El Escorial

This past Friday, I went to El Escorial with my civilization class. San Lorenzo de El Escorial is a town about 45 kilometers northwest of Madrid. Half of the kids in my civilzation class don't have class on Fridays because they aren't in the engineering program. They met at the Institute at 1:00 pm and took a charted bus to UAM, where they picked me and the other engineers up after our classes. The drive to El Escorial took around an hour and a half because of traffic. When we finally got to the town, we toured the Royal Seat of San Lorenzo de El Escorial, which is a palace that was built for Phillip II of Spain. The tour lasted around two hours. Honestly, I didn't really enjoy it that much because I was exhausted after a busy week of school. Also, the weather was very gloomy; the sky was grey and the weather was cold and very rainy. However, I was impressed by the size of the palace. It contains a school, a library, a church, and of course living quarters for the families of the monarchs that one resided there. Today, the Royal Seat of San Lorenzo de El Escorial is open to the public for tours and it no longer houses Spanish royals. After the tour, we all loaded back onto the bus and headed back to Madrid. The trip was short, but it was enough for us to be able to put into context the history we've been learning about for the past month.