Finishing up in Madrid: Sun., Sept. 1, 2013

I definitely sleep much better when we go to bed at 5am than when we go to bed at midnight. Still, 9am is much more bearable after 9 hours of sleep. 

Our flight wasn't until 5:30pm, and our AirBnB host didn't have guests after us, so we packed our stuff up (including all the bottles of wine left) and left it for the morning. 

Of course, chocolate con churros. That was a given for our last day in Madrid. 

Sunday is market day, and cute old men have their stamps, coins, and bottle caps in Plaza Mayor. If you continue down the road, you start running into stalls and crowds (and pickpockets - something we managed to thoroughly avoid in Spain!) We wandered through for a few blocks, using up some of our last euros and picking up some of the final souvenirs. 

The major attraction of Madrid we hadn't seen yet (beside the gardens behind the Prado - next visit) was the Palacio Real. I finally understood was "Real Madrid" stood for the other day when I realized "real" is Spanish for royal.

Ranked third (by Rick) for fancy palaces after Versailles and the Schönbrunn in Vienna, we definitely got a taste of the sumptuousness.

We asked a couple to take our photo, starting in Spanish, like we always do ("Un foto, por favor?") then lapsing into English to find that they are English-speaking tourists too.

The palace has 2,800 rooms. Crazy! We only saw 24 or so, starting was a regal, slow (because of the shallow steps) walk up the Grand Staircase. A tour group was hot on our heels (half in English, half in Spanish), but we started by sneaking past them to some rooms where important things happened, like Middle East treaties and joining the European Union. 

And frescos. Giambattista Tiepolo and his two sons worked for four years on the frescoed ceilings of the palace. The wooden fort that was originally here had burnt down in the 1600s, making this ripe for the Baroque and Rococo styles of massive ornamentation and curlicues. The king at that time, Philip V, was actually born in Versailles, so he knew what he was up against. His son, Charles III, grew up in Italy and added that style. 

The inside was ornate and marvelous. The king's dressing room (for the public affair that it was, back in the day) was floor-to-ceiling designed with carpets, furniture, wallpaper, curtains, and a frescoed ceiling to match. 

The current king and queen (Juan Carlos and Sofia) have their throne room, and their own thrones (new royalty get new chairs). They don't live in the palace (instead in a mansion a few miles away), but still host functions there. 

Also, the Spanish royal family collects clocks! Some were more accurate than others - apparently they all get wound and set once a week.

So, when the big clock in the courtyard said 12:45, we knew we had time for a early tapas lunch crawl. 

We were definitely early, with all of the bars deserted when we started. First was just some cheese - great, but not quite what we needed for lunch before a long plane ride. Next was more appropriate, suggesting a hake sandwich (we finally tried it! It was a fried white fish) and a cheese and meat (probably some loin of something) sandwich. We ordered chorizo, since we hadn't explicitly had it, but it was pretty salami-like, so I'm not sure I could tell the different between that and salmonchico.

And salmonchico (salami) is exactly what we had at the next bar. It was definitely starting to get livelier, but we weren't tempted by anything except the free and deliciously warm nuts of an unidentified variety.

I didn't want to end there (and who ever really wants to end a tapas crawl), so we went to one, final, bustling place and Rosie found me some gulas (those yummy fake baby eels) on bread. Done. The perfect end to Madrid.

Of course, there was the whole adventure of actually leaving Madrid. We metroed to the Atocha train station, where there was supposedly a bus. There is also a commuter train, which ended up taking.

That train lands you in Terminal 4, the furthest flung of the terminals. We confirmed our flight wasn't out of there (I was kind of assuming) then hopped a bus, asking the driver for which terminal he thought we should be at. He said Terminal 2.

So out we get at Terminal 2, and can't find our flight on the board. We backtrack to the info desk, where they tell us Terminal 1. We finally check-in (we still had 90 minutes before the flight!) and are off to gate area A, the farthest flung of the gates. 

Right before we get into the roped-off area on what is now the entirely opposite side of the airport from where we started, we get pulled aside for a random security check. It was a fun ten minutes of looking through all the pockets of our bags before getting in line to board the plane. We were efficient - didn't even have to find a place to sit before our seats on the plane!

Sadly, the sound on our entertainment systems was faulty and we got halfway through Iron Man 3 before it cut out for good. So, it was books, blogging, and chatting with our fun young seatmates to while the time away until we land in New York. Nueva York, I'm so ready for 3G and telephone and pizza and unpacking my bags at home!

I have a 3pm bus back to DC tomorrow, so really I have one more night away from home. But - America. 

Pleasantries in Madrid: Aug. 31, 2013

Churros con chocolate. I read the passage Rick Steves wrote about them at the very beginning of this trip, not realizing just how tough they would be to get a hold of. 

That all changed when we got to Madrid. Chocolatería San Ginés, open 24-7 (or practically) was steps down a pedestrian street right by our apartment. So clearly the breakfast choice (at noon) was obvious. Our eyes were a bit bigger than our stomaches, however, when we had two orders of the hot chocolate (a bit thicker, though less chocolate-y than we expected) with six churros apiece.

And with that, the day started on a very sugar-y note. The Centro de Arte Reina Sofía was free after 2:30. I'm a big advocate for free art, so of course I would go support that! It was the same walk to the Prado, then just a bit south along the Paseo de Prado to get to the hulking concrete building. 

I found out later that I'm pretty sure I went in the wrong way, but no one ever asked for a ticket, and I knew it was free anyway, so in I went.

Rick had a guided tour that took art starting with WWI and continuing through the end of WWII. Sadly, all of the Dalí had been taken out as part of a temporary exhibit that 1) you had to pay for and 2) all the tickets were sold out.

So it was cubism next - Picasso at all stages was all over this museum, with other Spanish artists such as Braque, Léger, and Gris about. I don't really know what I'm talking about, but I have heard of and seen prints of "Guernica," Picasso's anti-war piece, before. But the story - Picasso in Paris, Franco authorizing the bombing, the painting (and artist) in exile until the end of the dictator - wasn't something I was familiar with. It still baffles me that Spain was under a dictator in recent history.

I wrapped up my tour of the museum to meet back up with Rosie (and having a Brie and ham sandwich from Pans and Company, the Subway of Spain) and have a bit of a siesta. We arose again at 6, and I was starving. So it was off for a bite - which really just turned into a banana and some froyo. When we realized the Reina Sofía was open until 9pm, we headed back that way. 

My art style is modern, geometric, installation, using typography, found objects, math - pretty much the antithesis of the Prado and not really done until after the 50s. So while Rosie was off exploring the Picasso's I had seen in the afternoon, I was on to the Nouvel Wing, with a permanent exhibit on the '60s to the '80s and an awesome temporary exhibit on "concrete art in South America and its influences", or something of the sort. 

All I know is I was perfectly happy wandering through there for an hour and a half. There were psychedelic shimmering cubes, tricks with walls and mirrors and paint, installations of minimalism and escapism (at least, that's what I'll call the room that had parrots and a sand floor in it). 

I miss my Mattress Factory back in Pittsburgh, and I need to visit the East Wing of the National Museum of Art again. And maybe I need to invest in a piece of modern art of my own. 

As the last night in Spain, it was clearly tapas time. We headed to Calle Jésus for some Yelp (and Rick) suggestions. 

First was a hole-in-the-wall tavern down a side street with the best free tapa we've gotten - fried yucca . Then it was ribs (beef this time, with a yummy broth we soaked up with bread) and "cochocellas" - snails! Their were only five of us in the bar, including a woman from Florida and a kid with a yo-yo. But it was superb. 

Next was a "dive bar" - super friendly, English-speaking proprietor who told us to sit, gave us some salami a crunchy crackers which could be called "breadsticks" and then we got "pisto" (green peppers in a tomato sauce) to finish up there.

Cheery bartenders met us at our next stop, where we had our typical glasses of red and our typical tapa, something on bread.

At the Galacian Taberna Maciera, we were told "no Rioja - Gallacian wines only!" We got a delicious little dish of octopus with some chickpeas but moved on because it was more of a restaurant and we were getting full. 

100 Montaditos - with another location we saw nearer to us later - was our place to finish up the night. Sitting on the terrace, beer with límon in hand, watching the beautifully dressed people emerging from the hotel in front of us, we were actually getting a bit chilly. That, and the uphill in front of us, were reason enough to take the cab the mile and a half home. 

As we got in the cab, I mentioned that a con of taking a taxi was not being able to wonder past an ice cream shop. Well, the cab couldn't go on the pedestrianized final block to our place, and their just so happened to be a gelateria on that block, so me and my chocolate and my strachetelli powered me up those six flights of stairs.