Madrid Neat Buildings 08-08-10-08

Madrid had lots of beautiful architecture, and you've already seen some, but here are a few other pictures we took. The first is just cool, the second has monkeys on top of it, and the third is the Madrid Bank or something. The last one is from the royal garden and is called the Crystal Palace. It's basically a giant greenhouse without plants. 0=)

That wraps up the photos from Madrid. Stay tuned for Bilbao!

Madrid Lamp Posts 08-08-10-08

Most of Madrid's lamp posts were pretty much the same, so there's not much variety. In fact, you've already seen at least one of these from the Plaza Mayor.

More lamp posts!

Royal lamp posts!

Madrid 08-10-08

We went to Mass at a parish recommended by Borja's aunt and mother as being a pretty one. It was pretty and empty! Usually when we arrive at Mass 15 minutes early, there are a few other people, and by 5 to, there are usually quite a few people, and by the time Mass starts, the church is as full as it's going to get. Well, I think all in all there might have been a whole 25 people there, including ourselves! We knew everyone had gone to the beach for the summer, so we should have expected an empty church, but we really weren't prepared for this! All in all, it was a nice Mass even though it was in Spanish, and I really don't know what the homily was about besides the barque of Peter.

After Mass we headed to the ummm royal park, where the Spanish kings used to do their hunting. There's a painting in the Prado of one of the king's hunts, which is absolutely absurd - dogs and horses and stags everywhere as far as the eye can see! My best guess is that they brought in stags for the hunt to ensure that the king was indeed successful. All in all, the painting is rather bloody, and not especially pretty. The park, on the other hand, was quite lovely, and we took plenty of pictures, the first of which is our tour guide, Borja!

Some of the trees were leaning like they might fall over any minute, so I had Andy take a picture. =)

The last photo is of a big rectangular pool of water sitting in front of a big thing holding statues. (as if you couldn't tell) The funny thing is that the pool is not much bigger than what you can see in the photo, but there was actually a tour boat going around the silly thing with people on it! Not only that, there were row teams on it!

Pretty flowers. I guess one of the few flowering plants that can survive the Madrid heat is the rose, so Andy took some pictures of them. =)

Borja was quite excited to take us to see the "statue of Satan", and we were intrigued by the idea of such a "Catholic" country putting up a statue in honor of Satan. As you can see, the statue isn't so much in honor of Satan as the depiction of the unpleasantness of being a fallen angel. He doesn't look happy, and those monster things at the bottom don't look friendly.

Aside from that, I don't know who these statues are of, but if I remember correctly, the horse one was on top of that big thing on the other side of the pool.

Madrid 08-09-08

I think I actually got some of these photos a bit confused. On the first day we went to the Reina Sofia, which is where the photo with the tall thing (below this set) was taken. That was neat, but there's only so much modern art I can handle, so I was glad we didn't stay more than an hour or two. Across from the Reina Sofia is Madrid's central station, within which there's a greenhouse full of tropical plants! We had a Spanish break with two cokes (actually Cokes) and a water between the three of us. The last photo is the entrance to the subway. Oddly enough they kind of look the same everywhere...

The NEXT day, which is when this set is supposed to be from, we started off at the Prado, where the second two photos were taken. We had elevensies in the museum cafe, consisting of pastries and coffee. Yum!

After the Prado we walked across the street (I think) to a botanical garden with no flowers. I suppose that's what you get for looking for flowers in Madrid in August. Andy took photos of the few roses that weren't super wilted. I don't know who the statue is...

I'm fairly certain we must have gone to a dozen plazas while in Madrid, so I'm sure there were a few of those in between, but we "ended" the day with a tour of the royal palace. Apparently the king doesn't care for palaces, so he has a smaller (though I'm sure huge) residence elsewhere. The palace is only used for formal functions, but is ummm well, it's a palace, so mostly it's just overdone, but there are some pretty things in it...

Across from the palace you'll see Almudena Cathedral. This church was originally commissioned by one of the kings in the 19th century to house the body of his dearly beloved wife who died too soon to bear a child and so failed to meet the requirements for burial in the royal tomb as queen (I guess only queen mothers, not queen consorts get in). He seemed to have run into some financial difficulties as the cathedral wasn't finished until a few years ago - just in time for the prince to get married in it.

The story on the current king is actually pretty interesting too. Franco was the dictator who overthrew the Spanish monarchy (you know that, right?). Sometime in the '50s or maybe '60s or maybe, I think, it was even later (go check Wikipedia!), something more like the '70s or '80s, he made the former king's grandson heir to the dictatorship*. When he umm took office, he said, "Hey guys, I think that democracy thing is kind of cool, let's try that." So now Spain has a democratic monarchy. Or maybe it's a constitutional monarchy with a parliamentary democracy. Anyways, he decided not to be a dictator, and now he's king anyways, and lives in a nice house and has a great income, and probably doesn't make any major decisions. The prince is a diplomat and there are two princesses, but I don't know what they do. The Spaniards like their king. I don't. He looked at me funny**.

*I checked everything in this paragraph in Wikipedia for accuracy, but deliberately refrained from checking this one, well, from correcting this one, because that's the way I am. =)

**I didn't actually see him, so this isn't true, but it sounds like a fun story!

Madrid's Plaza Mayor, etc. 08-08-08

Before leaving for Spain, Andy and I heard a story from one of the other graduate students at the university he's working at concerning lost luggage and KLM Airlines. Apparently he's lost luggage with that airline at least two out of three times he's flown with them. Unfortunately, we had already booked our flights with KLM. Yes, they "lost" our luggage. Actually, we arrived at the airport, waited longer than necessary for the luggage to arrive, watched for our luggage, then saw that the belt wasn't bringing out any new baggage. Half the flight was still standing around, so we hoped they would bring more out. And they did. So, we waited much longer than necessary for our luggage to arrive (reminded us of Midway in Chicago), only to find that we were among several passengers left at the belt when the luggage well again went dry. One of KLM's representatives had arrived on the scene at that point and was answering questions, so we approached to inquire about our own luggage. She informed us that they had over 100 pieces of luggage, so that the plane was unbalanced and they were therefore unable to load everyone's luggage. There would be another plane at 3:30 from Amsterdam, and two more after that, perhaps it would be loaded on one of those. !!! UNBALANCED? So after standing around for at least an hour waiting for our luggage, KLM finally decided it should tell us, but only because we asked, that THEY had decided not to rearrange the luggage and left ours behind!!! Why they couldn't have posted a sign or made an announcement is beyond me. Not only were we not able to bring a carry-on sized piece of luggage on the plane, they couldn't fit it in the cargo hold! Now that we knew our luggage wasn't coming, we proceeded to stand in line for another hour with the other customers whose luggage wasn't loaded in order to inform KLM of what they already knew - that our luggage wasn't on the plane. !!! Two hours after our arrival, and at least a euro or two in text messages with our host Borja (who was waiting for us all this time), and we finally left, hungry and grumpy. KLM is a Dutch airline.

Having finally escaped the airport, we hit the ground running. Borja intended to show us all of Madrid in two and a half days, and it was time to begin! We started by taking a taxi to his aunt and uncle's lovely house where we dropped off our bags and soon took a bus "downtown" so that we could make our way to the Plaza Mayor, which you see below. The entire plaza is surrounded by a single building, which is now principally shops on the lower level and apartments on the upper levels. The main section, seen in the second photo was once the town hall, which was recently moved (more on that later). The plaza was beautiful, even if in need of some repair (as a historical site, trying to get permission for painting your shutters is probably both expensive and ridiculous). We enjoyed a few tapas - the tortilla espanola that I had been craving (sort of a potato and onion omelet, but with far fewer eggs than you're thinking, so that's it's mostly potato), chorizo (tasty Spanish sausage) and lightly fried potatos. We finished the meal off with *drumroll* coffee! Based on my observations from this trip, I think the Madriano (people from Madrid) blood is 10% water (it's hot and dry!), 20% chorizo cholesterol, 30% coffee and %40 Rioja mixed with soda (red wine from the Rioja region of Spain). It was great. Why oh why couldn't we have gone to Spain?!

Anyways, the same lamppost with Borja showing off his conversation piece - an Obama pin (some Europeans really hate the fact that they don't get to vote in our elections) - and us.

We walked down to another plaza type place where there was a statue of Don Coyote and Sancho Panda*. I'm not sure why I wanted Andy to take the picture... I think, though I'm not certain, that the lamppost bench thing was in the same area. It might have been in a long pretty section of grass and trees and benches that we walked through instead, though.

I promised above to tell you about Madrid's decision to move town hall. They decided an important governing body such as the city government needed a more elegant and illustrious building - they picked the building formerly occupied by the post office. Yes. The post office. This postal edifice, however, was not your usual drab affair, oh no, it was nothing other than that building portrayed in the middle photo below. Pretty swanky for a post office. You can also note that Congress and the Senate (which actually doesn't do anything apparently) have much, much prettier buildings. Or something.

*That is, of course, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. ;)