Madrid

The cold that´s been passed around to about half the people on my tour caught up with me yesterday. Bleh. I had a bit of a scratchy throat for a couple days, but the late nights and illness finally hit me harder and made it tough to do as much. Plus once again I only got 4 or 5 hours of sleep. I got up at 7:30 to go to the Valley of the Fallen, which is pretty amazing, by the way.

The ruthless Spanish dictator Franco decided to build a monument to those who died in the Spanish civil war when he came to power. I wonder if he remembered the many thousands of innocents slaughtered in Guernica just so the Nazis could test some weapons? Or the many more thousands of civilians that he had executed for disagreeing with him? Hmm... didn´t think so... the monument is for soldiers. Anyway, about 100,000 of them are buried there next to the cathedral. This isn´t a normal cathedral though. It´s basically the inside of a big hill that was hollowed out up in the mountains outside Madrid. It was so big that to avoid offending the Vatican by making a cathedral larger than St Peter´s, they had to move the doors further inside to make the worship area a bit smaller. Everything in there is just huge and there´s a nearly 500 foot tall carved stone base and stone cross on top. Everything just looks like each time the architects submitted a plan, it was sent back with the words, ¨NO! BIGGER!¨ on it.

With the illness catching up to me and the fact that I want to go out late tonight if I can manage it, I´m going to go take a long nap now. Tomorrow the tour ends and everyone leaves. I´ve got one extra night, or rather part of a night. I have to be at the airport around 4:30am the next day. Ack!