what was Hieronymus Bosch smoking?

After an 8 hour train ride from San Sebastian I met my parents in Madrid and we set out to drink as much beer and Baileys as possible.
I had many many problems with the language (Uno caña, s´il vous plait) and accidentally ordered giant plates of cheese for dinner, not once, but twice.

We spent hours and hours in the Prado with its crazy Bosch paintings....the Garden of Earthly Delights seemed to have nearly as large a crowd as the Mona Lisa in the Louvre. I was eventually able to get up close and personal with this incredibly weird piece of work, but you´d need hours to inspect the whole thing. Nevertheless it was very very cool.
The Prado is so huge and there is so much to see that I didn´t see it all unfortunately (I did see most of it though, and it was incredible). I don´t think I had ever seen any paintings by El Greco before and I really liked them a lot. The colours were fantastic.
We also went to the Reina Sophia which houses Picasso´s Guernica (which was pretty cool to see after seeing reproductions for so long) and the Thyssen-Bornemisza where I could have spent two days giving myself a private art history degree. As it was I ran out of time on the middle floor and had to rush through the impressionists.

To break up all the cultcha we wandered around the city checking out the Puerto del Sol, Placa Mayor etc etc (and our hotel was in a perfect location for all this walking, literally down the street from the Thyssen museum).

It seems to be a universal law that if you´re wandering around at night and you don´t really know where you´re going you WILL eventually end up in a red light district. We took a nice walk down a little street lined with lovely young ladies, me thinking...hmmm, there must be a club around here or something, everyone is all dressed up. Hmmmm, why are there so many groups of girls standing along the side of the street? Why is that girl pulling on my dad´s sleeve? O my GOD! And so on.

Madrid was cool but after three days it was time to hit Barcelona. Really we didn´t do a lot but since the weather was nicer than in Madrid we could do our drinking outside. We also spent a lot of time walking up and down La Rambla checking out the Michael Jackson impersonator, the living statues, and the red-faced and drunken Chelsea Boys who had come to town to support their team in a match against FC Barcelona. Maybe it´s because all of the good ones stay home, but this glimpse of english manhood makes my heart go out to the women of England. Sad, sad, sad to see these sad packs of 40 year old men roving the city, drooling and shouting incomprehensibly.
This level of madness made us think it was a final game but it turned out to be a semifinal or something...we found an american style bar and grill where most of the tables were reserved for the game but as we arrived early and were such wide-eyed strangers to the game of football our waiter let us have the last unreserved table to watch the game at. The bar started filling up with Barcelona supporters and the staff were turning people away. I went to the bathroom and when I came back Mom was chatting up a very very pretty man who had been seated at the extra seat at our table (how on earth she managed that I will never know). He was very nice, even though he was carrying one of those preposterous Louis Vuitton man-pouches. He tried to explain the game to us and offered to show me around the town when I come back to Barcelona.
Then, suddenly, I was trapped in a Jane Austen novel as my mother, Mrs. Bennet, went at him.
"Soooo, do you have a family?"
"Yes, my family is in Barcelo..."
"No, what I mean is ARE YOU MARRIED?"
"Oh. I am divorced."
"Ahhh...and what do you do for a living?"
"I have a communications and internet company."
"Oh! My daughter here studied communications and used to work with the internet!"

She was practically rubbing her hands together...okay, sorry Mom, I´m exaggerating. But not much! Poor guy...though I did get a pretty man´s phone number out of the deal so I guess it´s not all bad.

The game was great fun to watch as the bar was full of Barcelona supporters who went mad when they scored in the second half.

After a few days in Barcelona we decided to head to the heat and bought train tickets to Alicante along the coast where it is finally finally hot. Around 26º during the day and 20º at night...I lay on the beach this afternoon and caught the first sunburn of the year, may it be the first of many.
We´re here for a couple more nights (we got a pretty sweet room at a cute little hotel here) and then I think we´re off to Granada.