Northern Spain Chapter 10 - Madrid
Mar. 5-12 By Eric
I sensed that Madrid had a lot more to offer than we had time to discover.
It has a lot of interesting neighborhoods to visit and an excellent subway system to get around them. I think it would be a fine place to live.
In our relatively short stay we mostly did the typical tourist things. That's not bad in Madrid because the typical tourist things are great. We enjoyed our stay. However, I never got the feeling that it was a magical city.
Since we stayed about a week in Madrid, we established a routine. Coffee and donuts around the corner for breakfast; a cheap "menu of the day" for lunch (as little as US$5 each, including. wine); and graze on tapas for dinner, often accompanied by a pitcher of sangria. Our favorite dinner grazing place was called "Zapataria" meaning "Shoe Store." It was our fav
orite for the great Latin music, cheap sangria (800 pesetas a liter) and .. a great variety of shoes all over the walls.
Madrid's tourist district, called Puerto del Sol, is the only one we've seen so far in Europe that reminds of us the tourist districts in Asia, like Thamel in Kathmandu and Khao San road in Bangkok.
Like those places, living in the tourist district was easy and relatively cheap (we blew a lot of money on other things but not on the hotel or on food). Every night was like a block party. Traffic stopped in the narrow streets and drunks roamed in hoards starting around midnight. This was a little annoying for us old fuddyduddys that went to sleep between midnight and one. Even on the fourth floor the street noise sounded like it was right outside our window. One night I woke up and heard a very bad, very drunk rendition of a German beer drinking song I learned in high school German class. But overall English was the preferred language of the drunks. And of course there were the irritating American sorority girls in our hotel the first two nights.
Puerto del Sol had been transformed from a typical Spanish neighborhood into a place that provides tourists with just the Spanish things they want - all night parties, sa
ngria, and paella (a great dish of rice mixed with various seafoods and meats). It's still Spanish but it's been changed by the visitors. A really great place to party when you're 22.
Of the maybe 50 museums in Madrid, we went to four: The Prado (Spanish art thru 19th C.), the Reina (Queen) Sofia (Art of 20th C.), the Royal Palace (the palace but mostly an art museum), and the Museum of Archeology. They were all worth a visit, The Prado and the Royal Palace were my favorites. The Sofia contained Picasso's "Guernica" which was especially interesting to us after having been to Guernica. (JOAN: but since then, we have decided we are a little burnt out on museums).
I would say more about the museums but I would end up sounding like those stupid little cards posted beside the art work: "This important work by ... was executed probably in the spring of 1964 though certain elements suggest the work was started in 1963 while the artist was still in his period of 'indifference' as it was later called. It is especially remarkable considering..." They should get hockey players to describe the works, just replace Mario Lemieux" with Picasso and "Boston Bruins" with Miro: "Picasso can beat you in a lot of ways. Pablo didn't just show up, he came out to win. Miro has a lot of paintings in the attic that most painters would have on their living room walls."
I truly enjoyed the modern art museum. But one wing, about a quarter of the museum, I found utterly without value.
Here's a little glossary of terms used in the description in that wing:
"important work" -- no one really likes it but the museum wants everyone to think it's valuable.
"Figure of a woman" -- the blob in the lower left.
"very innovative" -- incomprehensible.
"on loan from a private collection" -- someone couldn't stand it in their mansion any more.
At every tourist destination 
there were a LOT of Americans. We hadn't seen this many Americans since we were in America. In Asia, except Bangkok, Americans were rare even among tourists. Part of he reason we saw so many Americans is because we went to the museums when they were free to everyone. Some days they were free only to Europeans. I think Europeans should have to pay to see the Smithsonian.
The train station was a tourist destination in itself. We went there even though we didn't have to ride any trains. There's a vast area that is uninterrupted by supports that is as big as a basketball arena. I think the trains used to stop there. Now it's a huge conservatory of jungle plants. Pipes along the ceiling occasionally sp
ray water and steam to provide the rain forest climate.
We met up with a friend of a friend in Madrid, Jose Luis, a high school language teacher (he teaches English and sometimes French and German). J.L. was preparing for the Madrid marathon coming up in a month or so. It had rained hard that afternoon but he assured us he had done his training run anyway. "If you don't out because of a little rain," he said, what are you going to do if it rains on the day of the race?
J.L. is a very interesting guy and we liked him a lot. He really knows Spain. He had been to just about every place we had and he told us the history of each place.
Also he spoke freely about Spain's position in the EU. He resents that other European countries think of Spain as poor. His resentment is totally understandable. If I were Spanish, I'd be furious. The European newspapers and magazines refer to Portugal and Spain as the "poorest in the EU." But the term "poorest" is relative.
Spain does not seem like a poor country AT ALL.
In some statistical sense it might be poorer but to the inexact sense of a bike tourist Spain feels just as rich as France, New Zealand, Canada or America. Also, since the cost of living is also a lot lower, you don't need as much money to live a comfortable lifestyle in Spain. If anything, people seemed happier in Spain than in other western countries.
We told Jose Luis a bit about our trip, though we had some trouble getting words in -- his English is very good and it doesn't stop very often. At the end of the evening we told him we intended to ride to El Escorial the day we left Madrid.
"No. It's all up hill. You can't make it," he said with absolute certainty. We were both taken aback. Hadn't we just showed him the photos of us crossing the Guadarramas? Hadn't we mentioned that we had ridden over the Himalayas, through Tibet, to Everest Base Camp? This guy was a hard core marathoner (a marathon is almost as long as the distance to El Escorial). How could he believe we couldn't bike the distance of a marathon?
It was another classic case of IIIMBY (It's Impossible In My Back Yard). But I have it too. I would never recommend that anyone bike tour into Pittsburgh, Penn. where I grew up. I think it's too hard. The traffic is awful.
Since Jose Luis was in training for the marathon, he went home at the unusually early hour of 1 a.m.
Next: The Impossible Climb to El Escorial
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