Mi Vida en España...

Yesterday, Kaitlyn, Kelly and I ventured over to San Lorenzo de el Escorial, which is a small town about an hour outside of Madrid.

The trip started off a little rocky because I didn’t realize until the morning that one of the girls that we had discussed going with texted me the night before to ask if we were still going. I responded but we never heard back from her. Then, we get to the train station and we are immediately confused because it looked much more like an airport with security than a train station. After asking for help, we were able to find where we needed to go and find Kelly. Unfortunately, we had to wait an hour for our train to come and it took a good deal of effort to figure out the whole train situation. But we got on the correct train and promptly headed to our desired destination.

When we got to El Escorial, we thought it would be wise to look up the time schedule for the returning trains. Turns out that there were trains leaving at 415pm and 730pm. Since we didn’t want to stay in El Escorial as late as 730pm, we decided that we had 3.5 hours to soak in all of the town as possible. 

As true tourists, our first stop was to the Visitors center so we could get a map of the town and also so we can make sure we hit everything we should hit in our time crunch. Luckily for us, the city is known for the Real Monastery and there was lots to see inside of it. We paid our 5 Euro student fee to get inside and we began our big tour throughout the Monastery. 

One downside of the Monastery was that we were not allowed to take any photos, even without flash. Kaitlyn was about to snap a few forbidden photos, but I was not so lucky. While we were in the Monastery, we got to see:

1. a museum dedicated to architecture of the Monastery
2. the Royal Library
3. the Basilica - where all three of us lit prayer candles for a 0.60 Euro donation
4. Pantheon of Kings
5. Hall of Battles
6. Garden of Friars
7. Courtyard of Kings

It was all really, really beautiful, very calm and serene. Though, I am not much for nature, the views were absolutely to die for. We were able to stay at the Monastery for a little bit to soak in all of the nature and history. 

After we finished the tour of the Monastery, we headed back to the buses, so we would be sure not to miss our train going back home to Madrid.

It was definitely a much more easy going trip than Toledo because we weren’t trying to cram in as many thing as possible. We went to one location that housed basically all that we wanted to see and more.