Madrid, Spain

Madrid is all about staying up late with music shows not even starting till 11pm on a weeknight! It’s also a city of art and has three of the most famous art museums in Europe – Sofia, Prado, and Thyssen. We aren’t big on spending all of our time in the museums, so we jammed through a few of them in the evenings when they open up for two hours of free admission We liked how the Reina Sofia was an old hospital converted to a museum and the uniqueness of Gayo’s black paintings. The Prado is an enormous museum and we dug the spectacular rooms and hallways.

We learned about free walking tours from our hosts Jose and Sole. This was our first organized walking tour on our entire trip and we would definitely recommend them. We learned a great deal about the city and its Moorish history, but most importantly we learned about the Monasterio del Corpus Christi where we could buy dulces (sweets) from a small little revolving window from the nuns inside a convent, and also a placed called San Ginés where we could sit down for some fresh churros con chocolate! which should actually be called chocolate con churros because you of the huge amount of dipping chocolate we were served!

Madrid has a rich history in bull fighting but there is beginning to be resistance against killing for fun, so we decided to visit the bull fighting museum instead. It had a great deal of paintings and sculptors of famous bull fighters but not much in the way of explaining how bull fighting is more like a dance than a fight.

In search of the best free tapas we found a few dive bars that served us up full plates of food. Most people order “cañas” (very small beers) but after we ordered “cervesas mas grandes” we were rewarded with full plates of tapas! Our favorite was a place called El Tigre. Being the end of October we picked up a soon to be jack-o-lantern for our hosts and took him out for tapas before bringing him home… Happy Halloween!

During our travels, we usually offer to make dinner for our couch surfing hosts – which of course leads to the question – what is a typical American dinner? Being from California, we generally feel like a Mexican dinner accurately portrays Californian cuisine, especially if we can call it “Meixcan Monday” or “Taco Tuesday” or “Fajita Friday.” However, we wanted to try something different, so after some time on the internet, we decided upon a truly American meal:

Carrots and dip
Mac and Cheese
Apple Pie

This was Robin’s first ever attempt at making Macaroni and Cheese. Luckily, allrecipes.com did not disappoint and we made a delicious and cheesy meal with the addition of some Oscar Meyer hot dogs in just for kicks! Kevin used skills he learned from his mom and made a monstrous apple pie.