Tuesday, March 18th
We did some grocery shopping today. The store is just 600 feet away, which isn’t very far, but we do have to walk home carrying all that stuff. And suppose that your items happened to include, as was the case today, a liter of newly squeezed orange juice, 1.2 liters of San Pellegrino, 1.25 litres of limonada, and a bottle of wine. At one point, M wondered if maybe we should stop buying so many liquids. E showed little enthusiasm for that idea, but she did pull one of the bottles out of M’s bag and place it in her own.
Once our larder was resupplied, we had a light lunch and then set off for a visit to the Prado Museum. We took the metro and got off at a stop called Estación del Arte (Art Station—kind of a no-brainer.) When we came up out of the metro, rain was pouring down like crazy; and it turned out the Estación del Arte is actually three fourths of a mile away from the building that has the art in it. There were rivers running everywhere in the streets and you needed to stay far away from where the cars were splashing by. When we finally got to the museum, we were pretty damp despite our raincoats. Luckily, the museum was warm and over the next hour or two we slowly dried off.
It’s a big museum, so we planned to focus on just three artists: Velasquez, Goya, and Federico de Madrazo, Madrazo being the painter who did the portrait of Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda that we liked so much at the Galdiano Museum last week.
First we found the big Velasquez section, which of course included Las Meninas. Then in the Goya section we saw many portraits of Spanish aristocrats (yawn) but also some other things, like Two Old Men Eating Soup and the double masterpiece Second of May/Third of May, 1908 about violence during the French invasion of Spain. And somewhere along the line we also found another striking painting by Madrazo: the Portrait of Amalia Llano.
We also found the coffee shop on Floor 0. It is huge and efficient. So nice to have a place to sit for a spell. That gave us enough energy to buy a couple of t-shirts. And when we got outside again, had the rain stopped? Yes.
Wednesday, March 19th
We went to the city of Toledo today. Instead of driving or going by train, we had decided to book a bus tour. That meant that we had to get ourselves down to Callao in time for a 9:00 AM departure. The bus was huge and very full. The weather was fine, no rain in Madrid and a lot of sun forecast for Toledo. It was a one hour ride to Toledo and the first part was pretty drab as we passed through an endless succession of business parks and light industrial sites that lined both sides of the freeway. E remembered that the area had long been known as the place you went to buy furniture. And still today, there are lots of furniture outlets. Oddly enough, we also law lots of Asian restaurants—hot pot shops and so on. Does this mean that Spaniards who make furniture tend to like Asian food? Maybe. But more likely it indicates that Chinese furniture maker reps make frequent visits here.
During the second half of the trip the views improved a little, showing us some open country and green fields. And when we got to the city of Toledo the views got radically better, which is one reason people like to go to Toledo. In the first phase of our tour the bus drove us around the edges of the old town so we could experience some of its more photogenic aspects.
Big tour buses cannot navigate the streets of the old city, so our bus dropped us off at a place at the bottom of the hill. Our bus load of 60 tourists was separated into two groups of 30. Headphones and radio receivers were distributed, and our two guides led us onto a long series of escalators that took us up to where the action was. We spent two hours walking around with the guide. Among the high points was an old synagogue that looked more like a mosque to us, but which in any case had been turned into a church when Spain ejected the Jews in 1492. Just a year earlier, the Christian armies of Castille and Aragon had ended the Muslim presence by winning the battle for Granada. Those two developments marked a major change; Muslims had been living in Spain for eight hundred years while Jews had been around for more than a thousand.
This meant that in Toledo’s formative years, it was inhabited by members of all three religions, who managed to live together largely in harmony. Today all of the tourist brochures call it “a city of three cultures.” So why not go there and take a look at a synagogue that looks like a mosque, which has been turned into a church?
Another stop on the tour was at the church of Santo Tomé to see a famous El Greco painting called The Burial of the Count of Orgaz. It was painted in 1586 to depict events said to have occurred in Toledo 250 years before. In 1323 a miracle occurred when two saints (St. Stephen and St. Augustine) came down from heaven to personally lay to rest the body of a nobleman and philanthropist named Don Gonzalo Ruiz de Toledo, a.k.a. The Count of Orgaz.
Our guide pointed out some interesting aspects of this painting. First we have to understand that the bottom half shows the scene down on earth where the burial is going on; the top part is meant to show heaven where Don Gonzalo’s soul is being welcomed in. Something else we might notice in the earthly half is that everybody is either watching the body be interred or else gazing up at heaven—except for two figures on the left just next to the robed figure.
The two figures are El Greco himself and his son. El Greco is the one who is looking somewhere off to the left and El Greco junior is looking straight out at us and pointing to the part of the picture where the main action is. Our guide said that El Greco deliberately depicted himself as not looking at the burial because he wanted to make it clear that he had not personally witnessed the miracle, (which occurred 200 years before he was born.) That almost makes sense…but not quite.
Another tour stop was the massive Toledo cathedral with its many incredible decorations. But sometimes we tire of cathedrals, so here is a clip that includes just one of the cathedral towers along with a little of the street below.
Thursday, March 20th
We spent this day doing chores around the house and exploring the neighborhood. For lunch we got take-out from a deli just a couple of blocks away. We’d passed by it several times but had never been inside. It turned out to be interesting. E got a sort of twice-baked eggplant dish: half a long eggplant stuffed with chopped eggplant, tomatoes and sweet peppers. M got a pastrami sandwich. We had heard from M-HP that pastrami was having a moment in Madrid and sure enough, there it was, right in our neighborhood.
Later on we went out for a drink at a restaurant called 11 Knots. We sat out on their terrace. It was just what E had been looking for and we were there right at sunset. Not that we saw any sunset. For one thing, the sky was totally cloudy and for another, the main view from the 11 Knots terrace is of the upper floors of the apartment building across the street. But still, it was a treat to be up high above some of the streets where we walk every day. As we were sipping, a light rain began to fall. Happily, the terrace had a big awning and several heat sources, so that was nice too.
Friday, March 21st
E invited a guest for a late lunch today. We got some lasagna from our newly discovered deli and E made a salad. Our guest brought dessert: an amazing pistachio cheesecake. (It seems that cheesecake is also much in fashion here.)
Since we were entertaining, we decided to use the formal dining room…
Saturday, March 22nd
Dinner at M and P’s with the old gang. Wonderful meal and lively conversation.
The occasion featured two desserts: Milhojas de Crema and Pastel Ruso.
Sunday, March 23rd
Just a relaxing Sunday. We decided to go for a walk in Retiro Park, which is not so far away; but when we got there, we found that the whole park was closed! They had some weak excuse, but never mind. The weather was mostly sunny and it was nice just to walk around town a little, stopping for coffee and a shared dessert along the way.
Monday, March 24th
Error Alert! Contrary to what you may have read in one of our previous posts, the modern incarnation of MG Motors does in fact make smallish convertibles. This is the Cyberster, made by SAIC in China. It is 20 inches longer than a 1962 MGB roadster and, being an EV, weighs more than twice as much. Not really a sports car.
