I spent last week at a tradeshow in Barcelona, (hopefully) drumming up some business for my freelancing venture. Yesterday, Kristian and Lilian took the train to meet me. Today, we all took the train to Madrid to see some friends and be tourists.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it a bazillion times again… it is so freaking cool to take trains around Europe. Within a few hours, you can be in a new country with a new language and a completely different culture. Plus, the trains here are so damn comfortable. Kristian splurged a whole 10 euros each for larger seats and we were really able to spread out.
We met up with our friends and then took the metro to the Plaza de España. We let the kids run around this gigantic playground (I think Lilian really enjoyed the excuse to do some playing!) and the grownups even got in on the action trying out these cool inverted tire swings.
Then, we took a stroll around the area to admire the architecture and the views. There are all these statues of kings on the Plaza De Oriente. They were supposed to go on top of the Palacio Real, but a queen had a dream that one of them fell on her head. So, instead they’re located on the plaza and in various other places around the city.
Our friends have much younger kids, which I think had Lilian on her best behavior. There was absolutely no whinging about how much walking we did, because she was thoroughly in “set a good example” mode.
The girls had a lot of fun running around together, and I had a great time learning more about the city from the perspective of a local.
We went to the Corte Engles for dinner. They have a “food experience” area on the top floor. There are all sorts of different fancy groceries, as well as maybe half a dozen small restaurants. We all split a bunch of tapas, and I discovered that spanish tortillas are a) more like an omelet and 2) totally delicious.
After dinner, we went out to the little terrace up there and checked out the scenery. We had a great view of the plaza and surrounding buildings. The Plaza del Callao is the Madrid equivalent of Times Square, so it has like 4 or 5 whole video billboards. I’m an AV girlie, but I have to say I appreciate that they didn’t put displays on every available surface. They even fit nicely with the architecture.
I’m still zonked from the tradeshow, so I’m glad that we were able to have a fairly chill day. Although, even with my watch dying sometime after we got to the playground, I still took over 9,000 steps today. It’s pretty cool that my definition of “not a lot of walking” has changed so much.
The last time we were all in Madrid was back in 2019. Which feels like it wasn’t that long ago, but is allegedly seven years back. I was in training for the first first half of the trip and then I was sick for the second half. I’m looking forward to appreciating the city more this time around! It definitely helps that we get to wander around with some locals.
