Views from my City: Madrid

As my time in Madrid comes to a close, I figure I would post up a few photos from some sites that have been regular haunts of mine over the last ten months:

The view from my window in my new apartment in the neighborhood of Moncloa and Argüelles.

A shot of the neighborhood Moncloa, from a country club due west of the city. The buildings include a the Ejercito de Aire (Airforce) building as well as a view of the park where I go running, el Parque del Oeste (Park of the West). The tall UFO style building was built in honor of the Barcelona 1992 Olympic games and features a panoramic view of the city.

Plaza of España, which has the city's own Cervantez Monument, was my old neighborhood for most of the year. It is a five minute walk from my new apartment and regularly hosts artisan fairs as well as the occasional concert or festival from time to time.

The Plaza also has Madrid's first skyscrapers, which were built in the 50s as Franco's reluctant nod to modern urban planning. Accordingly, these buildings are not that tall, especially in comparison to the major skyscrapers that dot north Madrid's skyline.

The Reina Sofia, Madrid's modern art museum, is my favorite gallery in the city. Picasso's denouncement of the fascist bombing of the town of Guernica -- Guernica -- is the centerpiece of the Museum's collection, which includes work by Miró, Dalí, Robert Capa, and, obviously, Picasso as well as works from 21st century Spanish artists. The museum is named after the current Queen of Spain who is major patron of the arts. Interesting note: the building was the city's first public hospital in the late 19th century.

La Casa de la Cerveza, an international beer house, is hands down one of my favorite bars in the city. Being a bit of a beer snob, there's only so much Spanish lager I can drink before I crave a Belgian Abbey beer. That said, the Spaniards do have a Abbey style beer, Legado de Yuste, which was first for Carlos I by Belgian monks to alleviate the symptoms of a fever that he contracted around 1516. It is very good, although hard to find in many Spanish Bars due to the popularity of other brands such as Cruz Campo and Mahou, which are lagers.