A Date with Spain...Day 6...the Final Day

To start off...missed out on mentioning some more stuff I had done on Day 3 in Amsterdam (darn, sure did do a lot of things that day)...we visited the house where Rembrandt passed away. Unfortunately, he died a very poor man. We also visited the house of Anne Frank where she and her family had hidden in Amsterdam. We did not go into the 'secret annexe' however as the queue to enter it was huge and would have taken us agood 1 1/2 hours to enter it.

Coming back to Madrid, this happens to be the bull fighting season and since Spain is so well associated with the Matadors and the bulls...we wanted to go see a bull fight (they have massive stadiums for these fights), until I learned in the course of conversation with the hotel receptionist that the bull is always killed at the end of the fight...that too a slow, torturous death. Never knew this...didn't want to pay money and support asport where animals are killed so skipped this. 

We went on the city tour as planned. Madrid is a relatively young city as it was never Spain's capital in ancient history. Therefore, most of the buildings are relatively knew. Visited a couple of churches and the Royal Palace of Madrid Now we come to the highlight of the day. Madrid is famous for housing some of the world's masterpieces by the greatest artists the world has ever known and you have tons of art galleries for the same. We visited the most popular of them all...Museo del Prado  Got to see the work of those artists that we had read about years back in our textbooks.Saw a ton of paintings, but a couple of masterpieces that I will mention are:

Las Meninas by Diego Velázquez

Artemisia by Rembrandt

The Cardinal by Raphael

Death of the Virgin by Andrea Mantegna

Adoration of the Shepherds by El Greco

Adoration of the Magi by Peter Paul Rubens

And the Prado museum can be seen in Google Earth and so can the paintings in a resolution of...14,000 million pixels! Read more on how these masterpieces can be seen in Google Earth at http://www.google.com/intl/en/landing/prado/

So we spent a good two hours in the museum before heading back...spent the evening walking around the Gran Via which is also the area where our hotel is located. 

So that ends my vacation in the Netherlands and Spain...6 delightful days filled with some Starbucks coffee (their hazelnut lattes and caramel lattes).

Till the next adventure...adios amigos!