San Isidro & Gran Via's 100th Birthday

In the beginning of May, Madrid was overtaken with celebrations for it's patron saint, San Isidro.  I already posted a few pictures from the kickoff of this celebration here, and I just wanted to add a few more pics from the week.

There were large stages set up around the city, and at one of them, we saw dancers from each region performing in their typical style & costume.  Pretty awesome.  I was too far away from the stage to get any sort of cool video, or pics for that matter, but I sneakily snapped some of people as they walked in front of us.  Here's a taste:

We headed downtown to see what the other festivities were, and we couldn't help but stop at one of our absolutely favorite new bars for a quick tapa & beer.  This place, I think, was one of the first operating bars in Madrid, and they have this a-mazing fried cod there.  If you don't like fish, you'll like this.  If you like fish, you'll love this place.  Pretty much any weekend that we're downtown, we manage to find ourselves at a little table outside this bar.

There are these doughnuts that everyone eats for the holiday, and I think we started a new tradition with Tep - whenever we would pass a bakery with the doughnuts we'd each pick up one and eat it.  It was like a pub crawl with delicious little doughnuts.  For all you CF people, I don't think they hold a candle to JR Doughnuts, but I definitely felt better after eating 1/2 dozen of these as apposed to those Sturgis Falls delicacies.  (San Isidro doughnuts aren't fried, but baked)

Lucky for us, this year, Gran Via turned 100 years old.  If I was Jay, I would start on some sort of long treatise as to how in the world it could be possible that a road would turn 100 years old, but, since I'm not him, I'll just leave you with a couple of pics from the celebration :)

Imagine Times Square.  Imagine it covered in blue carpet.  That was one thing the city did to celebrate the birthday.  We all got to walk on it later (um, gross), but yet, very cool.

There were several stages set up along the length of the street, and people absolutely everywhere.  I don't know if I've ever seen so many people in one place.  Imagine, up to that white building in the background is not even half the length of the street covered in blue carpet and people.

What birthday would be complete without a birthday cake?  It was plastic, and about 2 stories tall though...

And, of course, fireworks!  We met up with some friends for dinner at a Galacian Bar, and luckily, we made it back to the main drag for the big finale.  It will have to serve as our replacement for the 4th of July this year!  It was such a great day, and I'm glad we were here to celebrate it!