Madrid
It turns out that Dia de los Muertos is the Spanish equivalent of Thanksgiving in that it’s the big family holiday before Christmas. This provided a nice jolly vibe, but also lots of crowds. The hub of all our activity in Madrid was a busy plaza named Puerta del Sol. The first thing we did was fight crowds of hungry Spaniards at Madrid’s most popular churro house. They were delicious, but you must need a tolerance for those things because my stomach was killing me after only a modest helping.
Madrid has some cinemas that feature non-dubbed American films and we took advantage of that gem the first night. It was a tough decision because we’d never heard of any of the movies, but we figured we couldn’t go wrong with Brad Pitt. Having been starved so long of ‘moving picture shows,’ Lauren and I enjoyed the beautiful scenery, interesting cinematography, and “old west” feel of The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. Andrew, however, found it a little too melodramatic.
After that night of rest, we were ready to hit the town hard for another helping of the ludicrous 2:00-7:00AM Spanish nightlife. We were walking to the club we thought we wanted to go to when we ran into a guy named “Lil’ Will.” Lil’ Will hailed from NYC and was working PR for a couple of bars. As you would expect from any true New Yorker, he had only lived in Madrid for 7 months but already “knew a guy” at every bar or club imaginable. He pointed us to a hole in the wall offering 2 for 1 and then to another hole in the wall named Cibeles where we ran into a sea of blonde headed Swedish girls and their male escort named Magnus. Somehow we became engulfed in their group and left Cibeles in search of the mega-discos that had been getting so much hype.
The Swedes were very outgoing and friendly. They were perfect companions during the hours spent on the dance floor at ‘Joy.’ Not only did they tolerate all of our over-the-top ridiculous American dance moves, but they seemed to prefer our humble goofyness over the prevailing Spanish notion that dancing is serious business that is not to be taken lightly. The DJ was great aside from the gratuitous 40-minute stint of salsa.
The next day we escaped to the serenity of Retiro Park. It was by far the largest city park any of us had ever seen and certainly rivaled most in beauty. Retiro is huge, but Madrid is covered with little parks here and there. As Andrew noted, “even the major intersections are beautiful.” Being a city of that size, we were all amazed at how delightful it was to maneuver on foot.
For some (much needed) culture we hit up the Prado and Thyssen museums. The Prado houses some of the most important paintings in the world by hard-hitting Spanish artists like Goya, Velazquez, and El Greco. The belle of the Prado is Las Meninas by Diego Velazquez, revered as the best painting ever stroked onto canvas. The Thyssen was another 1900’s modernism tour-de-force featuring enough abstract expressionism to induce a very concrete headache. It was a full day of art that left us all exhausted mentally and physically.
Madrid was a fantastic place to round out our time in Spain. It gives the cold notion of ‘urban’ a refreshingly novel feeling of friendliness. We had as much fun walking the streets as we did in the bars – it was all amazing.
Tags: Travel
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