I know I'm extremely behind now, but our internet has been acting up so it's been difficult to post. On the first of this month we went into Madrid for the day with our professor to go on a tour of the Royal Palace (Palacio Real.) We took the train into the city and got off to find ourselves in the middle of a blizzard...yea we were told winters are mild in Spain so we couldn't help but laugh at how horribly wrong our program advisers have been...anyway we got to the palace and decided to first check out the Real Armeria where there were armor and shields from the 13th century and the spanish civil war. It was really interesting to see how different every piece was because they were all engraved with elaborate scenery and epic battle scenes. I can't even imagine how heavy some of it must have been to wear during battle.
After that we took a tour of the actual palace. It was sooo ornate and beautifully decorated with frescoes and gold and chandeliers(the gala room is used now for state occasions and the table comfortably seats 150 people! and has 15 chandeliers!). Some rooms were almost too overdone...silk walls, tons of clocks (Fernando VI was a collector), sculptures, paintings...it was almost overwhelming how many things were crammed into every room. I thought one of the prettiest rooms was the music room. It wasn't as overdone and had beautiful wood floors. The room had the world's only complete Stradivarius string quintet, and the instruments were just absolutely gorgeous. They have a specialist come in to do tuneups and play them, and he makes sure that the humidity in the room stays perfect so that they don't warp. Sounds like a pretty cool job to me!
We then went a grabbed a cheap bite in madrid before heading back because it was still pretty nasty weather, but overall it was a really cool visit!
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment