Day 3 of Spanish Vacation: Madrid on February 4th, 2017

Last day of our three-day stay in Madrid before heading off for Marrakech. The plan of the day was to visit the attractions in the city, the two most important were Catedral de Santa María la Real de la Almudena and Royal Palace of Madrid.

Similar to the day before, we woke up to a rainy morning in Madrid.

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After we checked out of our hotel near Plaza del Callao, the first stop of the day was Plaza Mayor, which wasn’t very far and we reached there on foot.

This building was called Casa de la Panadería (Bakery House) and served municipal and cultural functions.
In the center of the Plaza was a statue of Philip III, during whose reign this plaza was built.

Our next stop of the day was Catedral de Santa María la Real de la Almudena (what a long name…), the seat of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Madrid.
Admission to the cathedral was free, however, there was a separate admission to its museum and clock tower which started at 10am. However, by the time we arrived there, it was like 15 minutes early, so we waited out the time in the nearby Plaza de Oriente watching dog owners having fun with their dogs.

The museum of Catedral de Santa María la Real de la Almudena featured mosaic arts of Bible stories, collections of the Church, and exhibitions about its history, particularly of its consecration by Pope John Paul II in 1993. The museum offered free audio guide through its WiFi.
Oh, I shall mention that no photos were allowed inside the museum.

The exit of the museum tour was inside the cathedral, so we got the chance to sit and relax and contemplate in its pews while admiring its beauty and magnificence.
Catedral de Santa María la Real de la Almudena was a relatively modern cathedral compared with the other cathedrals we saw in the previous days (Toledo and Segovia), so featured one giant nave with the majority of seats, rather than scattered side chapels.

Then there was the Royal Palace of Madrid. It would be a nice move to purchase its entrance ticket online, as there were actually two queues at the entrance, one for ticket-holders and one for non-ticket holders, although everyone was waiting in the latter line.

Royal Palace of Madrid was a store-your-bag-but-not-your-camera site, but it took us quite some time to find a working locker.

The Royal Palace of Madrid offered a Samsung phone as its audio guide (hope it won’t explode…) at a price tag of 3 Euro per use, which was essentially an Android app that comes with earphone rental. However, one could download the same app at Google’s Play Store at a price of 1.99 Euro.
And because that app needed WiFi to work, the Royal Palace of Madrid offered free WiFi to its audio guide phones, which others could also connect to.

No photos were allowed in the majority of rooms in Royal Palace of Madrid.

After that, we finished our lunch in a McDonald’s restaurant near Opera Madrid, as we were quite surprised that all the McDonald’s signs in Spain seemed all to be in green instead of the more commonly perceived seen red. Is it a tribute to the Muslims ancestors that once roamed this land?

It was 1430 in the afternoon when we finished lunch, and we were pretty much done with downtown Madrid. So we decided that our next stop would be El Retiro Park in Eastern Madrid.

Visitors to El Retiro Park were mostly local people hanging out, and quite to my surprise, black people selling selfie stick.

One of the major attractions in El Retiro Park was Palacio de Cristal, which was built entirely of metal and glass in 1887 to exhibit flora and fauna from the Philippines, then a Spanish colonial possession.

I know it’s winter and it’s supposed to be cold, but I wasn’t expecting my phone’s battery to die out of the cold termperature that afternoon.

So after El Retiro Park and before heading for the airport for the evening flight to Marrakech, we decided to pay another visit to Museo Nacional del Prado (Since it offered free admission to students).

END

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