Meandering on the Way — Feb. 27 to Mar. 5, 2023

Monday, February 27

On E’s birthday, we had one overriding objective: a visit to the Chocolatería San Ginés to have chocolate con churros. Here’s what that might look like:

First, though, we had to take care of a few other details, such as shopping for a birthday present. We took the Metro down to the heart of Madrid, where there are lots of stores, all quite convenient to the Chocolatería San Ginés. First we shopped for a purse. E is very particular about purses, so naturally we took a look at Hermes, Gucci, and Valentino. But E didn’t see anything she liked. For one thing, their purses didn’t have enough zipper pockets. So we went to the Corte Ingles, a well-known Spanish department store. And eventually she found the perfect thing. It didn’t cost $6,000, not even $600, more like $60. M was sort of disappointed, but he got over it. Then we went to the Apple Store and got E a new phone case. Here’s the loot:

Then it was time for lunch. We met our friends L and M as agreed, but the restaurant where we had planned on going had a huge line, so we set off for the Coffee Central de Jazz, which was more accessible.

Finally it was time for the main event. We went to San Ginés Street, stood in line for 25 minutes or so, and finally were ushered down to a tiny table in the basement.

Tuesday, February 28

(Before we continue, readers should be warned that another person whose name begins with M is about to appear. Which is ridiculous, but there you are and something must be done. We have been forced to amend our style book to allow the use of last name initials as well as first name initials. And Spanish women usually have two last names and hence three total initials, which is something to keep in mind. Ready? Okay, here we go.)

We’ve already mentioned one friend of Eve’s from her days in Chicago. She was the M who took us up to Leon for the day. In our new style, she will be referred to as MTC. Today we got to meet another old Chicago friend when MB drove over from Paris and stopped in to Madrid. MTC and MB have kept up their connection over the years, but E had not seen MB for 51 years. She was pleased to find that his sense of humor remained unchanged, and issued him an invitation to make a special appearance in the Laughter Yoga class in the future.

It was decided that the four of us would go together to the the town of Ávila for the day. We left at ten in the morning, traveling in MB’s hybrid SUV, a fine vehicle for such an expedition. The drive up took a little over an hour. Like most medieval cities, Ávila was a walled town. Unlike most similar cities, Ávila’s walls are intact and still surround the oldest part of the city. When we arrived, our first stop was the cathedral, which is of course inside the old city walls.

We had our midday meal at a restaurant called Almacén, that had been recommended to MTC by a friend who has a house in Ávila. Almacén was a ways out of town on the highway leading to Salamanca and was barely noticeable if you were just driving by. But we found it.

At Almacén we had a view of the south walls of Ávila and also a long, slow, and very excellent meal. MB chose a rosé champagne to go with our starters and a twenty-one year old Tempranillo to go with our main course. Both were delicious.

On the way home from Ávila we stopped to see El Escorial, the largest renaissance building in the world. It was built by order of King Phillip the Second in the mid 16th Century, partly because he wanted a summer place where he could escape the intense heat of Madrid summers. Besides being a royal residence, the building also contains a monastery, a library, a museum, a basilica, a university, a school, and a hospital.

Wednesday, March 1

Among the presents that E got for her birthday were a couple of tickets to a special art exhibition at the Royal Palace of Madrid, and today was the day. Off we went, down into the Metro, emerging 40 minutes later at a stop just in front of the Madrid Opera House. The Royal Palace was just a short walk away. It’s a huge place and our first problem was to figure out where the heck the entrance was. Eventually we spied a large mass of people off in the distance and that, of course, was the place.

There were hundreds of people waiting to enter. Some were there for the art exhibition like us, but there were also many, many others who merely wished to tour the palace. Besides the building and the decor, visitors can see paintings by Caravaggio, Goya and Velasquez as well as frescos and museum collections of porcelain, watches, furniture, and weapons. Also on hand is a complete Stradivarius string quartet—two violins, cello and viola. Stradivarius gave the set to King Felipe V in 1702. E once took a tour of the Royal Palace and remembers that it was amazing.

But we were there to see the art of Joaquin Sorolla, a Spanish painter who was born in Valencia in on 1863, on February 27, the same day as someone else we know. In addition to several dozen paintings, the special exhibit had three more parts: a detailed timeline of Sorolla’s life, a special projection room where his paintings were enhanced with animation and projected giant sized onto all four walls at once, and finally a virtual reality portion where we had to don a special headset with heavy binocular-like glasses. That part was unlike any experience we had had before. We were told that we could touch anything we saw except for green statues, because the green statues were actual people. E proceeded to try to grab several butterflies which eluded capture by turning into soap bubbles and floating away. Then she collided with a green statue which spoke with M’s voice. At that point we walked off a bridge and came back to reality. What would Sorolla have thought of all this?

Sorolla is especially noted for beautifully luminous colors. He liked to paint by the seaside and some of his most powerful works are of fishermen and their boats on the beach in Valencia. Unlike some of his contemporaries, Sorolla was extremely successful during his lifetime. One of Sorolla’s admirers was Archer Huntington of New York, who commissioned him to produce a series of large scale paintings to be installed at the Hispanic Society of America in New York. This series, called Visions of Spain, has become part of the permanent collection at the Society’s Library and Museum. To mark the 100th anniversary of Sorolla’s death, the Hispanic Society is just now collaborating with the National Arts Club to mount an exhibition about the creation of the Visions series. That exhibition will run until April 25th at the NAC.

Thursday, March 2

Were we ready for more high culture today? Nope. Had to do laundry and other household chores. Then at noon E went off to have a delicious lunch with MTC followed by a visit to MTC’s hairdresser. The results are quite attractive, but E needs to get used to the look before we publish a photo. M, meanwhile, took the subway four stops down to Mar de Cristal in search of allergy medicine. The stuff he likes is available in Spain under the brand name Alercina, but it seems that not every pharmacy stocks it. Mar de Cristal is a big shopping area and M was hoping to find it there. And even if he couldn’t find the medicine, he could have lunch at the kebab place.

Friday, March 3

Our first order of business today was to make train and hotel arrangements for a trip to Cordoba and Granada. That took three excruciating hours. Our first mistake was to try to buy train tickets online using the RENFE website. Aargh! So much data entry, so many choices among unfamiliar options. So many mysterious roadblocks. We could have rented a car! We could have flown! Why are we doing this at all? But we got there in the end, mostly because we abandoned the Renfe website and used Trainline instead. The train is considerably faster than driving and considerably cheaper than flying. The only flaw in our reservations is that we ended up with one leg of the journey where we won’t be sitting together—close, but not together. And what was our reward for all this work? We got to go grocery shopping.

Later in the day, around 4:30, we went down to our little shopping area on Añastra Street. E was in search of a pedicure. She had her eye on a nail shop that we had passed before and now she was ready to walk in and ask for an appointment. Such things can be really daunting in a foreign country, whether you speak the language or not. So in she went, while M loitered outside. She was able to get an appointment for 5:30 that very day. So we sat down to wait at a cafe, outside in the sun, and had tea. In the end all was well with the toenails.

Saturday, March 4

Today we went to look at more pictures, this time at the Reina Sofia Museum. The Reina Sofia specializes in 20th century art and has a large number of Surrealist and Cubist paintings and sculpture. They have a number of Picasso paintings and sculptures, quite a few Dalis, and bunch of other things including photos by Man Ray and this nice Yves Tanguy.

The most famous painting at the Reina Sofia is Picasso’s Guernica. It’s amazing. For one thing, it’s huge—12 feet high and 25 and half feet long. The subject is grim—the bombing of a Spanish town by German bombers during the Spanish Civil War—and execution is pure Picasso. People just stand there and stare at it till their feet get tired.

When our feet got tired we went into a small theater that was playing Luis Buñuel’s film The Golden Age. It’s a silent film in black and white and it’s really odd. The two of us were laughing, but everyone else in the room was meh. Guess you have to be old.

Of course there was more in the Reina Sofia than we had the strength to see, so at 2:00 we decided to head home and get some lunch at a place in our neighborhood. That sounded easy enough. We got onto the Metro, our trusty Line 1, which should have taken us almost all the way home. But instead, our journey came to a stop when the train reached a place called Cuatro Caminos. As the doors opened, we heard an announcement. Our train would not be going further and all passengers had to get off. No mention was made of what passengers might do once they got off. We decided to part ways with the Metro and headed for the surface. Once there, we were glad we did. Cuatro Caminos is an area of Madrid that Eve used to frequent and even after 40 years she recognized the area well enough. Though much had changed, it was nice to relive some memories. After a short stroll down a boulevard called Raimundo Fernandez Villaverde, we got a taxi, which took us to the restaurant that we had intended to go to in our own neighborhood.

It was 2:45 by then and El Rincón de Carlos was really hopping. The atmosphere was lively with lots of banter between the waiter/manager and the customers. One older woman told the waiter—in a voice loud enough to be heard by most of the customers—that she wanted the eggs stuffed with tuna for her first course and to make sure she got lots of tuna. The waiter replied, quick as a flash, that the stuffed eggs were already made and she would get them the way they were. This got a laugh from the crowd. After a moment, the waiter continued, saying “This is not a gas station, you can’t just fill it up as far as you want.” This got another laugh and throughout the exchange the old woman was grinning as if that was exactly the response she had hoped to get. And then of course E had to join in the banter. So it was a fun time, and the meal, though slowish, was very good. It seems to us that this would be a great neighborhood to live in for a year or two. We could get a real apartment and little car of some kind…

It was a beautiful springlike day at that point and walking home was a pleasure. One the way M finally got some pictures of our resident parrots. They are quite beautifully green, but they are also an invasive species whose numbers are growing rapidly all over Madrid.

Sunday, March 5

Went out for Sunday breakfast to a bakery restaurant that we hadn’t tried before. They had tons of tempting stuff, more than we’ll ever get around to trying. E did fulfill her wish to have a palmera de mermelada de melocotón, a palm tree shaped pastry with peach jam. It lived up to her fond memory of it.

We can see that the weather is turning. Warmer and wetter, says the forecast. We felt a few drops on our way home from the bakery. Tomorrow we head south.