Day 4: Holy Toledo!!

This morning, we caught a thrilling, 5 am cab ride to the airport, driven by a cabbie that gunned the car up to 185 kph, sang us a Portugese love song, and chatted animatedly in Portugese about soccer (we think).

Here, Jack and Kelly wait sleepily for our 6:35 am flight to Madrid.

Despite how tired we were, we arrived in Madrid without problem, dropped off our luggage at our hotel, and managed to get ourselves to the train station to catch a fast train to Toledo, about 3o minutes outside of Madrid.

Toledo boasts a humongous and intricately designed cathedral, filled with gold, renowned art work, and Gothic, Baroque and Neo-classical architecture. The city is also famous for beautiful, artisinal ceramics, and marzapan candy.

Supposedly, the iron forgers in Toledo are so skilled that bull fighters from all over Spain will order their swords only from craftsman in this town. The detailed iron work can be seen all over Toledo.

Despite the confusing map and the winding, cobblestone paths, we managed to find the Museum Santa Cruz, a free museum in town that had an extensive El Greco exhibit, offering paintings of different saints and apostles cast in brilliant colors and a distinctive brush stroke.

Red rooftops of the Jewish quarter...

An old fortress wall...

...and the royal alcazar high on the hill.

We made it back to Madrid at 7pm, and gave our weary bodies a well-deserved, two hour siesta, before we set out again for our highly anticipated, Madrid tapas crawl! We hit the Puerto del Sol area, and made our rounds through 5 different tapas bars.

Each bar had a different character and tapas specialty, but in the end, our most treasured memory of this night was spending the time with good friends. How often do you get to spend good quality time with loved ones halfway across the world?