Day 7 Still Madrid

Well we finally got off to an early start, if you consider 9:20 early? It's really not to bad because not much opens before 10. We walked over to the Royal Palace and got in line by 9:45. The line moved pretty fast for a museum line and we opted for the audio tour. It worked out pretty good because we didn't spend too much time on the first few rooms and got ahead of all the tour groups. The palace is unbelievable, there's 3,000 rooms but only 29 are available for touting. and that took an hour and a half. The royal family had it pretty good. You could easily spend 10 minutes in each room. I couldn't, but we still really appreciated it. One thing that stood out for me was the Stradivarious Room. There were five Stradivarious's in the room, 3 violins and two cellos - amazing. And they still get played occasionally by visiting artists. The whole place was amazing, beautiful, and interesting.  I highly recommend it, but go early and it's probably best to get tickets ahead of time. We didn't, but got lucky.

The next stop was a revisit of the Mercado San Miguel, and this time the crowd was half the size it was on Friday. We picked up a few tapas and a glass of Cava and managed to find two seats. Both the tapas and the Cava were excellent. The tapas were toast squares topped with various fish: cod liver, cod mashed with caviar, cod with honey, anchovies, and tuna. Sylvia also picked up a salmon wrap and a ham and cheese wrap??? It would be easy to have lunch there every day for several months and not get the same thing twice, and boy would I'd love to try. We stopped for another drink before going back to the apartment to do laundry. "We" might not be the proper word, but you get the drift.

Around 7:30 we went up the street to El Buho tavern for a drink before dinner. It was a pretty comfortable place and we had a good window table so we ordered dinner. Sylvia ordered a marinated pork kabob, and I decided to try some pig ears. I had never had a pig ear before so it was worth a try. They gave me way more than I thought they would, but I managed to eat all of them except for two. Sylvia had most of one and I left one. They weren't too bad, just a little gnarly. I won't be so quick to order them again.

Tomorrow we're planning on doing the Prado.

Royal Palace Dining Room
Can set up 110 people at one table

Pig Ears