El Escorial

So to preface: I was totally sick this weekend. How lame is that?! Sick! In Spain! I know, totally dumb. But on Saturday we went to El Escorial! It’s this sweet monastery/palace concoction about an hour from Madrid built for Phillip II. I bet it was more than an hour from the heart of metropolitan Madrid for him, eh? Anyway, this place is AAAAmazing. So beautiful! Every Spanish king and their significant others have been buried there for centuries. Honestly, I was a leeetle disappointed until we got to the burial chamber. It was like descending into the Phantom’s lair, I tell ya. We went from a cool stone building with some bedroom and nice paintings down this gorgeous staircase with marble-lined walls to this PHENOMENAL, deliciously-Baroque tomb. Seriously. Tomb. I had to keep reminding myself we were surrounded by corpses, tho, because the room really was breathtaking. Gold, rich mahogany, marble. Such luxury for such very dead people. There’s actually a rotting room were the corpses have to decompose before they can be entombed properly, how sweet is that? They’ve got two or three bodies in there, waiting to be placed in their now blank coffins. Each coffin has the name on it when the skeleton is placed inside. From the main burial chamber we went thru at least half a dozen more, almost entirely of marble. SO MUCH MARBLE. After El Escorial, I basically wanted to die of sickness so I don’t really remember much, and life has been pretty calm since…but I bought a saWEET pair of India pants! Pictures to come, they’re amazing.