2 posts tagged “madrid”
The first thing I noticed this morning was my sore throat.
We went to a city tour on our coach in the morning. If the city of Madrid is boring, our local tour guide was even worse. I didn't see anything interesting in the Madrid city, except for a couple of grand fountains. The city tour was so boring, I fell into sleep at one point.
We went to Toledo in the afternoon. Toledo was a former capital of the Spanish empire. It is a beautiful and well-preserved medieval town that was declared as World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 1986. The Cathedral of Toledo in the middle of the town is spectacular and I heard that it is still a royal cathedral. The main door of the cathedral still only open for the Spanish King (and therefore is called the Door of the Kings).
During the bus ride back to Madrid city, our tour guide was busy filling
us up with the rich history of the Madrid. But May and I were more
interested in marking down all the nice shopping areas because we know
that we would later make our way back to the city tonight and we'd
better know where we are going. We took a cab to downtown and spend few hours shopping. Eventually we had Tapa (Spanish snack) for dinner.
This has to be the most boring day in our trip so far. We had been on the road since 7:30 in the morning. I am sorry to report that there is absolutely nothing to see between Barcelona and Madrid, except the barren, desert-like landscape, which is not too different from Australia's. I mean, we even struggled to find a decent place for lunch along the highway (to put this into perspective, we never had problem finding good, self-served motorway in all other countries we visited in this trip). To make the better worst, my friend and I developed some sudden and severe diarrhea. Having diarrhea is bad enough in normal times. It gets 10x worse when you are on a fast-moving coach. At one point it got so bad, the coach had to make an emergency stop so that we could relieve ourself in a small roadside shop. It turned out my friend and I were not the only one sick. The tour director, driver, and few other passengers were also sick. I think it had something to do with the buffet we had in Barcelona. I knew that the buffet was too good for this super costsaver tour.
The tour director gave each one of us some tablets but it didn't help me. I had to use the on-board toilet on the coach one more time before we arrived Madrid. Our hotel was in the urban area and we spent a couple of hours in the area around the hotel. There was not much to see.
