Madrid sits at the center of Spain, on high arid plains. The weather can be quite cold in winter and very hot in summer, but we were lucky and had relatively good weather for our visit. We quickly learned that people in Madrid take life at a much slower pace than we're used to. Our best lesson in this came from the hotel, where we had to wait in line for half an hour to check in and out. We also had to wait to check our luggage into storage for the day, and to retrieve it at the end of the day. Although this would not necessarily be a problem, this multi-story hotel had only one older man who was responsible for bringing luggage to people's rooms, taking it from their rooms to taxis, and checking/unchecking baggage from storage for the entire hotel. As a result, we had to wait half an hour to 45 minutes each time we had to deal with him.

Our short stay did not allow us to explore the city completely, yet we don't feel that we missed anything we really wanted to see in Madrid. During our visit, we managed to visit the royal palace, the Plaza Mayor, the Prado Museum, the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Retiro Park, and attend a Flamenco performance.

Our visit to the Prado was unfortunately cut short by the museum's mid-afternoon closing time, leaving us only time to visit half the museum. We would have done better, except the museum seemed strangely cut in half by a special exhibit, and as far as we could tell, we would have had to exit one end of the museum and walk around to the entrance on the opposite end in order to see the other half. Nevertheless, the early closing gave us a chance to visit the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, which contains a quite nice private art collection and is located only a couple blocks from the Prado. (Our personal preference in art museums runs more towards the Louvre and Musee d'Orsay than these two, but we nevertheless enjoyed the Prado, in particular).

Saturday night found us at the Cafe De Chinitas, attending a flamenco dinner show. This was defintely the highlight of our visit to Madrid. It was a bit difficult to locate the Cafe, which sits on a somewhat obscure street, but we managed to find it. We had dinner with Wagner and his brother. Although the food was decent, it was not particularly Spanish in character. The music and dance certainly was, though, and we thoroughly enjoyed the flamenco performance. The other food of note in Madrid was hams, dried and cured. We encountered several stores with hams completely covering the walls. We only took time to try one ham (sliced paper-thin and served cold), but it was very good indeed. Highly recommended!

Finally, one of the most amusing sights in Madrid is at the airport, where a life-size bronze statue of an old man sits in one of the airport chairs, just as anyone else would. It's a lighthearted and unexpected bit of sculpture, and it brought a smile to our faces as we walked towards our flight.