More Madrid!

After Locutorio Al Noor on Tuesday, I hoofed it back to the hotel to make it there by 6:30 p.m. for dinner. I asked Gary if we could run to see San Antonio de la Florida, the chapel whose ceilings Goya painted, before dinner. It is open until 8 p.m., and it would be the only chance to see it for those who were leaving the next morning. He gave me the go-ahead, and ten travelers followed me down the street at a pretty good clip. (First we took a picture of the entire group with Gary, like we had with Ricardo. I´m going to post it later.) The chapel was worth the sprint. It was recently restored to its original splendor, and it is glorious. In addition to the beautiful ceilings, Goya is buried there. (We can add Goya´s tomb to the others we have seen on this trip: El Cid, Christopher Columbus, Isabel and Ferdinand. Not a bad collection of bones!) We laid on the floor on our backs to get the full effect. Magnificent. His angels were my favorites, even though San Antonio, our city´s patron saint, got premium placement. (The chapel is named for him, after all.) I also think that of all the Goya paintings I´ve seen, including his most famous ones in El Prado, his painting of this chapel is my favorite. We couldn´t take photos, and they didn´t have postcards for sale, so you´ll have to take my word for it.

After our quick visit, we ran back down to the Principe Pio metro station and jumped on a metro to La Plaza de España. We had dinner at DuDua on Calle Cuesta San Vicente, number 2. Kim said, ¨Oh, oh. This restaurant doesn´t sound very promising. Doo-doo. Number two.¨ I cracked up. Potty humor. You can tell we´re tired/giddy from so much running around and lack of sleep. We were only 15 minutes late. Not bad. Dinner wasn´t bad, but it wasn´t great. Dessert was the best. Some sort of tiramisu treat. Aedan didn´t leave a speck of that on her plate. We bid farewell to the Alaska group, who was taking off the next morning at the crack of dawn, and seven of our San Antonio travelers (Sonia, Kim, Liz, Marsha, Alma, Valerie and Ish). We were sorry to see them go.

After dinner, we got back on the metro to Principe Pio. Chloe, one of the Alaskan girls, had gotten permanent tattoes above each ankle that day. One is of the Eye of Horis and the other of an Egyptian ank. I asked Chloe if she´d seen the Templo de Debod, yet, and she hadn´t. I told her that she had to since she´s so crazy about Egypt, and I think this temple is more amazing than the one at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. So, Mother, Blair, Aedan, Chloe, Carly and Monica (more Alaskan friends) hiked up to the temple. (It looked much closer on the map than it was, but it was worth it.) We took pictures of us posing like Egyptians (bent elbows), and took in the beautiful sunset. Besides viewing a 2,200 year old Egyptian temple in an outdoor park setting, you also get to view young couples making out like crazy. Splendor in the grass. My mother´s eyebrows were up to her hairline. PDAs (public displays of affection) are the norm here in Madrid, and I´m sure that Franco is spinning in his grave. I think it´s rather humorous. Or should I say amorous?!

Yesterday (Wednesday) we had breakfast in the hotel, and we got to say goodbye to our seven departing travelers. Kim said, ¨I feel like we ought to be giving you a tip envelope.¨ (We´ve given or are giving tips to Gary, our guide, and Ricardo, our driver.) That cracked me up. My ¨tip¨ is the pure enjoyment this group has had, and their appreciation for the work Mariana and I have put in to make the trip enjoyable. After breakfast, Blair, Aedan and I went to Retiro Park (sort of like New York´s Central Park) to ride the row boats. When Blair was in college at Kansas State, he was on the crew team, so he´s quite a rower. For just over 4 Euros, you can paddle for 45 minutes around El Estanque Grande (big pond) of Retiro Park. Alfonso XII´s masoleum overlooks the pond, and it´s very impressive. I took video of Aedan and Blair rowing that I´ll post later. I recommend this activity to anyone who visits Madrid. Very peaceful. (At least for the boat´s passengers!) After rowing, we walked over to El Palacio Cristal, the Crystal Palace, a gorgeous all-glass building. I loved visiting it when I lived in Madrid, and it still gives me a thrill to see it.

After Retiro, we walked over to the Thyssen to buy tickets for the Van Gogh exhibit. Mother and Casey had already seen it, and Mother said it was incredible. The show features the last two years of Van Gogh´s work, and I´m a huge fan of his art. We secured tickets for today (Thursday) at 11 a.m. (The museum only lets so many people at one time so there isn´t a crush of people all at once.) I left Aedan and Blair at the museum and took the metro to my family´s home, where I had left pralines for our friends at Suffolk. (Blair and Aedan had lunch near La Puerta del Sol without me. (Aedan grabbed a Happy Meal at McD´s...only her third for the trip!...and Blair grabbed a picnic para llevar (to go picnic) at El Museo de Jamon. For less than 2 Euros, you get a ham or cheese sandwich, an apple or an orange, and a beer or soft drink! They ate in the park near the Cathedral on the way back to our hotel.) I met Mariana, my Palo Alto colleague, and Cristina, our 2003, 2004 and 2005 Madrid study abroad coordinator, at Suffolk University at 1:30 p.m., and Cristina took us to lunch around the corner. It was a delicious lunch. Cristina explained that the owner/chef is from Cuba, and she is a great cook. No lie. I had arroz a la Cubana for my first plate (sort of like huevos rancheros, but served with sticky white rice), broiled salmon for my second plate, and melt-in-your-mouth cherries for my third plate (postre). Heaven! Cristina, whose last week at Suffolk is this week after 10 years of die-hard service, brought us up to date on her future plans and her family. We hope she travels to San Antonio in the near future! I know we are going to stay in touch with her. She´s family.

From the restaurant, I walked over to the Moncloa metro. Memories! When we lived in Madrid in 2004, our apartment was nearby, so Moncloa was our metro stop. The trip to Principe Pio was quick, and when I got back to the hotel I hit the bed for a siesta...just like a true Spaniard. When I awoke, Blair had been to the store and bought rations for a pre-dinner happy hour: papas fritas (potato chips), aceitunas (olives, with and without pits), and cerveza (Mahou, a local beer). What a nice wake up! Mother and Casey joined us for their last night in Madrid. They were going to take a night train to Portugal for a couple of days. (They´ll take a night train back to Madrid on Saturday night, so we´ll see them again on Sunday. We all leave for the States on Monday. SIGH. Can you tell we´re having a lot of fun and don´t really want to come home? I always feel that way when it´s time to leave Spain. I asked Blair if he thought he could live here some day, and he said as long as he was with me. What an answer! What a guy! I don´t know if he was pulling my leg, but it made me feel good.)

We met up with the group at 6:30 p.m. in the hotel´s lobby before grabbing another metro to Plaza de España to eat at the nearby Museo del Jamon. (Madrid boasts several locations. Blair´s lunch was from La Plaza Mayor location, and he couldn´t believe that he was having lunch and dinner at El Museo del Jamon in one day....but as Daisann McClane´s article in ¨The New York Times¨ reports, ¨In Madrid, there is no such thing as too much ham¨. Oddly enough, there was not a hint of ham at our dinner. Our first plate was pasta, our second plate was salad with tuna, boiled eggs and white asparagus, and our third plate was ice cream. (After my huge lunch and hefty happy hour, I was stuffed. Steve polished off my pasta, and I didn´t eat a bit of the salad. I did, however, eat the ice cream. Who can turn down ice cream? Not me. Especially not after climbing the 153 steps up at La Plaza de España metro stop. I counted them this time. I must be getting in better shape. I was still winded, but I wasn´t dead. I didn´t run up them like Miles did, though. I still can´t believe that. Oh, to be 18 and in shape!)

After dinner, Blair, Aedan and I strolled over to San Gines for yet another cup of chocolate. Blair and Aedan split an order of churros. I was still full so I didn´t eat any, but I made myself drink the chocolate. (Who can pass up chocolate from San Gines? Not me. Never.) When we lived here in 2004, we bought several bars (sort of like giant Hershey bars) of chocolate in El Corte Ingles´ grocery store, hoping to replicate the chocolate at San Gines. No luck. We were sorely disappointed. I asked our waiter if San Gines sold bars of chocolate. He said they sold their chocolate, but it wasn´t in bars. It´s polvo (powder). EUREKA! He said that you mix the polvo in a liter (about a quart) of milk. We snapped up four boxes (cost= 4 Euros a box), and we probably will wish we had bought more. Maybe they´ll ship it to us when we run out?

We took the metro back to the hotel from Opera, just a hop, skip and a jump away. When we got home, I spoke with Mari, our neighbor from 2004, and she invited us to lunch at their new house in the country on Sunday. We are looking forward to seeing them! We collapsed at 11:30 p.m., because we knew we had to wake up early for today´s activities.

We met at my Spanish family's home at 9 a.m. for breakfast. (We wanted to see them before our 11 a.m. entrance into the Thyssen for the Van Gogh exhibit.) It was the first time Blair and Aedan had met Maricarmen, one of my five sisters, who married a Puerto Rican-American and lives in New Jersey with her husband and twin daughters, Samantha and Silvia, who are 8. Aedan loved meeting them and getting reacquainted with Willie, another sister´s (Elena´s) son, who is the same age, 10, as Aedan. They played like they´d always known each other. I know Aedan was happy to finally be around people her own age. We had a nice breakfast, which brought back lots of memories of my year that I lived with Pilar, Paco and their daughters. The kitchen is bigger now. They rennovated it, making it wider. (They got rid of some closets to make extra space.) It´s very nice. Maria said that the rennovation was like building El Escorial, the palace outside of Madrid. It took forever. (Maria, like Pilar, cracks me up. I like the way they see things. When I told Maricarmen that my 71-year-old mother has a 72-year-old boyfriend, Pilar said, ¨Logico!¨(Logical! with a dead serious face.)

We left their piso to catch the metro over to the Thyssen Museum. We got in right away to the Van Gogh exhibit, which was small but over the top. His ¨Landscape at Twilight¨ brought tears to my eyes. It is amazingly beautiful, and I had never seen it before. It´s in the permanent collection of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, but when my sister and I were there in 1990, we weren´t able to go. (Seems like the museum was closed at the time for some reason.) I´m so glad I got to see it and his other work now. When I turned around, what should be hanging but one of the McNay Museum of Arts´pieces (¨Women Crossing the Fields¨)!!! I ran over to it and exclaimed to the guy next to me, ¨Es de mi pueblo! San Antonio, Texas.¨ He said, with a British accent, ¨So you are American?¨ I said that I was, and that it was a thrill to see a painting that I´d ¨visited¨ many times in my hometown here at the Thyssen. We started visiting, and turns out that he lives on the Canary Islands. He knew that Canary Islanders were the founders of San Antonio, and he said that he was going to send me some information via snail mail. The reason why Joe, as he asked me to call him, has a British accent is that he was born in Gibraltar, a British colony on the tip of Africa that once belonged to Spain. Everyone who lives there is bilingual (Spanish and English...and maybe trilingual, French, or quadlingual, Arabic). He said that he´s lived on the Canary Islands for more than 40 years now. I told him that I´d like to visit there someday. We´re going to have to plan a trip to visit our friends from graduate school who live in Rabat, Morocco, by way of the Canaries, which are off the coast of Morocco, now that we´ve made all of these Canary contacts on this trip!

The entire exhibit was fenomenal (phenomenal), and I bought a poster to hang in my office at work to remind me of the ¨piel de gallina¨ (chicken skin...a.k.a. goosebumps) experience. From the special exhibit, we made our way through the Thyssen´s permanent exhibit, which isn´t shabby. In fact, it´s tremendous. I like the way the museum is set out. You begin with the museum´s medieval collection and walk your way through the ages to its modern collection. You feel like you´ve been in a time-travelling machine. Degas´ paintings of ballerinas in beautiful green costumes and polo players in brightly colored outfits are my favorite paintings in the museum´s permanent collection. We saw them in 2004, and I was happy to see them again.

After the museum, we strolled over to La Puerta del Sol to pick up three more picnics para llevar. Aedan and Blair both got bocadillos de queso (cheese sandwiches), but I got a bocadillo de jamon. (There´s no such thing as too much, remember?) We sat on the steps leading down to the Calle Felipe III in La Plaza Mayor and ate our picnic feast. After lunch, we did a little shopping in La Plaza Mayor, which is filled with souvenir shops. We picked up a ¨History of Bread¨ tile for Blair, who baked 100 loaves of the New York Times´ ¨No-Knead Bread¨ before leaving for Spain. We also picked up a few other trinkets to bring home before taking the metro back to our hotel. Blair and Aedan are hanging out in the room while I write this blog. We´re meeting up with the group at 6:30 again. After dinner, we´re going back to my Spanish family´s home to see two more sisters, Silvia and Beatriz. (It´s difficult to organize visits with so many people with different work schedules and who now live in their own homes!)

Tomorrow, we´re thinking about going to Segovia. We can grab a bus right next to our hotel that´ll get us there in an hour. Aedan doesn´t want to go, but Blair and I may overrule her. We visited there in 2004, but it was a rushed visit. We didn´t get to go inside of the Alcazar, the castle, which is stunningly beautiful. It´s obvious that we´re not going to get to do everything we want to do in the time that remains. The only solution is a return trip!