¡Madrid!

My dear fiancée had a job interview in London yesterday and was flying there from Madrid, so I thought "what an excellent opportunity to see Madrid". So we found ourselves a nice hotel close to the airport and went there one day early to do some looking around.

Madrid is a pretty big place with about 3,2 million people living in the city. There are subways and buses everywhere, so getting around is quite easy and not very expensive. I'm a fan of getting around on foot whenever I'm visiting a new place, though. You get to see much more of the place that way. After a nice meal we went to the Reina Sofia modern art museum and spent a good chunk of the first day there. It's an enormous museum with plenty of very interesting works of art. If you're planning on going there for the first time, I recommend reserving a whole day just for this. The place is huge, and if you really want to see everything (I mean really see everything), you're going to need a whole day. There are four floors in total, of which two are reserved for the permanent exhibitions and the other two for changing shows. It's a modern art museum, focusing on art from 1900 and onwards, and especially Spanish artists. There are quite a lot of paintings by Picasso and Dalí, Juan Gris, Joan Miró, Man Ray and many others. The building is more or less square and has a nice garden in the middle with some interesting sculptures. I liked Joan Miró's "lunar bird" which stands just outside the entrance to the garden.

If you know Picasso mostly from his paintings of very strangely shaped people or his cubist works, there is a very interesting painting to see here from his blue period. It's a portrait of a lady, painted mostly in shades of blue like all his blue period pieces, but otherwise a lot more realistic than his later paintings. There are many paintings by Salvador Dalí here as well. He's probably best known for his quite surreal paintings, melting clocks, elephants with extremely long and thin legs, etc. but at the museum you can also see some of his paintings from before he got into all that. There is among other things a beautiful portrait that looks like it could have been painted by a renaissance artist rather than the surreal Dalí.
The most famous piece of art at the museum is Picasso's Guernica, and it sure is a great piece of art in more than one way, not least in regards to its size. The painting, which depicts the Spanish civil war bombing of the Basque town of Guernica in 1937, is an enormous grayscale painting.

After the museum, we headed to the Tryp Diana hotel, where we had a reservation for a room. It's a pretty decent hotel very close to the airport, and quite cheap for a four star hotel. My bed was a bit weird, though. It was quite hard, and incredibly loud for some reason. Every time I moved, the bed made a loud creaking sound, kind of like an old door in desperate need of some oil for the hinges. Gin had the job interview the following day, so she left for the airport at around 5 in the morning. I stayed in Madrid to look around some more and the plan was to meet up at the airport the same night when she came back. I checked out of the hotel at around 10.30 and headed for the city center. I spent the day walking around, looking at impressive buildings and other cool stuff. There is a huge park in the middle of town, called "Parque de El Retiro". There are huge trees and some ponds and stuff, and a pretty cool building called the "palacio de cristal". It's a big glass building with a small pond and a water fall in front. The pond has fish in it, as well as various kinds of birds and small turtles. There was some kind of art installation going on inside the glass palace, with a couple of speakers playing something that sounded like tropical forest bird chirping and a human-sized stuffed panda hanging from the ceiling. A bit odd.

There are bars and small restaurants everywhere in Madrid. One quite typical food is "bocadillos de calamares", which is a smallish baguette-type bread with deep-fried octopus rings in it. Very tasty! Bars in general in Spain very often offer tapas with your drinks. It can be anything from a small piece of bread with ham on it to small sandwiches with various stuff on them, to pieces of tortilla or other types of food like squid or sausage. They're usually pretty cheap, around 1-2 euros, though some bars offer them for free. Another good word to know is "caña" (pronounced "cahn-ya"). This is a small glass of beer, usually for about 1-1,50 euro.

There are plenty of things to see in Madrid; the royal palace, the big cathedral of Almudena, tons of museums and fountains. After walking around for about 10 hours my feet were killing me, but fortunately it was about time to go to the airport. Getting to the airport is easy. The subway takes you straight to the terminals, so no problems there. Gin's flight was right on time, so we met up and headed home.