Tapas!

We managed to avoid having meals in restaurants. We preferred tapas bar i.e. we ordered small bits and pieces of many things and enjoy every one of them. This is not the proper way as we quickly understood when the waiter started to walk away after we picked 4 tapas while we wanted a couple more. The trick is not to order them altogether but rather one at a time, preferably with another glass of wine.

We loved the ham croquettes: croquetas de jamon. That’s clearly our all time winner.

We love Spanish ham, as such, on a toast, in a croquette, on top of eggs… it doesn’t matter how it’s served, we ate it with great pleasure.

Despite Tortilla doesn’t come with ham, we enjoyed it quite a lot as well. We preferred it warm but one can eat it cold as well.

Only negative is that food in Spain is pretty greasy. Most things are fried one way or another. That’s probably what makes them so good.
I know one thing for sure. After 5 days in Spain it will take me 2 weeks of hard exercise to eliminate the damage. In my defense, I just can’t resist to their croquetas de jamon.

Colors & Structures in Madrid

Each building is telling a story.

Plaza Mayor

Plaza Mayor is the central plaza of Madrid. It is impressive but somehow I was not convinced. Maybe because there were too many people, maybe there were too many “street comedians”, maybe there was too much noise, I don’t know what it was but it didn’t click.

I did give it a shot with my wide angle lens (twice in one day, it was really a good purchase) to recreate the feeling of the square shaped plaza.

Apart from its architecture, Plaza Mayor is famous for its painted facades.

Only interesting piece for me was the carving on a bench. I know I’m in this huge plaza and all I pay attention to are little characters telling a story on a bench.

Surprisingly, on a fence I found locks with names on it. Like in Pont des Arts in Paris, some people have sealed their love on Plaza Mayor. That’s sweet.

Palacio real and Plaza de Oriente

On our way to the Palacio Real we encountered a demonstration. No clue what they were demonstrating about but we had to make a detour through the little streets of the center to reach the palace.


Like in Belgium the king does not live in the palace (sometimes you wonder why we keep them). At least in Spain tourists and diplomats can visit it, and some of the halls are used for exhibition. Entrance is not for free and by the time we got there, there was a 500m queue. Facing the choice of queuing or taking a picture from behind the fence and move on… we stayed behind the fence.
And this created the perfect opportunity for me to use my brand new wide angle lens.

We then walked further to the Plaza de Oriente where plan was to have lunch. By now it’s 2:30pm, right on time for lunch according to Spanish habits. Following the reco from the guide, we found a café with a terrace and enjoyed lunch with view on the palace… ah, that’s how life should be!

I wanted to take a picture of the statue, which I did. This motivated Wolfram to try a few things with his camera.

So I waited. And I had company.

After 5 long minutes my new friend passed by the other way around and asked whether Wolfram was done. “Not yet I said”. 

So we waited a bit longer because it takes time to take great pictures.
I've also established that I do not have enough patience for that. I give it 3 shots. After that I move on, in peace with my choice of average pictures :)

Typical scene of a Mediterranean street

Street names

While walking through the streets of Madrid I quickly notice that in this city street names are much nicer than usual. They are colored and usually come with a little drawing representing what it is.

Much better than the plain ones we see in most cities. One could spend hours exploring the streets and having a look at all of them (but I did not want to repeat the looong collection of pictures of the Hollywood bvd stars).

30 minutes in Spain

We’re staying at the same hotel I stayed last time and also were some of my research will happen. Indeed it’s convenient for me but above all hotel Tryp Atocha is located right in the center, walking distance from everything there is to see.

Room was not ready when we arrived. The receptionist told us it would take 30minutes. Naively we decided to wait so we could drop our suitcases and change before exploring the city.
Of course 30 min Spanish time means longer than that. Up to 1 hour actually. I was getting pissed of wasting time waiting in the lobby when we could have been outside.

Eventually our room was ready, we could change, load the cameras and multiple lenses in our backpacks and hit the road, direction Palacio Real.