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Travel Update
Entry 3 of 7 | show all | print this entry |
So I made it!! We have visited SO many cool places since we've been in Spain. I've posted a bunch of the pictures on www.dropshots.com/SarahMarieRue and I can briefly explain some of them!
Madrid is a beautiful city!! It is very modern and has a lot of cool shopping and restaurants (and about a thousand Starbucks!) It is kind of like New York City but with less skyscrapers (not nearly as tall of buildings.) It is actually really cold here! I've been wearing the only warm clothes I have like 5 times.
When we were in Madrid we went to the museum, La Reina Sofia. It has a bunch of modern art work by artists like Picasso, Miro, and Dali. I saw the painting "Guernica" by Picasso and it was HUGE!! (I had no idea because it is so little in an art history book, no sense of scale) It is 25 feet x 11 feet!! That was my favorite thing from that museum. You can see what it looks like (I just got this image off google, they wouldn't let you take pictures inside)
Then we visited a place called El Escorial. It is this huge monostary/ palace in this little town about an hour outside of Madrid. The day we went it was SO cold and rainy and no one had an umbrella or anything so we were all FREEZING! It was built in the mid-1500's by King Phillip II. It was designed after the temple of King Solomon and has a floorplan based off of that. It was dedicated to St. Lawrence, who was apparantly grilled to death by the Romans. So there are all these little symbols of a grill on everything (which i found kind of funny, the tour guide called it a barbeque, haha!) Even the final shape of the building is in the form of a big barbeque.
We were guided through the palace portion of the building. It was SO interesting because they still had all of the furniture and paintings in their original locations. The beds still had the original silk fabric on them!! SO COOL! We saw his daughter's room and the room where King Phillip died. His bedroom was built so hat he could watch mass from his bed because he had gout and couldn't move around much. Then they took us down to the mosoleum or pantheon where the remains of 26 kings and queens of Spain are kept in these tombs that they have stacked up in this room with a huge dome, right beneath the high altar of the basillica. The queens had to have had sons that became kings to be placed in that room. There are three empty tombs that are meant for the past mother of the last king of Spain, the last king and his wife, who all died. They are currently in the "rotting room" (described to us in a heavy Spanish accent by our tour guide, lovely visual) and will be there until they are finished rotting for another 25 years or so and then the monks take the bones and put them in the tombs in the big room. I was curious why the room was courpse odor-free, and now you know! Thanks to the rotting room. There were also a ton of other tombs in these other rooms for the other members of the royal family. They had this big limestone birthday cake which I thought was cool looking and interesting. Then the guide told us it housed all the remains of the royal family that had died before the age of 7. Weird and ironic way to bury somone. In a birthday cake?
Then we walked into this room called the "secrets room" because it was designed in such a way that if you whisper a secret into the corner (yes literally at corner of the wall!) a person standing at the opposite corner of the room can hear what you're saying like you're standing next to them, and a person standing in the middle of the room can't hear a thing!! SO COOL! It was CRAZY! It's because the room is in the shape of an ellipse, something to do with math...
Then we went to the basillica (all the same building) which was really neat! It was huge and has 5 massive organs! (I mean MASSIVE) It also has this huge dome and lots of cool sculptures and oil paintings. The tour guide said you can get married there for about 1 thousand dollars if you are catholic, but the waiting list is like 2 years or something. That would be one crazy wedding.
Then we went up to the library and saw the collection of SUPER old books. There were litearlly thousands of them. A lot of them were hand-written manuscripts. They took one monk 14 YEARS to make. CRAZY! It has the 2nd best collection of religious books in the world. Pretty cool. [None of the interior pictures are mine b/c no fotos permite]
Then we went back to Madrid and stayed the night there. The next day we visited the Palacio Real (Royal Palace) of Spain. Which surpirise surpirse, you couln't take pictures of the inside! But it was really neat. There were lots of rooms, this palace has over 2 thousand of them! They are all decorated in unique historical styles and it has A LOT of neat artwork and fabric and other decorations.
Now we are in Toledo which is the cutest little town I have ever seen! I just posted pictures on dropshots. (They are the ones after May 26th. I think the date is wrong on my camera because I took them today, the 27th) It is the original capital of Spain. All of the buildings are in the mideval style and are SO cool and beautiful. We visited all these cool sites like this castle building (which I have lots of pictures of) and one of the worlds oldest synagauges, and el Greco museum (a famous artist), and one of the worlds oldest Mosques. Very cool. They also have really good tapas and wine bars. It has been a lot of fun! We leave for Granada tomorrow and meet our host families!
Latest Comments (1)
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Yay!!!! (reply)
May 29, 2008 00:06 EST by trippinwithleis
Ruester....I am SO happy to hear you are having an amazing time. Spain is awesome, eh? I loved it!!! You had better be enjoying Sangria with every meal in honor of me!!! I promise it will be the best you will ever ever have!!! Do it. Do it.
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