cinnamon.  Sound strange? Yep. Was it delicious? Absolutely.  Slept for 12 hours that night ready for the next day.

Plaza mayor: in its heyday, it was a popular place for hangings and other tourture things…Today, some people claim that they can still hear vibrations.

Plaza Mayor

Jamón (ham) es MUYYY importante in spain.  If you haven't seen a picture of the large ham legs you'll think they look quite disgusting but they are sooooo good.  I will certainly miss that when I go home.  One of the reasons it became so popular was during the Spanish Inquisition, one way to prove you were a Christian was to eat ham in public.  This was better proof than a piece of paper and you had a nice little snack!

Then we passed by the suicide bridge.  It's a Romeo and Juliet type story.  Typical: rich girl in love with not so rich boy. So natural thing to do if the padres say no way: attempt to jump off of a bridge.  This bridge is quite quite tall but thanks to the fashion of the time (large hoop skirts) she floated down more than necessary and was the only known person to survive the fall with only a few scrapes and bruises. This attempted suicide was very unacceptable in her day because life was not yours to give away; it belonged to God. So the parents backed up a little and they were like, okey dokey, marry to your hearts content.

Convent cookies! The Convento de Corpus has nuns that NEVER leave the convent. Ever. They are hermit nuns.  BUT they apparently cook fabulous cookies. So you go, ring the doorbell, they judge you through quite obvious camera situated in corner of door, and if you are acceptable, they will buzz you in.  You stand there anxiously awaiting the cookies that are made by nuns who have quite a lot of time on their hands i.e. we expected gold in the form of cookies. There's a menu inside and you put the money on a lazy susan type deal and they return with the cookies in a rotary door. You never hear or make contact with the nuns.  After talking about the nun cookies all day long ready to experience this magic for ourselves, we walked up to the door to find they were in fact very busy on friday, saturday, and sunday, and therefore cookies would be unavailable until Monday. SAD DAY.

No one I know.  Photo credit: Google images

La Boqueria: very similar to the fish/fruit market in Barcelona.  After a few too many shutdowns due to stanky fish and insufficient cleanliness, they finally got it up to good standards and it is quite the nice.

Fruit section of la Boqueria

There's many churches in Spain, and Europe for that matter, but not so many with a crocodile.  The story goes: There was once a large croc about to eat a small helpless child and sailors were about to witness this horrible event. The cowardly sailors thought it a better idea to pray that the virgin Mary would use her heavenly powers to save this innocent baby. Low and behold the virgin Mary came through for them. A very large conveniently placed tree fell due to unbeknownst powers and killed the croc instantly, saving said child. The face of the virgin mary was etched onto the trunk and so to prove to the people back home that this was indeed the story, they brought back a large dead crocodile instead of the tree. Hence, theres a large croc muy grande and muy dead in the church. The etched tree is still floating around somewhere.

A reals famous Italian sculptor (Tacca) was asked to make a huge statue of King Felipe IV (numbers necessary because every king/prince is either named Felipe or Carles, you think they could get more creative). Now, if you know a little bit of history about statues, you'd know that if the man is riding a horse and two feet are off the ground, the man died in battle. One foot off the ground: he was injured and later died of his injuries. Both on the ground: he died of natural causes. Welp, when you're a prince you can do what you want and when all you do all day long is pose for pictures (instead of being out in real battte) he decided he wanted a horse on two legs.  The sculptor was paid bucos of mula to make a statues of him.  The unfortunate thing though, was that the horse statue suffered from weak ankles and kept breaking off causing the statue to fall. Tacca called up his good friend Galileo and was like, dude I need your help, my horse keeps falling over. So Galileo came over and after some brainstorming they decided to put some junk in the trunk. i.e. add some weight to the back of the horse so if would counter it out.  I'm happy to say that today it is still standing.

Tacca and Galileo's creation

The great things about tours is they give you plenty of suggestions for things to do whilst in the city.  Therefore things on our list included, eat churros at one of the most famous churros restaurants in Spain and take a mulberry shot out of a chocolate shot glass.

Rachel was so great to host us during our time in Madrid.  We were so thankful for the nice accommodations because our next place we'd be camping in tents.  We left for San Sebastian to try our luck at surfing.