I decided to do my best to overcome jet lag and set my alarm for 9am. Wow! I thought my alarm clock at home gave me a heart-attack! This one is much worse! I won't be sleeping through that! I opened the blinds to let the sun in so that I would wake up better and ended up getting out of bed at 9:20. I was a slow-poke and dawdled around the house until 11:30am. I opted to skip out on the family meal at noon because it wouldn't allow for much sight-seeing time for the day.

I decided to start out with the Rick Steves' Walking Tour of Madrid. We did his walking tour of Berlin when we were in Germany and it was great. This one was rather mediocre. I'm not sure if that means that Madrid is a mediocre city or if Rick just didn't do a good job. I'm inclined to think the former. From what I hear, Barcelona is really the more popular tourist destination anyways. I started at Puerta del Sol. There's construction there, so I didn't even realized that I had arrived. I took a picture of 0 km - the place where every distance in Madrid is measured from. That and the Palace, which is where the tour ended. There wasn't really much interesting in between. So at the Palace I decided to buy a ticket for the tour. Since I got the student discount (thank you, UCLA) I splurged on the audioguide, which was totally worthwhile. I learned in Russia that it's really helpful to get the auidioguide in English and I wasn't disappointed this time. Relatively little of interest in the palace is translated into English, so without that guide it would have been a pretty boring visit of 20+ rooms.

Time goes by so quickly here and I'm not using a watch so I had no idea that it was almost 7pm by the time I was done and leaving the Palace (during the walking tour I had stopped to eat some sandwiches and fruit that I had packed for myself, but I was getting a bit hungry by then). I took the metro home and was back by 8pm. I visited with the friends I'm staying with for awhile, ate dinner, and went to bed around 11:30pm.

Labels: Spain, WWW2009