 Today I traveled from Barcelona to Madrid, the capital city of Spain. The journey took place on Renfe (the state-owned Spanish rail company) AVE, an acronym for Alta Velocidad Española (literally, 'Spanish High Speed'). I've never traveled on a high speed train before, and it turned out to be a pretty cool experience. The entire trip from Barcelona to Madrid (a total distance of around 400 miles) took about three hours and twenty minutes (and it would have been even faster if we didn't make three stops along the way). I captured this image of one of the seats during a moment when the train reached its maximum speed of 300 kilometers per hour (186 miles per hour). At this speed, it felt surprisingly smooth; it was almost hard to believe that we were actually traveling this fast. The experience felt slightly more real as I traversed from one train car to another and stopped at the junction of the two rail cars; in that location, there was slightly more shaking, and while standing there, it certainly felt like we were breezing through the Spanish countryside. On arrival to Madrid, we settled into our hotel room. Our hotel, Holiday Inn Madrid, was located a few kilometers north of the center of Madrid; the hotel was a few hundred yards away from the Santiago Bernabéu football stadium, home of the Real Madrid club. I had an hour or so to explore my surroundings, so I found a grocery store and bought a Coca-Cola. Around 6:30PM, I would meet other English speaking tourists as part of the Globus tour around Spain (to everyone who I've met on the Globus tour: thanks for visiting my photoblog). We met our guide, Jose, who would be with us for the next seven days as we explored spectacular Spain. After we received some important information about passports and currency exchanges, everyone went around and introduced himself or herself. After the introductions, we had our dinner, and then we had an evening to rest or explore the city. NOTE: this entry is being posted retroactively (in July) to the day the image was captured. If you click on this image, you'd go to an entry I posted the day before. If you want to advance forward in time to see other pictures from Spain, click the '>' button, located on the bottom right of the image (to the right of the ABOUT section). |
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