Lets play

Sunday 30 November 2008 - Madrid, Spain
So today we went to visit the Kind and Queen of Spain, unfortunately they'd just popped out for some Macca's but said we could make ourselves at home, so we just had a wander through the Palace for a while. Afterwards we thought we would attempt the metro and see if we could get ourselves to the Zoo. As confusing as the map looks it is actually a really easy system to use, and is only 1 euro wherever you go. Understanding Spanish of course helps immensely. As you can imagine its hard enough to understand train announcements in English. On our way to the Zoo we went to the amusement park. It is obviously the low season as there was practically no-one there and about 70% of the rides were closed. Pete at this stage had been looking for a porcelin friend, so no upside-down rides for him, so we went on a few of the kiddy rides for the fun of it. Headed over the zoo, and finally got to see some American Brown Bears, who would have thought we had to go through Alaska, and America, then onto Spain to finally see some Bears. They also had an impressive collection of Australian animals with Koalas, Kangaroos and Emu's. They are linked with a big aquarium and we sat in on the Dolphin show. These 6 dolphins were truly stars and they new it. The show went for about 30 minutes and was a major highlight of the day. Finally got in touch with Raul, and arranged to meet up for dinner at 10pm, yep they eat late in Madrid. Raul was great, ever the host and rustled up a meal for us in his kitchen, while giving us some tips of what we really must see tomorrow. This was followed up with an introduction to a Sheesha which is a traditional waterpipe smoke thingo used mainly in arabic countries. You can choose all sorts of flavours to try and Raul set us up with Melon. In the end not really my thing, but very interesting all the same to have a crack.