Monday, the 27th (continued):
Tube to the south side of the river to see Westminster Abbey, Parliament and Big Ben at night.
Tuesday, the 28th:
Leicester Square to look for day-of-performance tickets. No Luck.
Tower of London. Not a tower. A Castle. Who'd a guessed?
St. Paul's. A big church. Not especially interesting.
Walk across Millennium Bridge to Shakespeare Globe and the Tate Modern, which had about 10 really nice pieces. Out of about 5,000.
Try (and fail) to get full-price tickets for a play. (Lots of tickets, just not for anything we want to see.)
Pack bags for Madrid.
Wednesday, the 29th:
Fly to Madrid. (After sitting on the runway for half an hour. After riding a shuttle 45 minutes to the airport. After stiffing the concierge who tried to find tickets for us yesterday; Dan still regrets not giving him a few euros.)
Arrive in Madrid and ride the Metro to our hotel (Hotel Ganivet). The Metro is faster than the airport shuttle (according to the information counter at the airport) and waaaayy cheaper: 4 Euros for the two of us as opposed to 25 euros or thereabouts for the shuttle.
Walk 5 minutes to an outdoor cafe. Sit in the sun and drink wine and eat tapas for an hour and a half. Our first tapas. Anywhere. Any time. Dan had a beer and two glasses of wine. Did I mention we were sitting in the sun, in a sidewalk cafe in Madrid, watching the city pass by in front of us? Anyway, a beer and two glasses of wine gets you 3 small tapas: a plate of olives, a plate of seafood and vegetables, and a plate of sausage and vegetables. Wonderful. We love Madrid. Waaayy more than London.
Back to the room to relax.
Head out for dinner at 9:30. Decide to have more tapas.
Walk around Plaza Mayor.
Thursday, the 30th:
Get lost after walking two blocks to get some coffee.
Wander around town: Plaza Mayor, Catedral de la Almudena (relatively new and an oder of magnitude nicer than the National Shrine in Washington), Royal Palace and nearby gardens, National Theater, Gran Via, and back to the hotel, looking in every single shop along the way.
While resting, try to figure out how to buy train tickets on line for a day trip to Segovia. Finally give up and phone the railroad. When I pick them up tomorrow I'll find out whether I agreed to 15 euros per ticket or 50 euros per ticket.
Ask the concierge to reserve a table for us at an inexpensive restaurant that got a great review in the New York Times a month ago.
Go out for dinner: a tapas here, a tapas there, a tapas in another place would add up to a full meal. Unfortunately, all the tapas bars permit smoking. And we can't deal with that. At one place, we managed to scarf something down quickly before anyone lit up, but then we had to give up our plan and head back to our nonsmoking hotel to eat its buffet dinner.
Good news. Our concierge was able to get us a restaurant reservation for tomorrow evening. Bad news. It's a smoking restaurant, so we had to cancel.
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