Weekend in Madrid - Parte 1

About a week ago I decided to accompany some friends I made from the Iowa group to Madrid for the weekend. Round trip by plane was cheap, about $50 american, and the hostel they had picked supposedly had a bathroom inside each room! How luxurious.






Even better, I had not realized the room came with a balcony as well. The view was sort of interesting, but only one at a time please, I don't know if you can tell from the picture but the balcony was only big enough to comfortably fit one person. What you might be able to tell from the view's height is the fact that we had to ascend and descend about 5 very long flights of stairs to go anywhere.







We decided to walk around after finding our hostel and get familiar with our surroundings. If you are familiar with the famous Prado art museum it's to the left of the rotary that encloses this arch, which I later learned was apparently a present from Italy.




This building was some sort of government building, can't recall what its function was but I thought the architecture was pretty interesting.

Later in the day we made our way to the royal palace. We only walked around the outside, we couldn't go in.

Next to the palace a little further down, a street performance of quite a large scale began as we walked up to it. I'll post those pictures and the rest of Madrid tomorrow.