The last two days were kind of crazy, but you have to take the good with the bad sometimes when you travel on a budget. We planned to leave for Morocco yesterday and woke up early because we missed the Royal Palace tours a couple days ago and wanted to make sure we got in there. So we ate breakfast at the rooftop bar in the hotel, went for a dip in the pool that looks over the entire city of madrid, packed our bags and checked out. Then headed to the Palace!
The Palace Royal didn't allow photos inside but it was everything royal! Tapestries line every wall and ceiling, unless they were hand painted or marbled from top to bottom. Everything handmade, sewn, etc. I wish I could tell you to google images, but there aren't any of them anywhere so Im going to recommend you just going! I'm sooo glad we got up to go do that.
We walked through the whole palace with the guided walking tour and headphones in our ears, to save money we use a headphone splitter and only purchase one of the tours and then plug both of our headphones in! We toured the Armory Museum on the East wing of the palace, they also don't allow photos but it was pretty amazing to see armory dating back 1000 years.
We walked back to the hotel from the Royal Palace down the Gran Via, grabbed some pizza to go and headed to my brothers to jump on our plane to Morocco. I had been using the Expedia App to let me know about our flights to keep me up to speed on time. Our flight was scheduled to leave an hour and half later than regularly scheduled so we knew we had time. We caught a 40 Euro taxi to the airport and turns out the flight was on time and the app was wrong so we missed our flight by 10 minutes.
It was very hard on me because there were no refunds. We went back to my brothers house where I took a nap to calm my nerves, looked up prices and other ways to get to Morocco and bought some more plane tickets. We had already purchased airbnb stays and everything so we decided not to back out on the whole trip. Thankfully a flight left the next night. So we went out to the bar and got some drinks decided one more day in Madrid isn't really that bad and we stayed at my brothers!
Woke up early to get some churros around the corner and headed to the Plaza de Toros de Las Ventas. Its the Bull Fighting Ring in Madrid. I wasn't really too thrilled on going here or even support the idea of what happens to the bull. I knew I didn't want to see anything horrid there but Frank really wanted to go. So we went and took the tour. To say the least I tried to be pretty optimistic about going and learning the history of the event. There is nothing wrong in knowing why or how things started. So the history of bull fighting was something Im glad I learned. Im also glad that its almost banned throughout Spain and getting close to being extinct all together!
After the tour we walked through Madrid richest city the Salamanca neighborhood, saw fur coats and all the Chanel bags you can imagine! We looked way out of place most of the walk until we hit the city center again. Took pictures in from the Puerta de Alcala, which is the arc that faces alacala and walked through the Parque del Buen Retiro in daylight this time.
We ate paella by the water, had a coke with lemon slices no ice and one beer. We felt like we were living a Spanish dream and kind of needed it after the days mishap from yesterday.
Needless to say we got on our flight to Morocco and headed south to Africa!
