Spain: Day 7 Part 1

Playing: Carla-Life in Film
Reading: Mayflower by Nathanial Philbrick

For breakfast, my family and I had given up on trying to find a place to eat, so we went to a chain restaurant (Oh my goodness, a chain! How mainstream!) called Café&Té, where I ordered the Spanish Brunch #3. It came with orange juice, hot tea, garlic mushrooms, pantumaca, scrambled eggs with ham, and toast. For the price of €7:50, you got a lot of food, even a bit too much for any one person to devour. In the photo, it showed the scrambled eggs with ham and mushrooms separated, so I was surprised to find it all mixed together. It tasted like any other American breakfast except for the pantumaca, which I've only had in Spain.

After breakfast, we went to El Real Jardin Botanico, which is the royal botanical garden. Very pretty and we went before it got hot that way we could enjoy it without complaining to each other about the heat. It's a nice place to walk around and by the end of our time in Madrid, we had started to run out of things to do, so we started to just visit gardens, plazas, and markets. After the park, we went to Museo Thyssen for two hours, which was way too long in my opinion. By then, that was our sixth art museum, so all of us except for my dad were getting tired of art museums. Therefore, I can't give you a good review of how it was.

For lunch, we ate at Cafe del Circulo de Bellas Arte, who had a price fixed menu to choose from. For my appaetizer, I ordered the Saute Artichokes with Cured Ham, which was very good. The artichoke was tender and filling, while the cured ham gave it a nice smoky flavor. they also had a too sweet balsamic vinegar reduction to dip your artichokes in. It was large enough to be an entree by itself.

 

For the entree, I got the Pampano Fisherman's style, which wasn't very good at all. The fish taste was overwhelming and every other bite was filled with bones. Plus, the shrimp were hard to eat and the fish was overcooked. I definitely would recommend ordering a different dish there. You also got a dessert with this, but I didn't understand the waitress' English very well, so all I heard was "chocolate" out of her long list of desserts available, so I just said chocolate and ended up getting a chocolate pudding. No picture necessary.

We then walked on to the Parque de El Retiro, which was gorgeous, but terribly hot. I ended up hiding a lot in the shade there, but they had this glass house by a pond there, which housed a whole art installation by the modern artist Nacho Creodo. The art installation was interesting, but I hid in there mostly because it was air conditioned and there were quite a few groups of cute guys there.

See, I told you, cute guys. Well, this is going to make me look creepy, but I took quite a few stalker photos of well dressed and/or cute guys that way I could try to convince my guy friends to let me redo their wardrobe. I like how guys in Europe wear colored jeans and collared tops all the time. I also like how the guy in green jeans kind of looks like a Persian Brendon Urie. Too perfect. Well hopefully, you don't find me too creepy by now. I should go.