Parque del Buen Retiro (Buen Retiro Park, or literally "Park of the Pleasant Retreat") is a 350-acre inner city park - one of the largest in Madrid. It was originally the site of a royal palace built back in 1632 but was blown to smithereens in 1868 during the Peninsular War, and this is what we have now.

In the south of the park is a small lake (with little turtles) overlooked by the glass Palacio de Cristal (Crystal Palace). It was built in 1887 to house exotic plants brought over from the Philippines (for whatever reason), and is now mainly used for temporary exhibitions and for vandals to throw rocks at.

Close to the northern entrance of the park is Estanque del Retiro (Retiro's Pond) - a large and boring artificial lake, but you can hire these little row boats.

This guy had the right idea ;)

After a lot of walking, we jumped on one of those open-top city bus tours to put the feet up and get shown around. Some time later up the road it was traffic and pedestrian chaos. Swarms of people were piling out from every direction and charging up the road.

A little further up the road is where they were all piling in to - Santiago Bernabéu Stadium, home to Real Madrid Football Club (David Beckham's old pals). We decided to check out the happy-haps and see if we could get in to see some footy!

During the walk from the bus stop to the stadium I was cracking up at the way people had parked absolutely anywhere possible. Some even opted for the footpath, and some just blatantly double parked blocking other cars in hahaha!

The best solution was clearly the good old moped!

The riot squad was on hand to deal with the footy fanatics that turn into idiots and start fights after the match.

It looks as though it was a couple of Madrid teams going at it, one of which was Real.

Instead we settled for the cheap option of seeing what we could through security gates outside hahaha!

We stayed in the area for dinner, and made the mistake of getting the Metro back into town at about the same time as the rest of the stadium.

The following afternoon we caught a Metro to the end of the line to check out suburban Madrid. I was largely uninspired, but surprise surprise there was an Irish pub out there. Almost everywhere you go in the world there seems to be an Irish pub hehe!

We had dindins at Sobrino de Botin - the oldest restaurant in the world according to the Guinness Book of Records!

Board shorts, wife beater, and jandels / flip flops / whatever wasn't exactly suitable attire so I was given a white shirt to spill my food on instead :)

Botin's specialty is suckling pig roasted in a wood-fired oven, and holy shit it was by far and away the best piece of pig I've ever had!

Look at them all there ready to go - poor piggies, but YUM!

Views of Gran Via at around 10pm - busy busy busy. The shot on the right is looking down from our hostel. Good thing I lived beside a freeway in Brisbane for 19 months and so am somewhat used to traffic noise all night!