Visit to Real Madrid’s Home Turf

Since our schedule today probably won’t time out right for us to catch a football game (soccer in North America), we decided to do a tour of Real Madrid’s Santiago Bernabeu Stadium.  It was either tour this stadium or the one for Manchester United, and the Santiago Bernabeau Stadium tour got better reviews online so we decided to just go for it.

We took the metro and it was quite easy to find – the metro station is right outside the gate you go to for the tour.  The lady at the ticket counter didn’t speak English so we just showed her two fingers, silently paid her 30 euros (15 each), and followed the other people in front of us.  Once we entered, we realized that this would be a self-guided tour that involved a lot of reading!

We had noticed three large busloads of kids arriving as we were buying tickets and had hoped that they would be touring at a different time than us, but they ended up doing the tour at the EXACT same time  Sadly, there was no way around them – they were too large a group to wait to pass, and if we tried to pass them we would have to skip half the tour.  So, for the rest of the day, we listened to a bunch of screaming rowdy kids shout at each other and we couldn’t even figure out what language they were speaking!  Paul put it perfectly when he muttered to me “when you don’t know what they’re saying, it sort of sounds like birds squawking”!  I think he has even less desire to have children now…(editor’s note: sabotage the birth control and when your belly starts to show, blame it on all the carbs and ice cream!)

The tour and stadium were pretty cool – you get to see the stadium from the highest section, the mid-section, and the ground level (although you don’t get to actually go on the grass, just the outside ring around the field).  You also get to see a history collection, a trophy collection, the Presidential Box, the Players Tunnel, benches, and technical area (and you’re allowed to sit in the seats they sit in), and the visiting team’s change room.  Considering the Real Madrid is the richest team in the league (or something like that, we honestly don’t know anything about soccer), we sort of expected the changing rooms to be nicer, but everything else was quite impressive.

After seeing how big the stadium is, we are kind of sad that we won’t get to experience an actual game – it seems impossible to imagine such a large space completely filled!  But then again, I’d probably just be lost during the entire game anyway….