Madrid, Spain

We went to the Royal Palace (Real Palacio) today.  It was huge and divided into four main sections, of which I found the armory, apothecary, and bedroom area worthy of discussing here.  The armory was full of stuff you would  see in a 17th century armory (I guess) like a couple dozen suits of armor and swords out the ying yang, and armor for horses and a dog. How the horses moved at all with its armor and a short guy (all of them were short) with armor on, and the short dude was carrying something heavy like a sword or jousting pole.  I'll bet the horses topped out their speed at about 1mph. 

The other notable area of the palace was the apothecary with lots of urns with cool stuff in it or rather I imagined it was cool stuff like eye of newt, grasshopper knees, and blond hair of Abba. I was disappointed to read a few labels with titles like (translated here naturally) carbolic acid, carbon, acid, etc. I thought kings' apothecaries were supposed to do spells and incantations. But noooooo, it had to be regular chemistry. Boring.

The bedrooms or whatever they called the private areas were pretty kingish as a person would expect. The throne room was garish to the point it was funny. Somebody has been watching The Game of Thrones too much around here. Anyway, the drawing room and other areas were pretty much straight forward king crap.  What I did notice was the paintings of the people in this area.  There was a painting of King What's His Name, King What's His Name V, and Duke What's His Name dressed in drag to look like Queen What's Her Name. Oh man the women in these painting were not happy at all. I guess having to sit still with all that hot (temperature wise) dress on and makeup applied with a shovel would not have been comfy. All of the women in the  paintings looked like they had crabs or too tight underwear or something.  They all kind of snarled at me as most women I've known did. Stupid paintings.

We went to The Prado Museum. The Prado is a Spanish version of The Louvre in Paris.  The artist Goya was pretty interesting in his Dark Period where he was going stark raving loony while dying of syphilis.  It seems he painted these really weird things on the wall of his house and when he croaked off the folks that bought his stuff removed them from the wall using some technique by renaissance rocket scientists and  framed them.Now if this had been somebody in my family I would have gotten out the Wagner Sprayer and went to town on nutty boy's paintings. But nnnooooo, they framed them and now the whole world knows Goya was loony tunes while dying of a sexually transmitted disease. That must have been some friends he had.

The rest of the Prado was full of painting depicting Christ in some form either crucified, baby, last supper, etc. I'll bet over half the paintings were of Christ in some fashion. You would think that these geniuses could have picked something to paint like a kid's birthday party, dogs playing poker, or velvet Elvis.  But nnnoooooo they picked Christ. What gets me is how they copied each other too.

Tomorrow we are touring a couple cities nearby. I wont talk about them until tomorrow. The day after tomorrow (Sunday) we head home. See Ya.