Madrid, Spain!! (Part IV)

On Monday morning, our last day in Spain, we went to see the Plaza de Toros and Las Ventas, the bull-fighting ring.  Ali and I had considered going to see a bullfight because it seemed like a good cultural thing to do, but we heard stories about how most tourists (even big burly men) have a hard time sitting through them and they're not how people usually expect them to be.  That's why we decided not to go to an actual fight but to just go see the arena during the daytime instead, so this is it:

We didn't actually go inside because we didn't feel like paying for a guided tour but we did go to the bullfighting museum.  It was interesting to see all the portraits of the famous bullfighters and how the sport evolved.
After the arena, we headed back to the Puerta del Sol where we found this statue.  We'd been seeing the bear and tree all over and had realized that it was the symbol of Madrid but we didn't know there was an actual statue of it.  According to wikipedia (as we looked up later), the tree is a strawberry tree.  Ali and I still aren't quite clear in its significance but, of course, we had to take a picture.

After this, we wandered around some souvenir shops in the area of Plaza Mayor.  I knew that I wanted to get a fan so we were trying to find the best one for cheap.  On our way around, we stopped at a McDonalds to get the cono kit kat off of the euro menu.  Basically it was a small vanilla ice cream cone with a kit kat in it.  I don't know why, but it appears that people in Europe are nuts about kit kats.

After shopping around a bit, Ali and I finally found the fans that we wanted.

We then headed for the airport and came home!  It was a lot of fun and I'm really glad that I went and it was made infinitely better to have company in the form of Ali. :)