Day 17 -- Madrid

We sleep in in Madrid. It is also nice not having a car and worrying about parking. Madrid has an extensive underground metro. The Royal palace was closed due to a monthly changing of the guard. so we walked. We visited and Egyptian. worship place moved from Egypt to Spain when the Aswan dam was created. Bo tried to do shopping but was frustrated by the inefficiencies - lots of shoppers but only one register with a a line around the block. In order to not take a chance on food, we ate at the same place as yesterday ordering the same thing -- a pimiento salad, roasted chicken and a fantastic dulce de leche cake for dessert. If you order from the menu del dia, you get a salad or appetizer, an entre, a dessert and a wine or beer for a single very reasonable price (9.5 euro in this case).
We also took a walk along the Gran Via, one of thr main streets of Madrid lined with architectural gems of the city. This week is architecture week in Madrid and many of these buildings have been open to the public so we followed the numbers given in our Madrid guide. We also visited an exhibition that proposed 9 very different future visions of Gran Via, including Gran Via as a public entertainment space (el teatro), free enterprise zone, a social network space, an atmospheric space, etc. It was very interesting and the visions were really creative.
After a brief siesta, we took the Metro to the Reyna Sophia museum of modern art and spent a couple of hours there. They have an great collection of Miro, Dali and Picasso and other mostly Spanish artists of the 20th century. The exhibitions are organized both chronologically and thematically, with very good background information in several languages and they include not just paintings, but also photography and films so it is really well done.