El Rastro

The main thing we wanted to do on day 3 in Madrid was check out the market that only happens on Sundays, The Rastro. Now, we've been to lots markets in the US, San Francisco has a huge farmers market that is packed out every week, but we had never seen anything like this. The amount of people was absolutely insane. The main part of the market starts at the top of one street and goes all the way to the end of it, probably 7 blocks.





After the Rastro we headed back towards the palacio real to see Plaza España...unfortunately the huge, cool looking building was under construction and the plaza had a bunch of shops set up so we couldn't really see it. But, we did find a restaurant called "The Wok" which was a nice change from the bread, ham and cheese we had eaten every other meal. On our way back to the hotel we saw one of the most spectacular sights of the whole trip...a plastic skating rink. It was so hilarious! Little kids doing there best to use plastic skates on a plastic skating rink surface. They had no chance, really. (The adults you see are employees of the "rink". Their job was to pick up these poor children...) There was even a line of kids waiting to undergo the same pain and humiliation while all of their "twisted parents" watched. haha







After this joyful sight, we made our way to the next museum, the Prado. We're not big museum people but it's a pretty famous place so we thought we should go. This was a fortunate event. We liked the art in the Prado much better than the Reina Sofia, and the other painting that we learned about in our Spanish class was there and we didn't even know it. It's called "el tres de mayo de 1808 en Madrid"



After the Prado we ate some dinner, packed and got ready to head to Sevilla