MADRID

Vacances d’hiver Part 1: Madrid! (guide to pictures at the end) A lot of things about Abby’s school have required difficult adjustments. But one thing that has required no adjustment at all is the schedule of breaks! (From Abby: The French are right about some things!) Abby finished a week of Compos (tests that students are told to take very seriously, because tests are a very, very serious thing in France) on the 8th, and classes ended for two weeks on the 11th. Meaning: road trip! Or trips. We have some other places we really wanted to go (from Abby: Have no fear; we WILL get there! We better…) but I’ve been dreaming that someone would pay my plane fare in exchange for a talk. Maybe in April. So, in order not to exclude such financially convenient possibilities, we asked ourselves where else we might want to go. And came up with Madrid, because Abby wanted to see if she looked like the (clothed) Maja (from Abby: Can you blame me? Pale skin, dark curly hair, I had to at least check…), and the Prado was definitely on my bucket list. Which turned out to be a good idea. We stayed in Paris for Valentine’s Day, and went to the restaurant that has become our favorite because it is reasonably priced, has very good food, and has the third entrant in the Pantheon of Potatoes. It’s called the Rotisserie de Beaujolais, and the mashed potatoes are divine (from Abby: I adore them. With all my heart and soul. They are more than divine, they are Heaven epitomized). The next morning we headed off to Orly and took an Iberia flight. (Strange travel twist 1: you never know what will vary. Iberia only assigns seats in advance if you’re a member of their frequent flyer club. But we did get to sit together.) (Strange travel twist 2: in the interest of having more privacy than is possible when three people share a room, we rented an apartment through a company called Friendly Rentals. So we had to find our way to their office to get the key and exact directions for the apartment. This involved the Madrid Metro including a change, and then a 15 minute walk, then to learn that we were supposed to have gotten an e-mail that would have told us where to go directly. ) Got in at about noon to very new, very nice airport terminal. In search of a snack discovered that Madrid may (from Abby: What is this offensive word?! There’s no “may” about it) have the best potato chips in the world. And a pretty new subway system that was an extreme pleasure after the Paris Metro. Smells better, among other things (from Abby: Indeed it does. It’s a nice change of pace, the subway not smelling like urine). Has many more elevators and escalators too, though still a bit of schlepping with stairs. Even a little cheaper. Only problem is that most of the directions are in Spanish. This is awkward if you don’t speak it. We thought we didn’t much speak French… and we don’t, but in comparison… more on that later. Found our way to the apartment rental place, surprised them because they thought we would go straight to the apartment, but they called and the owner was waiting for us. He actually owns the apartment next door. It was maybe a 20 minute walk and a little drippy but not so much as to be a real problem. It also was a good intro to some main parts of the old city. So off we went. The place we stayed was almost across the street from the Palacio Real, at the west end of the old city, maybe 3 minutes from the Opera and 5 from Plaza Espana (I didn’t know what any of this meant). The building was a mix of apartments and businesses; in fact the apartment was actually within an office suite, and the owner lived in an apartment next to the office suite. Rather strange. But we had two bedrooms and two baths and the beds weren’t great but there was a good TV with Disney channel that was sometimes in English (from Abby: First time I’d watched it since July. I cannot be blamed for nearly crying) and sports Joe even wanted to watch even though it was in Spanish (Joe happy) and wi-fi and a fridge. Basically pretty comparable to the place we live in Paris only with the extra bathroom and slightly better living room seating, but not as good a kitchen or bedrooms. Oh, and no babies crying at night (from Abby: PLUS). So we got settled and then headed off to get a fashionably late (3:30 or so) lunch, at an American-style restaurant called Fosters Hollywood where Abby and I shared some wings and bbq ribs (from Abby: I nearly cried here, too, ’cause it’d been six months since I’d had good ribs as well) and Sydelle had a burger and we discovered that the Spanish do American food much better than the French do, perhaps because they’re less embarrassed about it. We were happy when we set off for a wander through the old city in the general direction of the Prado. On the way discovered the Mercado San Miguel, which (a) is a very nice market where (b) a lot of people seem to use it as a tapas bar and (c) there was a cart with more of the Best Potato Chips in the World. We picked up some chips and milk and put them in my backpack and then wandered through the Plaza Mayor (very nice Plaza) and looked at various shops as we headed towards the Prado. Unfortunately, the sort of misty rain turned into something much more serious when we were still a good 15 minute walk away. So we got there at about 5:40 and a bunch of people were waiting in line for free admission at 6:00. The Prado is open until 8 with free admission every evening. Which seemed a good idea but we were pretty wet and I started thinking that it’s not that expensive and if we went in with everybody else we’d be waiting forever at the cloak room. So I spent a while trying to convince them to sell us tickets (as far as I could tell, they kept trying to make me understand that we could get in for free if we just waited another ten minutes, and I kept trying to get them to understand that we were wet). Eventually we got tickets and went in and beat the line at the cloakroom and went looking for Goyas and Velasquez’s. They have a few. Actually, I figured out on Friday when it was too late to go back that we’d missed some Goyas. They have a lot of Goyas, in three different sections. The Velasquez’s are mostly together, but I think it’s about six rooms of them. Maybe more. And a few Rubens – well, at least a dozen in one room, plus a nice collection of Titians, some Tintoretto, Veronese, tons of Riberas and Murillos… and, most of all, a room full of El Grecos that had us just sitting, staring. My, my. The colors. And this was all just the second floor, all we had time for. Abby doesn’t quite look like the Maja – she has the coloring but her mouth and chin are wider. She might fit in a couple of the Velasquez’s though. (From Abby: There were also a couple paintings of the Virgin Mary that I could be related to, oddly enough. Not really complaining, though- it’s about time someone painted Mary with dark hair! SHE’S JEWISH!) (Strange travel twist #3: We wound up in time, we thought, for a quick stop at the bookshop. But it closed at 7:30 even though the museum closed at 8:00. And, unlike other museums, you have to buy a ticket to get to the giftshop. Just fyi.) We had decided a nice thing to do for dinner would be to go to the market and get a bunch of things to take home. Still raining. So we grabbed a cab back to the market, went in, and found all sorts of people eating all sorts of interesting-looking things that were served on plates, and looked around and never saw anybody getting something in a bag. And we didn’t know how to ask “can you sell that to go?”. We had been walking and standing ever since lunch and wanted to sit down. So we looked in our guidebook (Frommers) and discovered that Sobrino de Botin, a restaurant that Hemingway had written about, known for its roast suckling pig, was fairly close. It also claims to be the oldest restaurant in the world, though that would be a surprise to the people at the place we went in December with the Brown-Scallens or, for that matter, the people at Le Procope, also in Paris. I guess there are definitional issues. Anyway, if a restaurant has been around for a few hundred years, apparently it is likely to be pretty good! We found our way there and it was our first Old Madrid Restaurant: Dark wood, rambling set of rooms, hams hanging from ceiling in the bar as we walked in. They could feed a small city with the hams hanging from ceilings in Madrid restaurants (from Abby: I actually like them as decorations. They were pretty cool; made the restaurants seem very old-timey and authentic). The pig and lamb were both really good, and I found that manzanilla sherry went pretty well with pig. (From Abby: I had the pig, too. It went against all of my morals, which I think I’ll have to forgo for the simple reason that piglet is delicious and I want to have it again.) Full and happy, we left to find the rain had died down and walked back to our apartment, where I found a Champions League soccer match between Valencia and Schalke, watched the last 30 minutes or so of it, and then watched the clips from the bloodbath at San Siro where Tottenham Hotspurs beat AC Milan. Vicious game, judging from the clips, but I root for Spurs because I have a vague memory that that’s the team of my friend Robin. They’re also the sort of underdog North London team, compared to Arsenal. So I was glad they won. Abby was on my little laptop all during this, of course (from Abby: I’m fourteen. What did you expect?). Next morning I got up and went looking for churros, because we’d kept passing places that advertised churros and chocolate. The market didn’t open until much later, but I found churros and other essentials (paper towels, fruit, newspaper). The churros weren’t dredged in cinnamon sugar as I’d expected; just a fried sweet dough. Still worked for breakfast, though, with fruit. Eventually we wandered across the street and down the length of the building to the entrance to the Palacio Real. This was built in the middle of the 18th century, I forget why. Maybe the old one burnt down. They display something like 40 of the 4000 rooms, a number of which are the armor museum. We got the audio tour equipment which turned out to be real useful. The armor museum puts the armor court at the Met in its place: namely, the provinces. But we’re not that much into armor. It also does have some awfully impressive tapestries. The real show for us was the living quarters, or Places Where Royalty Put on a Show, or whatever. We agreed that it was better than Versailles, partly because the decorations were done over a century and so were much more varied and partly, to my mind, because Tiepolo was better at ceilings than the French guys who did Versailles. Spanish kings apparently were really into clocks and extremely elaborate carvings on walls, and the recordings said the place used to be full of Velasquez’s and things like that but it’s hard to see where anything could have hung, because flat and empty wall space was in short supply. Most of the paintings are at the Prado now, but it was all impressive enough. The Salon Gasparini is especially amazing, but the throne room (with thrones that the current king and queen use, very rarely) and others were pretty good too. We’d give it all three stars even though we don’t think we like this kind of thing! We were there long enough that it was about 2:30 and you know what that means in Spain: lunch! Abby had read something about Spanish omelettes with great thin-sliced potatoes and onions inside. Me too, but darned if we could find it in the book again. We did see a reference to another very old restaurant, Casa Lucio, famed for something called “huevos estrellados,” or “broken eggs mixed with potatoes and here raised to a fine art.” Which sounded good, so we wandered uphill and down-hill, found it and discovered that it’s basically fried eggs on top of French fries but somehow a lot better than that sounds. Maybe it’s olive oil. I had a shrimp tortilla and learned that in Spain a tortilla is an omelet. All good and then – time to walk again! This time we wanted to shop, and the guidebook recommended a mall that we could get to by Metro. The bad news was, they got the Metro station wrong. The good news was, the street we walked up (and up), Calle del Serrano, turned out to be the main fancy shopping street in Madrid. Or, if not, it must have been close. So it was a nice walk and then we got to the mall which was ehh. But rested a bit and then found a cab back to the Prado, along the main north/south boulevard. Think NY cab driver. Prado part 2: oh my god. First floor this time. Sydelle, quite reasonably, wanted to hit the gift shop first. I, scared of missing something, insisted we just go straight in. So we don’t have souvenirs but we do have memories. This floor had the Goyas from after the French invasion and the revolt and the war. The black Goyas are scary and the more colorful ones not much easier to take. He did not romanticize war and slaughter. Then the older stuff. What to say? There’s a set of I think six Raphaels that are how we all wish we could look. Durer’s Adam and Eve, amazingly restored. A Durer self-portrait: could he really have been that pretty? Assorted other good stuff. But the highlight in this array, at least for us, was the selection of Bosch’s. Especially the Garden of Earthly Delights. (From Abby: This painting in particular was quite striking, because Bosch included a number of colorful structures with an architecture similar to what we today would describe as futuristic. Talk about ahead of the times!) I don’t know what was going on in Flanders around 1500. Brueghel’s The Triumph of Death (also at the Prado) is similarly filled with small, grotesque figures being tormented in various ways. But the Bosch is Dali, or Terry Gilliam, four or five hundred years earlier. I can’t imagine what people who looked at it thought, and it’s striking that Phillip the II wanted this stuff in his palace (apparently he brought a bunch of the Flemish stuff to Spain during his reign). Absolutely amazing, and seeing it live really is different because of the scale. I guess we’ll have to order a highlights of the Prado book online. This was the night of the Really Big Soccer Game: Arsenal (London) vs. Barcelona (best team in the world) from London. So I wanted to watch it. My ideal would have been to find a bar and see if the Madrid fans were rooting for country (sort of) or against Barca (think Yankees and Red Sox, then double or triple or more; blood rivals in the land of bullfighting). But I settled for watching on TV in the apartment while Sydelle and Abby rested on the principle that we should eat late like the Spanish do. (From Abby: Read: we were tired.) Great game, Barca is amazing but Arsenal rallied to win. Barca’s goalie didn’t have as good a game as Arsenal’s. I have to find a way to watch the “return leg” from Barca in early March. So I had fun and we all rested and then walked two blocks to a tapas place called Taberna del Alabardero. I kept thinking the name sounded familiar but didn’t figure out why until the next night. This place had all sorts of good stuff including entry number 4 in the Pantheon of Potatoes: roasted potatoes that apparently were marinated in garlic juice (from Abby: My theory is that they were grown next to garlic, marinated in garlic juice, roasted with garlic and then sautéed with some more garlic. Yes, they were that delightfully garlicky). We ended up sitting next to a group and struck up a conversation because (a) they were speaking a mix of languages including English and (b) the woman had a dog in her purse. They were three singers who had just finished a performance at the Opera across the street, the soprano’s agent, and a friend! Really interesting people. Apparently the opera itself was the kind of music we call “good for you,” (from Abby: A translation, for those of you who may not know this term: It may be “good for you,” but it’s not good for your ears) but we really enjoyed talking with them, about voice training and music and we found out that one of the singers has recorded Defying Gravity, one of Abby’s favorite songs (double-tracked) on a disc that will come out in June (from Abby: This particular singer, by the way, is a man. A countertenor. I can’t WAIT to hear his rendition of the song!). Definitely something to buy, and a dinner to remember. Thursday I went off early to look around a bit and found the Plaza de Espana (big Cervantes statue) and a Starbucks (many Starbucks in Madrid). So brought stuff back for Abby and Sydelle (and a muffin for me). Another late morning and then a walk through the old city again to the Reina Sofia, the modern art museum. Via the market where we got some more potato chips! The Reina Sofia is an extremely confusing place, with museum inserted into some huge old building and then a new building in the back. Its focus is modern Spanish art, but since that includes Picasso, Gris, Miro and Dali, it has a lot of stuff worth a look. The highlight is Guernica, which was returned to Spain from MOMA after Spain became a democracy. I had seen it a number of times in New York, but the context was entirely different in Madrid. You get to it after four or five rooms of art related to the war – posters, photographs, other paintings, films. And it is accompanied by all sorts of preliminary treatments and postscripts done by Picasso. Lots of Dali there too, with videos of Un Chien Andalou and L’Age D’Or (Bunuel/Dali) showing. (From Abby: There were even a couple of Dali paintings that were perfectly normal. Surprising, but I really liked those.) And a ton of temporary expositions, but we were not quite sure what was where or, necessarily, what we were looking at when we found it. Eventually we found the museum cafe, though I’m not sure we could do that again, where the waiter spoke better French than English so we communicated in French! Very stylish; they do stylish in Madrid. Suitably fortified, and relishing the fact that it had finally stopped raining and was about 50 degrees, we decided to follow the map and wander through big Parque Retiro. More hills. Saw a few nice sights along the way though – quite pretty. Tired ourselves out nicely, too, and so headed back to the apartment in the late afternoon. Abby had said she wanted Paella. I had noticed that the Taberna that we went to Wednesday seemed to have an attached seafood restaurant. So we stopped and saw it had Paella and made a reservation for 8:30, then went and rested (well, Abby was on the computer except when I was checking e-mails). Abby and Sydelle then had Paella and I tried the Bacalao (salt cod). All pretty good. And Abby, looking at the placemats, said, “Hey, they have one of these in Washington!” Explaining why the name sounded familiar! After dinner it was time for: Flamenco! Sydelle had said she wanted to find some flamenco, and there were some places in the guidebook and one that was quite close, called Las Tablas, was also recommended by the apartment owner. So off we went, and it was another wow. About an hour-long show, two dancers, both regal and fiery. Two guitarists and two singers, telling stories that would have been useful to understand. Abby and Sydelle thought I was bad for saying one (from Abby: Just one? You lie, Daddy, you ragged on them both) sounded like a cantor – endless sort of moaning and dramatic warbling, though not as good a voice as our cantor. Still, it sounded dramatic and I’m sure was a good story. The snap, the power, the twirls, the sound of percussive feet! Great stuff. A great finale to what I’d call the traditional Madrid part of the trip. (Strange travel twist #4: the question when you rent an apartment is what to do with your stuff between checkout and going to the airport. The guidebook said that we could go to the Nuevos Ministerios Metro stop where the line to the airport begins and check our bags and get boarding passes there. This seemed perfect – a different part of town to explore, and we could maybe head to the airport a bit later than if we had to mess with check-in and luggage. But when I went on the web I found stories about this service being cancelled in 2006 due to security concerns. On the other hand, I found various announcements for meeting, including major scientific meetings, which told the international visitors the service exists now. The owner of the apartment didn’t know, and he asked the people from the office if we could leave stuff there. They said yes, but offered to try to find out what the story was on the Nuevos Ministerios option. No luck – nobody answering at the airline, etc. So we decided to take our chances and go out there, since we really didn’t want to come back all the way to the apartment. Got there, wandered around lost for a while, but finally determined that the service doesn’t exist anymore. So the guidebooks aren’t always right! Frommer’s was very good on restaurants, not so good on travel details.) Anyway, a little before noon we found ourselves at Nuevos Ministerios metro stop wondering if we should just go out to the airport or schlep our luggage around. I was worried that they wouldn’t check us in unless we went in (again, security) and Abby couldn’t see the point of making the extra trip so we decided to schlep. We wanted to find a “fast-food” restaurant called Fast Good Madrid because we wanted to be a bit healthier and it was created by Ferran Adria, the Catalan master chef. This time the directions sent us to the closest Metro station and it was like having started out in Boston’s north end (old Madrid) and emerging on Michigan Avenue in Chicago. Much more modern, wide streets (though not flat), an entirely different feeling. Also a very good place to eat, bright and cheery, no hams hanging from the ceiling, and only a few other people there (from Abby: Including someone who might have been one of the five sole people in Madrid who speak English; very convenient) because it was noon and that’s just not normal lunch hour. We were happy with our burgers and (for Sydelle) roast chicken. Not quite virtuous but did taste real good and wholesome as burgers go. Then we walked around a bit before we took a bus that we hoped would get us back to the Serrano shopping area to take a closer look at some of those shops we’d seen on Wednesday. The bus didn’t quite go where I thought it would, at least not immediately. Oops. So we schlepped the bags a bit more than I’d hoped. But eventually we got there, and window-shopped, and eventually reached the very large Zara store. The clothes at the Zara in Madrid were much more colorful and youthful than the clothes at the Zara in Paris, and Abby and Sydelle spent an hour there while I hung out in a Pain Quotidien café, drinking lemonade and enjoying a nice fruit tart. The shopping was a success! Abby now has clothes from Spain. And we then made our way to the airport where we picked up a few more souvenir-ish things. All in all: a really good trip, to a place I’d never thought much about visiting but which turned out to be pretty wonderful. Abby said she could imagine spending a semester there in College – the hours people keep seem particularly right for students. (From Abby: Starts late, ends late. What’s not to like?) Lots of good food, easy to get around, much nicer subway than Paris, less expensive. What’s not to like?

Guide to pictures (we wish we could figure out how to do captions). From top down, left then right.

Top right: The Plaza de Castilla and Puerta de Europa. A more modern part of town!

The pond in the Parque De El Retiro, up above the Prado on the east side of the old city.

Meaningful Art About Modern Society in the Crystal Palace in the parque

Abby in the crystal palace

The Astronomical Observatory in the parque.

Picasso's Guernica, in the Reina Sofia museum.

Calder mobile in the courtyard of the Reina Sofia, observed by Abby.

Front of the Reina Sofia.

Street scene.

Casa de la Penederia in the Plaza Mayor.

Mickey and Abby in the Plaza Mayor. One of the cleverer ways of begging -- he asked for money after the pose.

On the way from Opera to Puerta del Sol, which is the official geographic center of Spain.

The Palacio Real

Abby and long-lost cousin.

View of the Campo Del Moro behind the Palacio Real -- the main park on the west side of the old city.