EU Holiday, September 10 (The Walking Debod)

Visited the Temple Of Debod in the morning, which looks like it belongs in Egypt instead of Spain. I think it was moved, or a gift, or something like that. It has a few of those arches outside, and a sort-of reflecting pool, as well as a small building with some Egyptian artifacts. To the other end of the park, which sadly was filled with trash and seems like it must be populated by homeless people, was the Madrid version of the cable car or teleferico. It wasn't opening until something ridiculous like 12pm, but the other station did not seem to be elevated much higher than the starting point, so it didn't seem like it was worth waiting around for.

The Temple Of Debod.

The Temple Of Debod, view partially obstructed.

We walked back through Madrid and down to the Caixa Forum, there was also one of these in Barcelona but this one is much better. It has this strange vertical wall with plants and shrubs growing on it, and the other side is a brown copper, which works well together somehow. The museum inside is free and sponsored by La Caixa, one of the banks in Madrid. They had exhibits on two levels, one was all photographs of old structures around Moscow and other parts of Russia which was quite good, and on the other level was some South American artifacts collection and Haiti earthquake photographs.

The Caixa Forum building and vertical garden wall.

More of the garden wall.

I had to spend the next hour in a queue at the Atocha Renfe train station to buy a ticket to Segovia, the only enjoyable part of that was seeing the large indoor garden they have at the station. In the afternoon we went to an Irish Bar that was showing the Liverpool vs. Stoke game, there was a surprising number of Liverpool fans in Madrid, yet they all had a disappointing day on this occasion.

Atocha Renfe station.

After that it was time for a real game, so we walked up to Bernabeu which was actually quite a long way. All the seats were kind of dirty and didn't look like they get cleaned often, but even worse than that, smoking is allowed in the stadium. Wherever I looked, pretty much everyone around me was smoking, and they would finish one and then move straight on to the next. It wasn't so bad during the game, but each time a goal was scored seemed to be the time when everyone would start up. At half time everyone moves from smoking to unwrapping their foil baguettes, almost everyone had one of these too! The atmosphere from the game and crowd was otherwise pretty good, and it was a close game with Real Madrid 4 Getafe 2 at the end.

Game time at the Bernabeu.