Saturday- let's see the sights!

So after a wonderful night out on the town, we slept in a little. We woke up at 11, which for Spaniards seems like normal wake up time since Mara has been waking up at this time if not later most days. We had a nice bowl of Special K and headed on our way!

The first stop was Plaza Mayor! Espe told me recently that Madrid was trying to convince the Olympic committee to have the Olympics in Madrid. Her argument was "that everyone needed to have un cafe con leche in the Plaza Mayor". It was pretty stunning and I am going to try my hardest to find my way back here when I show Taylor and Tristan around! Me as a tour

guide. HA!

and then we took a selfie with it. You can clearly see how exhausted I am. I should have worn my shades...didn't get the memo.

Close up view of the building in Plaza Mayor! So beautiful.

After we got to the Plaza Mayor we headed towards the Palace and the cathedral. I definitely do not remember how to get there as I was definitely still half asleep and exhausted from the night before at 1pm. 

This is the Almudena Cathedral! Too bad this dude walked right in front of my pic!

Directly across from it is the Palace.

It looks beautiful, although don't let this picture fool you. We were so cheap and didn't feel like paying we couldn't go in. So we got some pictures from behind the bars. (I was terrified taking the photo above as I head my phone through the bars. I was solely concentrating on not dropping it!)

Along the walk we saw some really beautiful buildings! Some of them were just random beautiful buildings that had no true significance, like this one!

Beautiful random building.

Next we went to the Temple Debod that was originally built in Egypt, but was rebuilt in Spain. Apparently it is one of the coolest places to watch the sunset, but alas it was not sundown (aka 10pm) while we were there. 

There is some history about it, and I'm way to lazy to retype it all so here it is from the lovely wiki!

"In 1960, due to the construction of the Great Dam of Aswan and the consequent threat posed to several monuments and archeological sites, UNESCO made an international call to save this rich historical legacy. As a sign of gratitude for the help provided by Spain in saving the temples of Abu Simbel, the Egyptian state donated the temple of Debod to Spain in 1968.

The temple was rebuilt in one of Madrid's parks, the Parque del Oeste, near the Royal Palace of Madrid, and opened to the public in 1972.^[5] The reassembled gateways appear to have been placed in a different order than when originally erected. Compared to a photo of the original site, the gateway topped by a serpent flanked sun appears not to have been the closest gateway to the temple proper.^[6] It constitutes one of the few works of ancient Egyptian architecture which can be seen outside Egypt and the only one of its kind in Spain."

Theres a nice pool behind the building. See how it would make a lovely place to see a sunset?!

I'll admit, I did not do my due diligence and take the best pictures of this place as I could. The picture from wiki is so amazing that I feel the need to post it so you know how amazing this place can look!

I wish I took this picture. 

Definitely going to try and go there for sunset with Taylor and Tristan!

Our tour continued past the old mail building. I wish our mail building looked like this!!

More walking brought us to the Victory Arch of Madrid.

and more walking. We were pretty much exhausted and decided to head back to Cristina's apartment to relax for a bit before the Gay Pride Parade. 

Just a small touch of what we saw at the parade. Funny thing though, the parade was not moving! Not much seemed to be happening besides a lot of drinking and people standing in the street like they were going to be moving down the street, but they never did. Also, this is the street parallel to where all the people were. In the background of this pic you can start to see a lot of people, yea it was packed in there. We had been drinking a lot the night before, so we decided not to start drinking at 6. 

Cristina decided to go back out to the parade but Darah and I were pretty pooped form the day and we were planning on heading out to Segovia the next day (Sunday), so we stayed in Saturday night and watched some divinity (tv channel that is a mixture between hgtv and ion). 

So that pretty much sums up Saturday in Madrid!