Madrid on our own

After a constant stream of company for the last 6 weeks (Corsica visiting friends, 2 weeks with my mom, one week with our friends Bobby and Vicky, 10 days with Zoya and Patrick) it felt eerily quiet and a little weird to leave Barcelona with only 4 of us. We were lucky not to be pressed for time so after walking our friends to their cab around 3 am, Sven was able to sleep in and sleep off some of his sickness before we headed to the rail station around 10 am. A luxurious, speedy 3 hour train journey brought us to Madrid and a perfect little apartment- totally modern with sliding doors separating rooms, sleek new kitchen and a 10 minute walk from all major sites. And oh joy, wifi in the apartment so we were able to check on the fate of Alaska politics, always so interesting lately... After a couple hours of utter relaxation (Eilidh said, "I feel like I'm home in this house") we decided we needed to exit the building to get food. A 2 minute walk down our road brought us to Place Santa Ana, which was delightful. This little square, lined with theaters and tapas restaurants, is filled with tables from various little restaurants, 2 kiddie parks, and various musicians or performers doing their thing (flamenco, guitar, etc) and is visited by uniformed school kids and their moms after school, as well as various professionals and tourists. We had the classics: Spanish tortilla (sliced potatoes in eggs, similar to quiche), albondigas (meatballs) and roasted vegetables with tea de manzanilla (camomile tea).

An afterthought: both Sven and I felt bloated after our trip with our Kodiak friends (so much good food and drink!) but we didn't know how much our bodies had actually changed. Eilidh commented in Madrid (after I said, "Bella's round baby belly is gone!").... "And you got it, mommy!". And to Sven later on that night... "Daddy, your belly button got deeper!". Time for less food and lots of walking!

Place Santa Ana

Place Santa Ana with statue of Federico Lorca holding a bird

View from our apartment.

Eilidh and Bella resting after the 98 steps up to our apartment.
Musee Prado

Since there are three art museums that we want to visit in Madrid, we figured we better start now and go nice and slow. We have learned the hard way that more than one museum per day is usually a mistake with kids. So we decided to start with the Prado, home to most of the great works of Spanish art prior to the modernism.

Some of the things we enjoyed and which led to our much finer appreciation of Spanish art (with all of its realism and passion) as well as an awe of all the Spanish people have had to live through:

-Francisco Goya, who started out as a court painter and who painted some wonderful portraits of the royal family, went quite mad at the end of his life and painted the walls of his country house with dark scenes of violence and destruction around 1815. Those painters have been transferred to the Prado and are very disturbing, and very ahead of his time. We stood in front of his two great masterworks for quite some time: the "2nd of May, 1808" and the "3rd of May". These two vignettes, translated into very grand scale, tell the story of the Spanish rebellion against the French (under Napoleon) invaders. The 2nd of May is gory and chaotic, showing the brave Spanish men fighting against Napoleon's hired Moorish fighters. The rebellion was put down by the French and on the 3rd of May Napoleon ordered that those who rebelled should be shot. The way that Goya depicted the sacrifice of these brave Spanish men is strong, vivid and undaunting.

-Diego Velazquez was another court painter, but in his case in the late 1500's, just after the Italian Renaissance. The thing about Velazquez is that he was little known until the 1800s when all of a sudden he was discovered by many of the modernists and called 'the first modern painter'. Spain was so insular during the counter-reformation that Velazquez's work was mostly collected and displayed by the king and thus was Spain's secret. His most famous work, Las Meninas, is a masterpiece!

Gisbert

-Spanish painter Antonio Gisbert's is someone who was unknown to me but probably made the strongest impression. His painting ("The Execution of Torrijos and his companions at Malaga Beach was huge- monumental and sobre. The theme was one that is familiar to the Spanish: a liberal politician was ousted from power and fled. When he attempted to return to the country he was captured and his entire party put to death. The nearly life size figures seemed to almost breathe with life and we were again reminded of all the Spanish have had to endure.

Royal Botanic Garden

Eilidh in front of a monkey puzzle tree.

"I found one!"

A relaxing evening in Madrid
After the Prado, we were able to relax for a couple of hours in the royal Botanic Garden, which was welcome after all of the visual stimulation. In the evening, after a crazy walk back that included Bella almost being bit by a dog and flying off some playground equipment we witnessed a rather intense protest in the Puerta del Sol... Hundreds have been protesting in Madrid every Thursday towards the need for a war crimes trial against the Franco regime and the murder of at least 100,000 people who opposed it. There were people shouting at each other and policemen taking statements; most of those marching were in their 40s or 50s and carried photographs of parents, siblings, or friends killed by the Franco regime. (The fact that there has not yet been a trial against those involved with the Franco dictatorship is shocking... yet another reminder of the insanity that the Spanish have had to live through).

The congress building.

Protest against indemnity for those in the Franco regime.