Madrid - more museums

The Prado report is out there. Here are the other museums we visited while in Madrid:

We went to La Reina Sofia on Saturday the 19th. Our primary reason for visiting was to see the Picasso and Dali exhibits (oh, and I like modern art in general, so I wanted to come here), but there were lots of other interesting things to see, including the works of Miro and Man Ray.

One of the more “memorable” (hah) exhibits was Jesús Rafael Soto’s Penetrable - an interactive piece of art (I don’t think it’s part of the permanent exhibit). It was an 8mX8m curtain of plastic "tentacles" (well, tubing) that you could walk through. Fun stuff. Kind of freaky. Another amusing one was a work of Carmen Calvo that was a canvas with lots of plaster bananas on it.

The Picassos are on the second floor of the museum. We saw Woman in blue of course, one of the most famous paintings in the museum (people were crowding around it as if it were La Gioconda), but we weren’t overly impressed…

Salvador Dali was one really weird character. I saw a lot of his stuff when I was at the Dali Museum in Figueres (near Barcelona) in 2003, and I even bought a book about him. It’s equally fascinating every time though. There is an incredible amount of details in each of his paintings. You have to spend a good amount of time in front of each painting, and you still don’t catch everything the first time.

Oh, and there was this freaky metronome on exhibit. I can’t forget to mention that ;-)

Oh, there are a few cool sculpture exhibits outside of the museum as well…



On our final day in Madrid, a rainy Sunday, we decided to go to some more museums as we had a late-ish flight and time to kill. We were pleasantly surprised to find out admission was free on Sundays... :-)

National Anthropology Museum. This museum is interesting, but very small. It took us less than an hour to go through the whole thing.

National Archaeological Museum.
This is an excellent museum with a lot of interesting, well-presented (aside from not being able to read the information in Spanish) exhibits. We could have spent hours here had we been a little less tired. Unfortunately, I didn’t write many notes about this place :-/

Madrid - Corral de la Moreria

We went to a flamenco show (with dinner) while we were in Madrid - to Corral de la Moreria. Several trusted sources recommended this place for both the dinner and flamenco show, even though they're otherwise the type to not recommend such "touristy" places. So we booked a table for our second evening in Madrid (16th of May). Everything went fine at first... the booking for the evening we wanted went through (we made the reservation via the Website), but we had to confirm our booking the day of the dinner and show. No problem. Or so we thought. There was a moment of slight panic when we got there, as the idiot who supposedly confirmed our reservation managed to write down that we had changed our booking to the following evening. But we still got a good table. I was happy about it, but it was kind of annoying. I wonder how many other times that person taking in the phone calls has fucked up people's bookings.

The locale was rustic and cosy, with lots of tables placed closely together around a stage. It looked to be fully-booked and that wasn't any real surprise; there was article about Corral de la Moreria in the New York Times around that time, and it’s mentioned in some book about the top 100 places you must see before you die (not sure what it’s called, not going to look it up either). Corral de la Moreria attracts a lot of Spain’s and the world’s top flamenco artists as performers, and it attracts a lot of celebrities as guests. If there were any celebs there, we didn’t see/notice them, nor would have we cared. We had a good table and the atmosphere was lively; this was what we were after!

Anyway, we ordered the Menú Degustación (tasting menu). The first thing that came was a shot glass filled with cream. (This was something everyone got, and wasn't on the menu.) Yuck. I can't consume cream on its own (or with strawberries for that matter). I'm sure it would have been good for making ice cream or a sauce or whatever, but a shot glass to drink down? Eeeww...

Next was a glass of sherry. The sherry was dry and OK tasting, but it's not my favorite thing to drink. Sherry to me is stuff you use for cooking, not for drinking on its own. Then we got two rolls each, one white and one wholegrain. This was kind of interesting, as it seems like wholegrain bread is non-existent in Spain. But who were we to complain? And right after we got our rolls, our first starter arrived - a plate of cured hams and sausages. One of the hams was made from pigs that have been fed a diet of acorns. Spain is known for its cured meats and sausages, and we weren't disappointed here!

The next starter was a vegetable-cream cheese concoction served with some shrimp. It was OK, but not the most exciting thing in the world. Nothing worth writing any more about.

The main course was roast lamb. Now after what we had gotten so far - two small portion starters - we were expecting some slices of lamb with potatoes and sauce or something along those lines. Oh, no. What we got was a whole big chunk of lamb. Dang! It was very tender and flavorful and FATTY. Mmmm... That really stuffed us, and we still had dessert to come! At least we had a good pause before they served dessert and coffee. Ooof ;-)

The wine served with the second starter and the main course was Montecillo Reserva 2001 (Rioja). Color - didn't get this. It was too dark to figure it out. Nose - spices and earth (barnyard), perfumey. Palate - Powerful, medium-bodied, slightly acidic with soft tannins, flavor of cherries. Definitely a wine for serving with lamb, but we agreed that it would also go nicely with cod or wolf fish (or other really "meaty" fish) that is served with a rich sauce. It was a nice wine, but only worthy of a :-) in our database…

Dessert was served just as the flamenco show was about to begin.

We each had a "sampler" plate of different Spanish desserts - rice pudding served in a cinnamon cookie mini-"bowl," some kind of caramel pudding (flan, I guess), and vanilla ice cream, also served in a little cookie bowl. They were each very nice. Dessert was served with a glass of Pedro Ximénez. It was kind of weird; it was black and tasted sort of like licorice and raisins. We also had coffee with our dessert. We needed that coffee after such a big meal. Otherwise we would have slept through the whole flamenco show, despite how loud it was ;-)

The flamenco show itself was quite interesting, energetic, and at some moments rather exciting.

In the first part of the show, only women were actually dancing, but there were both men and women sitting around in a ring, singing and clapping. One guy was playing a guitar. The dancing involves lots of movement, clapping, stomping, and intense facial expressions. During the second part of the show, more singing and guitar playing and clapping and stomping, and both men and women were dancing.

One of the men was stomping like mad at one point... he was pretty much stomping in place, like a kind of running in place but more stompy, at über-top speed. Very impressive. Very intense. Very captivating. (Hah, and on our way out, by the separate entrance for the artists and staff, we saw him outside. Smoking.)

Since I’m no expert on flamenco, and can't give a proper critique of the show (other than I really enjoyed it) or any information about flamenco itself, I’ll give you the following flamenco-related links:

Flamenco World
flamenco.org
Foro Flamenco
Wikipedia’s flamenco page

The Madrid report (finally) - at least a start. Prado...

Wow... it's been over a month since we were in Madrid and still no trip report. Shame on me. Well, now I'm getting my act together. Really, I am.

The trip report will be kind of "haphazard" like the Western Cape trip report, i.e. grouped by random events and stuff like food, not day-by-day. We were there from the 15th of May (arrived late afternoon) to the 20th of May, in case you want to know.

Since the photos are on another machine, I'll start this trip report by discussing the visit to the Prado Museum, where we weren't allowed to take photos...

We went to the Prado Museum on the 17th of May, right after having some Cava in our hotel room after breakfast, to celebrate the fact it was the 17th of May (Constitution Day in Norway)...

Anyway, Prado is one of the most famous art museums in the world. It is a large museum with lots of exhibits, but I noticed that many of the paintings have a religious (Christianity) theme - Jesus or the Virgin Mary or something or other from the Bible. One of the more bizarre of these was Alonso Cano's San Bernardo y la Virgen (The Vision of St. Bernard). It was a painting where the "virgin" was squirting breastmilk into some guy's mouth. So all that kooky fetish stuff you find on the Net these days... nothing new. Another weird one was Juan Martin Cabezalero's La Asunción de la Virgen (Assumption of the Virgin). Among the weird things on the painting, freaky floating babies' heads, some with wings. WTF? I doodled bits of that painting in my Moleskine. I should scan it and show it to you all. It's a rather amusing interpretation... :-P

There also were lots of interesting works by Goya as well; we actually bypassed a lot of exhibits in order to have the energy to look at the Goya exhibit. The most fascinating was Saturno (Saturn devouring one of his children), where some kind of "wolfman" was eating a guy; his head was already devoured. I wonder what inspired that...

Throughout the museum, there were artists scattered here and there, with their easels set up, painting detailed versions of select parts of a painting on exhibit, not the whole painting. It was interesting to watch them work. They seemed rather oblivious to all the tourists watching them...

There were also a lot of groups of schoolchildren throughout the museum. When they were walking past, they would make a sort of train, where the kid behind grabbed the shirt of the kid in front. Very cute...

Overall, a museum well worth a visit. You'll need around 3 hours there, give or take depending on what you actually want to see. Be sure to research what exhibits are actually there before you go and find out what you want to see, if you're on a time crunch. I think some people could spend a whole day there...

well, that sucked...

We got back home from Madrid very late last night. It was probably the suckiest last day of a trip anyone could possibly have...

Madrid Barajas International Airport has taken the honor of acheiving first place on my least favorite airports list. What a dump of an airport. No sense order whatsoever, and you had to struggle to find anyone who could speak at least two complete sentences of decent English. This is an international airport with heavy traffic, mind you, not some small town in the middle of nowhere, where the inhabitants have never gone further than 5 km from their own homes. They're doing a lot of fixing-up there, and OK, fine. But they couldn't even manage to keep at least one proper restaurant/café open (and we (at least I) hadn't had a proper meal since breakfast). At least when Oslo Airport was being reconstructed, they managed to keep a café up and running. And we eventually did find some cafés at another terminal (nobody pointed us out to those when we asked if there was anyplace where we could get food). The food was substandard though. Quite shocking when you're in a country that likes to pride itself on its cuisine...

The only positive thing about the place was the nice lady at the tax-free gourmet food shop where I bought some chorizo and manchego cheese. She fed me with samples of chorizo and ham and cheese and even gave me a free chocolate bar because I bought so much stuff there :-)

Getting back to Oslo wasn't that much better... there were lots of flights that came in at the same time as ours... too many people, too little space, we were the only ones going through the red zone as usual - there was a nice bottleneck at the green zone hahaha, random checks and all. But for the first time since I can remember, we were actually within quota. We were sure we were over...

Anyway, and then the train ride into town... a train overstuffed with people and luggage. We got on at the last few seconds, and people inside were just standing there like a bunch of retards, not moving when the train staff was yelling at them to make way for the last passengers. And my being hit in the back and nearly twisting my ankle from being shoved by the stupid bitch as she was trying to stuff me into the train because of the idiots who were too dumbstruck to move. Sheesh...

Oh, the trip was nice, but very exhausting (mostly because of the extreme heat)... I could use some more sleep but I have to be at work... blah... proper trip report will come eventually...

dragon temporarily slayed - idiots ruining things for everyone

I was saddened to read that a bunch of asshats vandalized Gaudi's famous dragon that does nothing but mind its own business at the entrance of Parc Güell in Barcelona, Spain...

What kind of losers would do something like this? *sigh*

By the way, don't let this stop you from going to Parc Güell. It is one of the nicest places I have ever visited in my life. Even if you're not into Gaudi or architecture, the park itself is beautiful, and it's a good place to relax, people-watch, and maybe even catch a concert like my friends and I did when we were there in 2003...

Here's my photo of the famous dragon: