Hola Madrid: Day 1 in pictures

The title reads hello Madrid. Last evening I reached Madrid and joined our team from Purdue. Here is our group picture with the noteworthy emblem of the town hall of Madrid:

Soon after coming I discovered that we were living in the historical town of Madrid, where buildings date to 16th century. One of the things I liked is that the streets are named after the kind of shops/ residents’ profession. This is only in the old city of Madrid like this one for example, where arenal means ground and bordadore means embroidery. Well, it helps if you know spanish:

We toured around some historical locations like the market place (Plaza de mayor):

Also the Royal Palace:

But the moment of my day was our visit to Real Madrid stadium. Of course, we couldn’t spend quite a lot of time as much as I would like to as they were preparing for tomorrow’s champions league game, but we did go to the important places, Here are some pictures:

At the pitch.

The tunnel were the players stand before the game begins and the benches where legends like Zidane, Beckham, Ronaldo, Kaka and Cristiano Ronaldo sat:

About food, Last night I had some Tapas, which is kind of a traditional dish in here. It is roasted bread crumps served with some toppings on them. When you go to traditional restaurants, you see meat hanging inside. Those are part of the curing process of the meat. So, this meat is marinated with salt and is left in a room with certain temperature and they are left for aging. And these restaurants kind of smell meat.

When one of our coordinators, who explained to me about the process of curing meat, offered me a Tapas to try, I didn’t know that it was uncooked. However cured they are, it is still ‘raw’ beef. I still don’t know how I finished eating one of those tapas with cured meat on it. Here are some Tapas…

I liked one of the deserts I had. Its called Tortella de Fruites.

Lastly, tonight we went to eat at the oldest restaurant in the world (According to Guinness book of Records), that is existing since 1725 on the same location. They served wine a little differently (though not their specialty), with ice and Orange in the porcelain Mug: