More Madrid-Vale, Vale (OK, OK)

For our second day in Madrid, we walked all the way down to the Prado to see some art. We loved walking through lovely neighborhoods to the museum-starting with our walk through Jardine Sabattini and along the Palacio Real...more street performers and lovely statues.

The neighborhoods had great old buildings.

Purple is cheery. I always take photos of purple stuff for Linda Roman and Nikki.

Me and Nana taken by Gillian and some stranger in orange.

I love oranges and yellows on buildings.  El  Prado is a great building and we enjoyed our visit there.  There were not too many photo ops because you cannot take pictures there.  But it was fun.

Across the street was a lovely church and while walking back up town we saw a very important building.

The church and the important building:

It is hard to see the name but this is the Real Academia Española-the absolute authority on all questions about grammar and usage in the Spanish language.  Whenever we had questions in our Spanish classes at Berkeley, our professors would preface their responses with "according to the Academia...", end of discussion.  Mariana was taking a Spanish class at NYU, not the real one but an informal drop-in lunch time thing she did the first year.  Her Argentinian teacher said that of the 4 extra letters in the Spanish alphabet, all but ñ had been demoted to non-letters:  ll, rr, ch, which we had been told were actual letters...Mariana argued with her, called Luis to get the real scoop; he agreed with me, but we decided to check with "The Academia" (which you can now do online, unlike 35 years ago) and, actually, yes, the other 3 letters have lost their status. I don't know if Mariana ever apologized but we all felt a little let-down, sort of like when Pluto lost its planet status.

We walked back up through the literary district where many famous authors lived and worked and I took photos of their tiles;  they are on my cell phone and I'll add them later.

We had a great lunch, headed back to towards shopping areas, bought books, and the girls looked around...we got back at 7, very tired, rested and ate near our hotel....