Marching in Madrid

Well Madrid is a pretty big city compared to what I've been seeing. It reminds me a lot of London with the architecture and the bustle. We arrived in Madrid and went straight to the hostel. It's supposedly a gay friendly hostel and the decorations look like it. I can't describe it, but the style fits with the gay friendly vibe. No big deal. Plus, it was a great big room that was nice and clean.

After dropping off our stuff, we went and explored the Plaza Mayor. It was amazing how many street performers there were. They were everywhere. And hardly anybody was giving them money (probably because there were so many). We saw artists, musicans playing wine glasses, a demented winny the pooh, a GI Joe, and many more human statues. From the plaza Mayor, we went exploring walking down through the Plaza Sol and towards the resting gardens on the other side of town. There are lots of shops of all different pursuasions and tons of people always milling about. We didn't end up going to the resting gardens, but we went to the botanical gardens instead. They had a very large collection of plants but I must say, my favorite was their grape vines. They have a huge tunnel of vines and up each spoke of the tunnel is a different grape varietal from different places in Spain.

From there, we meandered uptown because I wanted to stop by a wine shop and an olive oil shop. At the wine shop, I tasted one of their simple wines. It wasn't very good. It just wasn't balanced. At the olive oil shop, they had a good selection and I ended up picking one from Andalucia.

After that little bit of shopping, we went in search of this chocolate shop that was supposed to be part chocolate shop, part art gallery. We didn't find it, but we did find a patisserie in about the same spot. So we had a light dinner of quiche and pastry there before returning to the hostel.

In the morning, we tried to go the Palacio Real but it was closed for the day, so we went go see a monestary. While waiting to get into the monestary, a political caravan came and stopped right in front of us and everybody went into the building beside the monestary. And we were wondering why there were snipers on the roof across the building :-). It might also be why the palace was closed. Don't know though.

In the monestary, they don't just let you wander. It's a forced guided tour and they were only running in Spannish, so we didn't really know what they were saying. But, they had a lot of really good looking art. Especially the tapestries, those were fantastic, if faded as all tapestries are.

From the monestary, we had lunch. Matilda wanted to get some spicy food and she found a Thai place so we just went in there. It fixed the craving. After that, we went to the Prado for the afternoon. They had a student rate but you have to be under 25. damn! The museum itself was pretty big but I was able to get through all of it in the time we had there. Of course I wasn't looking in detail at everything, I was basically using the audio guide and their map and making sure I hit the audio for all the "masterpieces". The audio was really very useful in order to get the context for so many of the paintings. For example, in a royal family portrait, the painter put the queen in the center of the frame and the king off to the side a little, probably because the queen was known to be the one really in control. I like understanding the historical context of things. If you don't have that, it's just another pretty picture. I also don't understand why all these Spanish galleries and museums don't let you take pictures. I'd expect not being allowed to use a flash because it'll damage the works, but almost everywhere, you can't even take a normal picture. It was very dissapointing.

From the Prado, we went back to the hostel and I went exploring while Matilda rested. I ended up mostly around Grand Via, the Times Square of Madrid. But it's not quite Times Square. Times Square doesn't have hookers. I was walking down one of the streets and noticed a very tall bottle blond woman wearing a pair of super tight and short shorts. I remember thinking, that's weird. They I saw her try and proposition a guy walking by. After that, I noticed that there were tons of hookers. It was a whole hooker line right down the promenade, one per tree. Definitely not Times Square.

One of my goals exploring was that I wanted to find some clothes for a relatively cheap price that I could wear on the trip home and stay bedbug free. I went into a bunch of shops but some were too expensive and some just had crap. Eventually, I ended up at one of the El Corte Ingles stores. They're like Wal Mart, but more so. They do everything from groceries, to high end perfums to travel agency. I kind of felt bad going there, but they had something I was willing to buy so.... Funny thing though, I was too small for the Men's floor. I was there looking at pants and one of the sales women comes up to me, wraps a tape measure around my waist and says I'm too skinny. I have to go to the young adult floor. And here I was thinking that Europeans were small.

For dinner, we went to a place up the street the guidebook listed for some tapas. The book explicitly mentioned some fried eggplant with a honey dip that sounded interesting. And it was. It was eggplant fries dipped into a very dark honey that was almost mollases. It might actually have been mollases. It worked pretty well. The rest of the stuff we had wasn't anyting to write home about, although their wine selection was good.

In the morning, we tried the palace again. We ended up having to wait in line for almost an hour before they actually decided to open the doors, but then we got to go in. There were three areas, the armory, the pharmacy and the series of rooms. It was pretty packed with school groups and other but it was a good thing to see. The pharmacy was cool because they had racks and racks of glass or ceramic jars that used to be filled with all sorts of exotic plant matter which was brought from around the world to cure ailments. As for the rooms themselves, they were just as obscenely lavish as any other palace I've seen. They even had a Stratavarius room with 5 instruments made by the master and another room designed and built by a porcelain workshop so that the walls were covered solid in intricate porcelain.

After the palace, we walked towards Sol plaza and the market. We stopped for a quick lunch at a fake Greek place with terrible food. Oh well. At the market, I picked up a bunch of cheese and tried some hot chocolate and churros. It was fantastically rich hot chocolate and the churros aren't suggared. They're purely fried dough for dipping. Yum.

In the afternoon, we went to the modern art museum. Like all modern art museums, there was a bunch of stuff that was really stupid. Like a blank canvas, or a single piece of metal. Whatever. I found it interesting when I latched onto a couple of french student groups that were touring around. Their teacher was telling them about the paintings so I listened in. This not only gave some context on some of the paintings - like Picasso's Guerria which was drawn at the end of the Spanish Civil war to show how disgusting war is - but also helped me practice my French. Furthermore, it was useful to have somebody showing you where all the crap is in the Dali paintings! Some of those guys were just nuts. Or high. Or both. Who knows.

For dinner, I went to a vegetarian restaurant that had a great almond soup and some greak leek and carrot tarts. A good last meal in Spain and on this trip.