May 5-11,
2014
MADRID
We
arrived in Madrid only slightly jet-lagged, making our way easily through the
clean and modern metro system to our neighborhood, a lively quarter with a fun
mix of residents: old, young, African, Arabic, Chinese, little kids, white-haired
señoras, college students, couples with little dogs, young mothers with babies,
everybody moving about their day. We have a little IKEA-styled apartment with a
view to the airshaft, not to the street as we had hoped, but it is nice and
quiet, and we are only a few blocks from the major museums. We stop at the
corner café for a sandwich, and get our first tapas when the waiter places a
dish of potato salad on the table while we wait for our order. Well, ok…
We aren’t
far from the Plaza Mayor, the main plaza of the old city. In the early
afternoon, it’s not at all crowded, so we can enjoy the architecture and the
open space. There are a few buskers working, somewhat dispiritedly maybe: a guy
in a Mickey Mouse suit, another waving a squeaky noise wand. One of the more
clever bits is an Invisible Man, a white hat and glasses floating over a dapper
white suit. One gimmick is a goat-puppet thing, a cape of long silver strands
with a goat head, worn over a kneeling figure who shakes and bows in a goat-like
manner. A second goat-puppet works an opposite corner. Now, if they’d team up
and have a big goat-puppet battle, we might give them a couple Euros.
We stop
for a cold seltzer water, and get a plate of olives! This tapas thing is kind
of fun. Later, at the little restaurant
where we stop for dinner, we get a dish of small ham and cheese sandwiches…and
a plate of potato chips. Dinner gets to be redundant around here.
As I
said, our apartment is quiet. So quiet, we sleep for 12 hours our first night.
We can hardly wake ourselves up. But the city awaits! We walk to tour the Royal Palace,
one of the most sumptuous that we’ve seen so far. We find the city full of
lovely shady parks and charming 19th century architecture. We stop
at the very touristy San Miguel Mercado, where scores of honeymooners from South Carolina are
enjoying the fabulous tapas. The place is just too inviting, so we forgive all
the “other” tourists for living and find ourselves a table and a couple beers.
The next
day, we visit the Prada, one of the world’s great museums and home to most of Spain’s
great art. The building and the layout is similar to the National Gallery in
DC, with plenty of opportunities to find oneself completely and happily lost.
OK, maybe not Bob, but most other people would be happily lost. There are
several artists working on reproductions in the galleries; a few are just
astonishingly talented. We enjoy the Goyas, Velasquez, El Grecos, Bosch and
Breugels, too. There is a special exhibition of huge tapestries designed by
Rubens, and one of El Greco’s library with his own notes and commentary on the
margins.
After the
Prado, we walk through the acres of the Parc de Retiro,
Madrid’s Central Park.
It’s here that we some of the real charm of the city – the people who live and
work here participate fully in the city, enjoying the many parks and plazas as
part of their daily lives. We don’t feel like tourists at all, even when we
order a pitcher of “sangria” at the café.
On
Friday, we go to the Regina
Sophia Museum,
with a more contemporary art collection. The Museum is pretty gigantic, with a
huge modern wing that contains an auditorium, library and offices connected to
a 19th C building with 4 floors around an open courtyard. We keep
working our way around and through, and never seem to find an end. The
collection here includes Miro, Calder and Picasso, with one great room for Guernica, full of art pilgrims. We’ve actually
come at a time when the crowds are small, so we can stand right at the front
for as long as we like. The adjoining room shows related works by Picasso,
smaller studies and figures, which I enjoy quite a lot.
Saturday
is a gorgeous spring day. We walk over to another museum, the Thyssen-Borne
Misza, a private collection donated to the state, housed in an attractive
building with red marble floors and terra-cotta walls. In the entry, there are
larger than life portraits of King Philip and Queen Sophia, she dressed in an
elegant cream lace column gown. On the next wall we have similar portraits of
the Baron Thyssen-Borne, with more medals on him than Michael Phelps, with his
wife Camilla, who’s done up like a Kardashian GlamorShot, in a high-fashion
one-shoulder gown, with her precious Maltese at her feet, artistically
presented in an ultra-slimming side pose. But enough about her…
We are
just lucky enough to attend at the last day of an exhibition of Cezanne
landscapes and still lifes, from museums and private collections all around the
world. The premise of the exhibit is that Cezanne created his still life
arrangements in compositions that essentially mirror the landscapes that he so
loved. Placing the works together illustrates the similarities. We like
thinking about Cezanne carrying his tote of paints and canvas up the mountain
paths every day, painting away in the summer shade. The rest of the museum is a
survey of art history, with a little of everything, Medieval to Modern, room by
room. One area shows the hyper-realistic
pre-photo photorealism, aka trompe l’oiel,
so popular in the 17th Century. At the sight of one painting of a
pantry table full of fresh seafood all ready for the cook, with a big old tabby
stretching out her paw to filch an oyster, I shout out GET OFF THE TABLE!!! and
scare everybody in the room.
After the
museum, we walk through the city to the outskirts, following a walk along the
shallow Manzanares river, to what is known as the “Oldest Cider House in Madrid, maybe Spain” Casa Mingo. It’s a big, dark
tavern, the walls lined with bottles and barrels of their own cider, and a big
oven roasting chicken, the specialty of the house. The place is so empty, we
fear it may be closed. There are, however, about a dozen of those older
gentlemen European waiters hanging about the bar area, paying us absolutely no
mind. So far, we’re just lookers, not customers. We wander through the place
and finally settle on a table near the entry. Now, a waiter comes over and
takes our order for cider and chicken. Of course. Just as he leaves us, a great
busload of tour travelers marches in and fills the room. They all sit at the
pre-set tables, and the waiters animate themselves to bring in plates of ham,
bowls of bread and bottles of wine and cider, then full plates with whole
chickens. These tour people take their meals seriously. They seem to be Dutch or
German: grey-haired, tall, gangly-thin, dour. They work at their dinners, with
a muted hum of conversation in the air. We are entertained by the sight of
them. How can these thin people eat so much? How is there so much wine and so
little laughter? The mysteries of life.
We take
our long walk back home, and coming down our block as the night starts getting
dark, we encounter one of the pleasures of Madrid – EVERYONE is out on the street,
sitting on the benches, filling the cafés, standing on the sidewalks. They’re
all just talking, drinking wine or coffee, having conversations and
socializing. It’s just so pleasant.
We notice
a certain hairstyle showing up on a lot of the younger people, one that you
might describe as a Rasta-Mullet, with the forward part of the hair fairly
short, often shaved high around the sides, maybe with a little bang or
pompadour effect at the front, then at the back, a Reggae party goin’ on mon,
with a thick hank of Rastafarian dreadlocks hanging down the back to the waist.
Saturday,
we take another long river walk to a spot where a gondola ride carries you high
over a fairly non-descript part of the city, to a great expanse of rugged
parkland full of trails through low, arid pine woods, and not much else. There
is a restaurant at the end of the ride, and an amusement park zoo of some sort
nearby. People come here for the gondola ride and picnics. Most of the children
end up in the game room of the restaurant.
Our walk
home takes us into a park with a relocated Egyptian temple from 2000 BC, a gift
to Madrid
from the Egyptian government for some reason we forget. It’s weird, but fun. A
little further through the park, we happen upon a big statue of Don Quixote and
Sancho Panza, a very popular photo op for the tourists, rubbing the brass
burro’s snout all shiny.
On
Sunday, we head through the city streets to find an exhibition center from our
guidebook, and are blasted by the sound of about 1000 Harley Davidson
motorcycles enjoying a major rally. They all swarm by, waving and honking, then
pull over, filling a street near us, and hop off the bikes for a group photo in
front of an Arc de Triomphe style monument. Then they’re off again, roaring
into the city.
We continue past the National Library and Archeology Museum to an exhibit on the Chinese
Terracotta Army, which is interesting, but mostly made up of copies of the
statues, and not very Spanish.
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