Weekend trip to Madrid
We booked a trip to Madrid, arriving in Madrid last Sat and depart on Tues. The weather was simply too hot for us, feels like back in SG!!

Flew via BA and stayed at Hotel Praga, all booked via Expedia. The Madrid airport and the city are very well connected, we travelled everywhere via metro.

On the way to our first stop, we got lost and found ourselves at the Atocha train station.
Large plants and a pond full of turtles in the centre of the station.

First stop = Reine Sofia Museum
Modern art museum, not our cup of tea. Anyway, the entrance fee was free at the time we were there, thus worth the trip to see-see-look-look.

Realised that restaurant serve dinner late, thus we had a drink at Hardrock Cafe and walk to 25 Juan Bravo for dinner (as recommended by Telegraph).
There's not even a word of English on the menu and dinner is only serve from 9pm onwards!! However, we decide to order drinks and wait for dinner plus the waiter was very patient and tried his best to describe the menu to us. We can only guess and hope for the best for for what we ordered. The dishes were a plate of jamon (which is ham,really good), baby squid with chick pea (taste like chick pea so assume so as we can't read spanish!!) and goat cheese with crystallised onion (we thought he meant lamb stew, how wrong we were!!). The waiter was far to nice to us and we tried to finish off everything, although the cheese was just too cheesy to finish off!

Sunday
Had previously booked the bullfight online, thus need to arrive before 12.30pm to collect the ticket from Plaza del Carmen near Gran Via. Interesting building on the way.

Realised that the ticket price was only 24.70 euro each but we paid 32.40 euro each online.... At least we don't have to queue for the ticket at the entrance and had got the seats we want (first row of Category 2 and in shade).

Plan for Sunday is sight-seeing/ shopping and watch bull fight in the evening.
On the left : Plaza Mayor
On the right : Mercado de san miguel Not within my plan, but it was a great find and stop over for lunch here.

Oyster is Sam's favorite, thus a MUST have!
The smoked salmon was good.

Bull fight

The stadium was located near one of the metro station (Ventas), very easy to get to. At the stadium, you can rent seat cushion. The salesperson informed us that the fee is 2 euro each, we declined as I remember reading the forum that it cost only 1 euro. After we walked nearer to our zone, we saw the the cushion were rented for 1.20 euro, the previous salesperson were trying to cheat us (luckily I had read the forum!).
It's damn hot in Madrid, good thing Sam insisted on buying the seats in the shade, thank goodness for that!
The event consist of 6 bull fights, the first 2 were interesting, after that it gets abit boring and repetitive. However we stayed on, not wanting to miss out on anything. Our seats were fantastic as there's a father and son seated above us with the son kept asking questions (questions which we also like to ask) and his father seems to be very knowledgeable and explained all of them, with us tuning into their conversation.

Monday
The main purpose of our trip was to visit Segovia for it's suckling pig!! We saw a TV programme in UK which feature the restaurant cutting the suckling pig with a plate (see link for info), thus have decided to visit Segovia eversince. There's a fast train from Chamartin train station (Medrid) to Segovia-Guiomar, half an hour journey and a shuttle bus from train station to Segovia centre (about 20 mins). However the frequency of the train is about 1 and a half hour and we just miss the 10.30am train, thus we waited at the station for the next train at 12pm.

The restaurant we booked was Mason De Candido. We ordered a portion each and it was very delicious, juicy and the skin was very crispy. However I was very disappointed as they don't show the cutting of the suckling pig using plate.

After lunch, we need to walk the fats off!!

The Aquaduct, a heritage site. Magnificant!
Streets of Segovia and Cathedral.

Alcazar (Castle) of Segovia and we managed to climb the 152 steps in the tower of the castle.

We were back in Madrid at about 7pm and walked from Sol metro station to Plaza de la Independencia.
We wanted to take some night shots using our newly purchased Nikon D90, however we forgot to bring the tripod plus the sun sets at about 10pm, too late for us as we are too tired!

Tuesday
Slept till 10am and packed up to go back home.