Vacation Journal, Day 2 - Getting to Know Madrid

We hopped on the metro at the airport and headed to our hotel, ME Madrid. Thanks to a snow day back in February, I had a day to do research and find this great hotel. Our room was tiny by American standards, but it had great amenities and was housed in a beautiful historic building in Plaza Santa Ana in Old Madrid. The location was absolutely perfect.

We settled in at the hotel and headed to Restaurante Sobrino de Botin. The Guiness Book of World Records lists this as the oldest restaurant in the world (est. 1725). The restaurant also claims to have employed Goya as a dishwasher when he was a teenager. One of our goals for this trip was to experience the Spanish culture through its food, and Botin was a great place to start. We ate the house menu -- garlic soup, bread and roast suckling pig, all washed down with Rioja wine, and finished off with yummy ice cream. The building itself was amazing; we got to eat in the beautiful brick cellar.

After lunch, fatigue was definitely settling in (the bottle of wine might not have been the best idea). I am embarrassed to say it, but we shared a Starbucks vanilla latte on our way to the Renia Sofia, Madrid's modern art museum (I swear it was the only time I had Starbucks on our vacation). We were pretty tired, but we walked around the museum until we could not walk anymore. The museum houses many Dali paintings, as well as Picasso's Guernica.

After touring the Renia Sofia, we ate a quick dinner and hit the sack early. We needed plenty of sleep to prepare for all the eating we had planned for our second day in Madrid.