Tapas, Churros, Art, Music, Dance. Seriously Spain what can't you do! We've decided to spend the next month or so in Spain and kicked it off in Madrid. We had a week in the city center in an awesome Air BnB. With only a week we didn't waste any time getting out to visit the sights. We started at the Museo Prado, a world class art gallery that had some incredible pieces. We spent an easy 4 hours in the Prado and can hardly say we saw it all. If you're not a huge art fan but want to take in some of the Spanish greats this is a great gallery to visit because of their world class collection. If you're an art nerd like myself than you'll need to give yourself the full day to properly enjoy their massive collection. The next day we tried to visit the Royal Palace but the King was in town and they shut the place down for him, we got to enjoy the exterior at least! Madrid is made up of plazas, areas filled with restaurants, people and live music. We spent most of our afternoons sipping coffee or wine enjoying the brisk but sunny days. After a few days in Madrid we decided to take a day trip out to Toledo. It was definitely not long enough, in hind sight we should have spent a few full days here to take in the 2200 years + of history the city offers. We took a 3 hour walking tour through the city which gave us a great snap shot of what Toledo has to offer. Our guide highlighted the Jewish District, the Cathedral, a chapel that homes a famous El Greco painting (no pics permitted) and took us through the winding side streets. It's an absolute maze of a city but I think getting lost is half the fun here, wandering down narrow streets filled with shops and cafes. With a few days left in Madrid we headed to the Thyssen Museum opposite the Prado. This is a private collection and was extremely impressive. They housed art from Renaissance, Romanticism and 20th Century pop art. The collection is fairly large taking us 2 -3 hours, was well done gallery minus the horrible choice of wall colour. There are other fantastic galleries in Madrid but too much of a good thing and so on.... Instead we spent our time eating churros and chocolate, drinking wine and relaxing. Our last day we had a beautiful sunny day so headed over to a park near the Royal palace that is home the Debod Temple, a real life Egyptian temple! It was a gift from Egypt to Spain in 1968 as a thank you to for Spain's help saving the Abu Simbel Temple during the construction of the Aswan Dam. The Debod temple would have also been destroyed by the dam if not relocated so they deconstructed the temple and rebuilt it in Madrid. We've been busy travelling and are behind in our blogs. We've spent 4 days in Seville and are in Gibraltar today! We're spending the next 10 days driving around southern Spain visiting Gibraltar, Malaga, Granada, Cordoba and the interesting towns in between. We'll get our next post up asap with highlights from Seville (which was incredible!).
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