Sunday was once again rainy, but not in a horribly uncomfortable way. We decided to head back to the Palacio Real and see if we could actually get in this time. On the way there we walked through this park and decided to take a cute umbrella picture in front of the fountain and the horse statue (like I said, they're everywhere!)
This time, we were actually able to get into the palace. The only thing of it that I have any pictures of is the courtyard because they wouldn't let us take picture inside.
I really liked the palace. Basically we followed a little path that wove us around through some of the rooms. Everything was very ornate. My favorite part was the ceiling artwork. At one point, we tagged along with a french tour group to hear what their tour guide had to say.
After that, we hopped on the metro to head to the market. I haven't really said anything about it so far but we had weekend metro passes to get around and they were really handy. Here are some of my metro pictures:
Inside the station
Waiting on these odd standing bench type things that Ali was fascinated with
Inside the metro
A ramp-alator its like a flat escalator that goes up-hill. I'd never seen one before, but Ali said she'd seen them in Dubai.
Anyway, enough with the metro. We were headed to a market called El Rastro that I read about in my tour book. It was kind of cool at first, and Ali bought some cheap earrings, but it started to get really crowded, so crowded that you couldn't even really look at the booths, you just had to follow the herd, and it seemed like it went on forever.
So after the crowd got to be too much, we decided to head towards the Parque del Retiro and find some lunch in that area. We ended up eating delicious paninis at a Café & Té, a chain of restaurants that was everywhere and that promised on all of its signs to have at least one employee who spoke English. After that we headed to the park, but on the way there we saw the Puerta de Alcalá which is the original gateway into Madrid, so we decided to take a few pictures.
After our small stop there to take pictures, we finally got to the Parque del Retiro. I'd have to say that it is probably my favorite place in the city. It's huge. We walked in and there is this big pretty fountain with flowers all around:
Farther in, there was a path that is bordered on one side by a large pond/lake type of thing with boats everywhere.
Across the pond was the colonnade with a statue apparently of Alfonso XII.
On the other side of the path, there were street vendors and performers. We saw this puppet show, more of the people statues, and a dog that did tricks.
We headed over to the other side of the park by the colonnade.
And we climbed up on the colonnade.
Then we got ourselves some ice cream and sat down to rest for a bit since we'd been up and about for most of the day already.
After that, we headed back to the hostel to relax for a bit and have dinner. We were hanging out in the lobby when this guy handed us a flyer and told us about how the hostel had social events planned every night of the week. Sunday night's event was seeing a flamenco dancer so we decided to go check it out. Probably about ten people from our hostel went and we met up with some people from another hostel as well. This is a picture of Ali and me at the flamenco place:
Because blogger apparently no longer lets you upload videos onto it, I don't have anything to show you of the flamenco dancer, but it was cool. It's a very interesting style of dance. Anyway, that's all for day three!
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