Dinner - somewhere cheap, beautiful with tasty food?

No problem! With all the restaurants in Madrid you dont need to settle for a place which is cheap and nasty, or expensive or beautiful, or with great food with the view of a nice busy road. I was doing a course in Madrid (yes I know I live here, but I just finished an interuniversity course which took me all over Spain, one course being in Madrid) and on one night with a group of my friends from the course we naturally wanted some dinner.

We tried to get a table in the Museo del Jamon off Puerta del Sol but at 11pm they told us it was due to close soon. A dilema! However we are blessed by the multitude of fast food shops around the area, including the wonderful Moaz Falafels (a vegetarian fast food place with is tasty, cheap and relatively healthy) and if you want more traditional you can pick up a cured ham and cheese sandwich from the museo del jamon.

We all went to our fast food place of our choice (me - I took the tasty falafel salad!) and took our food to the plaza Oriente. This is right in the centre in between the Opera house and the Palacio Real. Now who can complain with a view like this:



We were infact seated on the benches at the foot of the statue pictured. It was lovely to sit there eating our cheap fast food of our choice with a spectacular view where a restaurant would have charged us 20% for the pleasure. It was awesome!



I highly recommend it to anyone who fancies a nice picnic in the city centre. Maybe with a date? I could imagine this being highly romantic on a lovely moonlit summers night.

Debod Temple and the Parque Oueste

Some cities have some interesting suprises, and Madrid is one of those cities. One of it's many parks and gardens, the Parque Oeste in the centre has a very interesting feature - A whole Egyptian Temple. Crazy I hear you say, and I concur, but after seeing this in real life a couple of times I have had to accept it is real.



Apparently the Debod Temple was a gift to Spain from the Egyptian government, so I guess it's not so bad as a whole Temple stolen by some of the other countries in the world (Britain and Germany I am looking at you!) which are concealed away in public museums.

It is rather surreal to walk off Plaza España into a park which greats you with a monument built by the ancient Egyptians, but at least the weather is more comparable in Spain so it doesnt feel too surreal (as opposed to if it was in London or New York). But still it is an interesting and pleasant sight. I have never arrived at the park in time to go inside the temple, and I intend to make it a mission in the future when I have time to explore Madrid again.



The park around it is lovely, with wonderful views of the Palacio Real and the Cathedral which are a must see for any budding photo-snapping tourist, or a romantic who adores gorgeous views. I think that the Parque Oeste is one of the more under rated parks in Madrid. Most visitors will go to Retiro, which while Retiro is grand and has a certain "je ne sais quoi" about it, Parque Oeste also has some wonderful features which are definately worth seeing. I mean, how many parks have an Egyptian Temple and a breath taking view of the palace? Not many I wager.

Romantic Retiro

At the heart of this vast city (well a little bit off the heart as Sol is official km zero), there is a wonderful big green lung that is the Parque del Retiro. A vast park with lots of trees, a few lakes, glamorous monuments, decorative mini-palaces etc. Everything you could want in a park.


Especially during the summer months, Madrid is like a desert with temperatures up to 40 degrees C and its dryness and pollution a green refuge is much appreciated. I arrived in Madrid in August, the worst month in the summer. I decided it would be a nice idea to take my boyfriend at the time there for a romantic picnic while he was over in Madrid. Packed the bag with Tortilla Espanola, Patatas Aioli, various hams and cheese, a bottle of wine and some crusty bread. It was a rather decadent picnic sitting opposite the Estanque monument and lake, while relaxing in the shade.


In the heat of the august sun, we decided to take a boat out onto the lake and cool down a bit. It was a very fun and cliched romantic thing to do, but it was great. Unfortunately the lake was over crowded so had to make sure not to have any run ins with the other boats. It was a lovely way to pass a hot afternoon.

Asides from the Estanque there are two palaces in the park, the Velazquez Palace and the Crystal palace. The crystal palace is my favourite place, as it looks out over a lovely cool lake with a fountain and some interesting swamp trees. Its a really nice place to just cool down if you get over heated (like I did that day).


We walked out around a bit, taking some naps in the shade (well I did, he ran off everywhere like an excited 5 year old). The park is also home to a collection of fountains and statues and contains the only public sculpture in existance depicting the fall of Lucifer.


So when the Madrileñan sun gets to hot and you want some shade and greenery, the paque retiro is the perfect place to find it. However a word of warning, there are a lot of theives and dealers around in this park (the dealers are very polite though), so best to keep a guard.

Atocha - The main (or one of the main) stations

I know what people will think - has she finally lost it and is writing about train stations? Is this girl a closet trainspotter with no life? No. I don't have a fetish for train stations or watching trains but bare with me on this one.

Atocha is a train station, no denying that fact. It is also a train station with a nasty near-past too. However Atocha is no ordinary train station - it is part train station/part botanical garden. Yes I know that sounds strange but its true. Last summer when my boyfriend at the time was visiting me, we came here together. We had spent the day in the Reina Sofia museum (which is located next to Atocha) and came out looking for a coffee/beer. I saw the station across road and remembered something odd about it from my guide book. I suggested we investigate it since we were right there. We ran across the road while the little green man on the traffic lights was flashing and bleeping and found our way into the station.

I knew there was a garden inside, but not this! From walking inside what seems like your bog-standard 19th century style train station into a colonial-tropical haven! The humidity hits you in the face as you walk in (its so dry in Madrid - especially in the summer) and you look up to see palms and other tropical trees and plants. Look down you see little terrapins swimming in the pond below. The whole grand setting of this iron-wrought train station gives it that glamorous colonial appeal. You feel like someone out of a Kipling novel. We found a bar on the top of the station over looking the gardens; this too was done in colonial style and had a kind of Indian theme to its architecture. We sat on the terrace drinking our cool beers enjoying the view of the palms below us forgetting we were in Madrid; and that we had been transported back in time and across the Indian Ocean. Its not the most beautiful garden I have seen in my life, nor is is the most beautiful in Madrid. However its most unlikely setting does add a kind of quirk appeal to it though. If you are ever passing buy do pop in and take a beer!