El Parque de Buen Retiro

So literally 2 minutes from my apartment is Madrid's largest park, Retiro, and I spent part of the morning walking around it. I don't have pictures because I decided to wait until spring when the flowers come out, but even in this really cold winter, the park is seriously lovely. It's really large, it seems like it might be as large as Central Park in New York, but it's not quite as wild. Like most urban parks in Europe its highly landscaped, but the result is really beautiful.

It was a lake in it where people were rowing, even though it couldn't have been higher than 50 degrees today. And amazingly, there were a lot of people strolling around, even though it was in the middle of the day. It's also incredibly quiet in the middle of the park, which considering how noisy Madrid is in general is a major plus. I sat and graded on a park bench for about 30 minutes and realized that once the weather gets better, I'll be spending a lot of time there.

The other thing I like about the park, and this has been true of every park I've seen in Spain, there are little cafes dotted around the park so you can sit down have a coffee and a bocadillo. It doesn't matter how small the park is, there's always a cafe.

Later in the evening, I went with some students to an Irish bar in the Plaza Mayor called Moore's to watch the Real Madrid/Lyon game. I'm not a huge league follower, but one of my students is, and she was explaining to me the importance of the game. Unfortunately, since it was an Irish bar, the Manchester United game was playing on the bigger TV, but it was still fun to watch a soccer/futbol match in Spain. Next time, though, I think I might go to a bar closer to home where I'll find more locals. Real Madrid, by the way, lost.