Anyway, found some places to go, so headed for a nice little walk to some nearby gardens, where a funicular railway went up to a nearby hill and botanic gardens. First disappointment of the day - it was closed. Sit down. Regroup. Decide I'll go for the longer walk past everything I visited on my first day in Madrid and visit St. Francis' Basilica. Looks great from the outside, but disappointment number two - I get there right on midday closing time. Everything in Spain closes between about 1pm and 4pm. I have no idea why and it's really annoying. The guy at the desk tells me the Basilica is reopening at 4pm, but I'm not sure I want to walk all the way down there again given I have somewhere to be at 8.30pm and I'm still not the fastest walker.
I decide to take a scenic route through another part of Madrid back up to the hostel and have lunch on the way. Since I was almost out of cash I was keeping an eye out for an ATM, too, so when I spot a Caja Madrid ATM I figure I'll stop. This was how I got my excitement for the day - put bankcard in ATM. ATM eats bankcard. Run around like a headless chicken and panic in Spanish. Manage to explain to the tellers inside the branch fairly coherently that the machine ate my card. Teller rescues card. Successfully retrieve money and card from working ATM inside branch. Go to cafe across the road, collapse in relief and order lunch.
I tried a bocadilla, which turns out, sadly, to be like a Spanish baguette. Still, I tried, right? I took a long, slow walk back to the hostel and spent some time online. Like I said, theatre tickets for that night and everything is closed mid-afternoon, so I spent some time doing work on my computer. In the end I didn't make it back to the Basilica, mostly because my feet and mind were tired, but also because the logistics of getting down there and then up to the theatre in a different location were just awkward, given the times. Instead I fled the hostel at 7.30pm fearing I'd be late for my show after a lengthy conversation with my Spanish roommate. Antia was fun, and our conversations were good for her English and my Spanish, but I really was running out of time.
I did just make it, and Sonrisas and Lagrimas (Smiles and Tears) was great, every bit as good as the movie. You Anglo plebs might know it as something along the lines of 'The Sound of Music', I believe...seeing it in Spanish was a better idea than it sounded, and I left the theatre feeling thoroughly uplifted. A brisk walk back to the hostel and I packed my bag for an early train the next morning.
Despite all my panicking, I made my train on time, as usual. It was a beautiful four-hour ride from Madrid to the city of Burgos, a few hundred kilometres north. As we crossed a series of rocky peaks I could see snow all around. It really was beautiful. Arriving in Burgos, I made my way to my hotel and settled in for a bit, checking the weather forecast to see if I should expect rain. Late that afternoon I head out again, buy a bus ticket for the following afternoon and make my way to the cathedral.
Burgos is most famous for its cathedral. Personally, I know the name from the one-week cycling stage race La Vuelta a Burgos (The Tour of Burgos), but as the former capital of the Castilla y Leon region, it has the most stunning cathedral in the area. I spent two hours on a tour of the freezing cold cathedral before deciding it was time to go and find somewhere to have a nice warm dinner. This resulted in some interesting experiences regarding Spanish ideas around food (around 8pm you have pre-dinner drinks, and around 9.30pm or so you have dinner, not helpful for a 6pm-hungry tummy like mine) which results in me walking nearly an hour round trip to the nearest fast food place for something hot that I can eat.
The following morning I had my latest start yet. At noon I burst out of my hotel room, having hurriedly showered and packed to make the check-out time. Leaving my backpack behind, I began the lovely half-hour walk along the river to the local monastery. Though I apparently arrived 'late' (the ticket window, it says in the fine print, closes an hour before the monastery does), a lovely English-speaking tour guide took me around. It was fascinating, and the most interesting part was that it's still a working monastery. There are still a small collection of closed-off nuns there, mostly over 70, but there are a pair of young novices as well, she said. An hour later the security guard let me out of the monastery museum and I began walking back to the town.
The Spanish siesta caused me a few problems. Finding lunch food between 1pm and 4pm was way too hard (found a bakery that was open), and every single church I went to was either not where the map said it was or was closed. In the end I sort of wandered around the tourist attractions of Burgos for a few hours, unable to do anything much because by the time everything reopened I had to go and take my bus.
The four-hour bus ride wasn't too bad - I slept a bit, read a bit and then discovered that the bus had wifi, so when my similarly crippled seatmate (crutches and moonboot on right foot) got off at Leon, I got stuck into work on my latest article which, like its predecessor, has gone somewhat viral online thanks to being shared by the cyclist subject of the article. I'm on holiday in Spain, writing articles from a press conference in Belgium in my spare time, and they're being retweeted and shared on Facebook by the cyclists they're about. My life is strange.
Just after 9pm the bus pulled up in Oviedo, the capital of the region of Asturias, and I hopped off the bus to meet...
But that's another story! Stay tuned for Part III...
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| The Basilica of San Francisco, Madrid |
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| The Burgos Cathedral from the side |
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| An altarpiece in the Burgos cathedral |
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| One of the many amazing street statues in Burgos |
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| The Monastery of Our Lady of Rest, Burgos |
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| The main fountain at Plaza de Espana, Madrid |
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| The main ceiling vault in the Burgos Cathedral |
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| The main facade of the Burgos Cathedral |
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| Looking along the river in Burgos |
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| A star ceiling in one of the chapels of the Burgos Cathedral |
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| Looking east along the river in Burgos |
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| Artsy photos of the cathedral and the fountain |
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