Year Abroad: The weekend when my mother arrived and we tramped across the whole of Madrid in our pursuit of culture….

              I was really looking forward to this weekend (15th Oct), even though I hadn’t slept properly and was going to have to be up really early once more.  I had to try to organise a taxi since for some unknown reason the bus from Baeza doesn’t go to the train station at the weekends.  I can understand on a Sunday there not being a bus but judging from the amount of passengers on the train it is necessary.  But I booked my taxi and shilled out the 25 euros as well as the 23 for my train ticket…and that was with the carnet joven discount that my Young Scot card entitles me to.   The trains in Spain are quite terrifying as they have decided to put stairs that are too steep to climb without killing yourself, more on that in a later paragraph.

                

                 So getting to Madrid I used the Metro system for the first time.  That was horrific.  I’m used to the Clockwork Orange in Glasgow which has only two lines, the inner and outer circle, so much easier than having to check if you need to change lines.  Also the people were a bit strange.  Not your usual run of the mill Glaswegian drunks and/or student, just strange and foreign with a couple of fellow ERASMUS students to boot.

                Got to the hostal and checked in and whatnot before the mother arrived.  As the taxi couldn’t get down the street she was standing at the bottom with a huge suitcase, my trumpet and her carry on case, waving furiously.  We then started to plan what we were going to do over the next two and a bit days.  We settled on visiting the Prado, the Rastro, the Retiro Park, the Plaza Mayor and the Puerta del Sol.  What we didn’t count on was the protest and the fact that all of the main streets were being shut off and the normally maze like Madrid became a labyrinth that was almost impossible to traverse without the multitude of maps we had.  We found out that the Prado has two hours before it shuts when it is free to enter.  So we went to see the Velasquez.  I really don’t care/know about art but you can clearly tell that these artists were gifted, and a bit mental.  We had to do a mad dash to get to the room with the one painting we wanted to see and then wandered around a bit.  I do feel bad that I know nothing about art and names like Rembrandt occupy only vague spaces in the back of my mind, but the truth is currently I don’t really care.  Art doesn’t make me feel anything.  For me music inspires my emotions but art is flat, especially portraits.  I prefer landscapes cause then you can invent a story to go with it.  But meh.  Well now I’ve been there and done that.

At KM 0 in the Puerta del Sol

Me and my main man Velasquez

                After the Prado we went to buy our train tickets in Atocha.  I hate this train station, nothing about it makes any sense.  The main floor looks like a botanical garden, and there are no signs!  It seems so counter-intuitive and illogical.  Another thing that makes me utter the phrase "Bloody Spanish" in a bemused British way.  Our next adventure was to try and find a restaurant that was open and serving food whilst trying to get back across the city to our hostal.  Just off the Puerta del Sol there was an Italian restaurant so we went there.  The food was really nice but the portion sizes were ridiculously large.  The man asked where we were from, you know the usual restaurant small talk, and then when I mentioned Baeza he paused for a moment and then shouted “olives”…  We headed back to our hostal, pushing through the crowds of protesters occupying the Puerta del Sol, and slept since we knew that the Sunday was going to be oh so busy.  

                 Our plan for the Sunday morning was to head to the Rastro market which is held every Sunday.  We headed down and to be honest it wasn't as I'd imagined it would be.  I thought there might be a little more of the traditional but it was just a tourist trap with people peddling the same rubbish t-shirts and bags as anywhere.  We wandered around but it was far too claustrophobic so we left pretty sharpish and headed off to the Plaza Mayor.  This for me is such a powerful place as it is huge but completely surrounded by the impressive Castillian buildings.  I'd wanted to go and see the Lion King exhibition because that is my favourite film and it was about the costumes and things used for the stage production, but being a Sunday afternoon it was shut.  We wandered around the Plaza and then meandered towards the palace to get something to eat.  On the street there was an antique book shop with random textbooks, old novels and dictionaries.  This turned out to just be a taster for what we'd find when we meandered up to the Retiro.    

                  The cafe was opposite the Palace and we had little bocadillos.  The funny thing was when we had to give them our name..McAlinden..and then listened for them to call it out.  It would have been so much easier to have just given them my first name like everybody else did.  But then it causes confusion as my name, whilst being unusual in the UK, is one of the most common is Spain...MariaAnna Isabel.  I have one class in the school with five girls called Maria!    

Mum enjoying her cafe con leche aparte...

                       After this we explored the gardens surrounding the Palace and then headed off across Madrid to the Retiro park.  On the way we stopped in various little souvenir shops and bought some postcards.  Just outside the Retiro there was a book festival and there were stalls from bookshops across Spain.  All the books were second hand and some were really old and some were just odd.  There was even a copy of Foundation by Isaac Asimov in Spanish.  I probably should have bought that but I couldn't be bothered lugging it around Madrid.  I did however buy a poems and commentary book by Antonio Machado, the famous Spanish poet who taught French in my institute and he even wrote some poems in Baeza.  This is his centenary of his death and from what people have been saying he was almost a sort of Burns type poet i.e. he spoke to the common man.  More about Machado in a future post methinks.    

Translation of Shakespeare into Spanish.

Did they really need to translate his name?!

              When we finally got to the Retiro we had literally walked the whole of Madrid city as it is on the opposite side from the Plaza Mayor and even that was about half an hour from our hostal.  We were pretty beat.  We ended up sitting on a bench with a bottle of water listening to a performer entertain a small crowd of children.  It was funny to see the Punch and Judy puppets in such a foreign context.  But clearly slapstick humour transcends language and even though I hate it slapstick still seems to be popular here.  The Retiro had such a nice atmosphere as it was just full of locals and tourists relaxing on a really warm day.    

    

                  That night we ended up eating in a small bar that was in the middle of nowhere and it was really nice food.  Typical Spanish food served at this time of year (nod to the family)...I had mixed veg to start and then roast chicken leg.  Amazing.  As we walked up from the restaurant we ended up hitting a few of the Chinese run shops along the way.  These are where you find the cheap fashion and I ended up getting a top and a pair of shoes.  The following morning we also went to some of these shops and mum ended up getting a few winter things.

                  Just to sum up, since this post has taken me forever to write, and I'm forgetting some of the details, we had a wonderful time in Madrid and I enjoyed it more than the first time as I had someone to drag around and to take m photo instead of me asking random strangers.  I will go back to Madrid as I still have to see Guernica.