I will be solo in Madrid from the 2nd to the 5th of December and solo in Barcelona from the 6th to the 10th. I was looking for a schedule of events at El Centro de la Villa de Madrid, Auditorio Nacional de Musica, and Palau de la Musica Catalan in Barcelona. Wasn't having much luck finding them on the internet. Any suggestions? Thanks- happy travels.

i don't think you'll have any problems finding things to do!

for instance, you could sit on a bench and just watch and in a few minutes you can find a hundred things to check out...

one cool thing to look for in way of art is the traveling expositions of art that make their way around europe, in particular a series that caja de madrid (big bank) offers from time to time... the last one i saw was called "the road to the abstract," featuring the works of piet mondrian and vasiliy kandinsky. what a great show of works that was! i found out about that one standing in line at a caja de madrid branch speaking to a beautiful spanish woman (you should have been there, MM ).

of course, be sure to see the reina sofia and the prado (as well as the thiessen (sp?).

architecture is also one of my favourites... you have only to walk around the city for this...

by the prado there is a street that has a ton of booksellers selling books on anything you could possibly want to know. i found a book there that had all the street names of madrid and what they are named after.... cool stuff!

you will not have any problems finding things of interest in spain! have fun!

Thanks- I actually think that I will be going to the opera in Barcelona and then I have tickets to go see Real Madrid play December 10th- the day before I come home to the US. If anyone wants to meet up before the game to head over to the stadium- let me know. I'd love to go with some other people.

The website for the Palau de la Musica is www.palaumusica.org. They're not yet set up in English or Spanish, but it's not that hard to decipher the schedule, which is listed in Catalan (Temporada de Concerts).

A helpful site, with lots of links, is www.barcelona-on-line.es. By the way, in case you're not already familiar with www.dogpile.com, I highly recommend it, especially for foreign-language searches. Basically, it allows you to use something like 10 search engines simultaneously. I've had much better success with dogpile than with Yahoo! Spain, for example.

Have a great trip!