Prado Museum - but no bullfight

Yesterday we spent touring the Prado museum. Unfortunately I couldn't use flash so very few pictures turned out good. However, you can look on the internet for some of the 8,600 paintings that are in the museum! Here is a shot of it from the front (I think). An interesting piece of trivia...it was used as cavalry headquarters by Napoleon's troops.


And this is a statue of Diego Velasquez out front.


Here we have a beautiful inlaid marble table, with lapis lazuli accents.


And this painting of Vulcan at his forge was done in 1577 by Bassano.


A marble bust of the Roman Emperor Antonius Pius.

We were supposed to go to a bullfight, but it got cancelled because of rain. That was a major bummer, and thus necessitates another trip to Spain. They did have this statue in front of Las Ventas bullring which was pretty neat.

Las Ventas is a beautiful building, with lots of tile, built in the Mudejar style. Here is one of the arches. Look at that layered brickwork!

And here's a shot of the ring itself.

And yet another shot of the facade. Ole!

Then we went and watched the soccer game with some friends. Madrid's home team Real Madrid was playing, and if they won, they won the championship. That, along with the fact that Felipe had money on the game made it a pretty big and tense game. Real fell behind by one goal early on to Mallorca but played much better the second half and won 3-1. The whole city went wild, and we returned late at night. Manuel went to Cibeles fountain where the rest of the fans go after the game to greet the bus with the players and didn't get back until 3 am. So this is Madrid by night.