So, the weekend of January 29th our little Maryland group went into Madrid again. Our itinerary included The Prado and La Reina Sofia (art museums), a Convent, and a Dali/Lorca exhibit at Caxia Forum which is a museum with free exhibits. After arriving in Madrid at 11am, we all had to wait about 1.5 hours because Regina (our RD who we all call Reg) needed a lot of paperwork to prove we WERE in fact a group that had a reservation etc....with that said we toured the Velazques and Goya parts of the musuem, a Saints exposition because we'd been studying Santa Teresa, and then various other paintings. It was wonderful. The Prado houses over 7,000 works of art so it's virtually impossible to see everything in one trip. It is also exhausting to do so.
Friday, the day before, was Rachel's birthday (a girl on our trip) so she and our other friend John had stayed out ALL night the night before. As in they did not go to bed. Stupid. In fact they showed up still partially drunk. We did our best to avoid them during said tour. Here are the sleepies as we wait to enter the museum.
Due to the Prado enduced exhaustion we decided to skip La Reina Sofia and come back as a group during the week sometime. We got a little free time and went to get lunch close to Puerta Sol. On the way there was a man playing guitar and I barely heard it but it struck me that I knew the song. Once I stopped to get a better listen, I realized he was playing "Nothing Else Matters", Tuna and my song. It was such a nice little moment in a day that had started out kind of irritation (waiting in the cold for 2 hours will do that to you) that I felt like there had to be somebody watching over me that day. Some one that knew I needed a little pick me up. Needless to say I was in a wonderful mood the rest of the day.
At lunch we got the Menu del Dia. This is a general meal that restaurants have where you get a drink, bread, choice of two foods from the lists on the menus, and then coffee or dessert. Now ordering food here is very difficult and ALWAYS requires a dictionary. It took us a bit to look up what we thought everything was. Then the ordering started. I decided to play it safe and get Paella and a roast chicken. The others all then ordered what they wanted. Now, you know when you have those moments where what you ordered was just not good and it really ruins lunch for you? Where it wasn't what you'd expect and instead of being a good surprise is just terrible? Well that happened to everyone else. I got to have a day where I totally picked the right thing and everyone envied my choices. That was nice too because I needed it. The paella was fantastic by the way!
Our little group and our cafés!
My first European cup of coffee! It was more like a cappuccino with all the milk, but that means I liked it!
Here's me and Reg outside the convent!
After lunch we met our RD and got in line for the convent. It was pretty popular and we were about 30 people back. Well as luck would have it we were about 10 people shy of being able to get a ticket. They'd sold out. Since I was still in my happy place I didn't mind at all! We just headed over to Caixa Forum to see the Dali/Lorca exhibit. Below are the pictures of Caxia Forum and the GIANT plant wall outside of it. It's pretty cool.
Well the exhibit was very neat. It wasn't the usually Dali work. It was more of the story of Lorca and Dali's friendship and their very very early work. Sketchings in notebooks. Letters back and forth. Comic strips or illustrations for silly stories they'd made up. There were some of Dali's paintings but they were all in styles other than surrealism. For example, a few were cubist from when Dali was learning from Picasso. It was a great exhibit.
From there I shopped around the city a bit. Found a nice pair of boots (to blend in) and the headed home. It was a very nice day.
my favorite food mishap was trying to order a bottle of red wine. we asked the waiter for a bottle of "vino roja" and he had no idea what we were talking about. after about 5 minutes, he was like "vino tinto!!". lol. getting the calamari en su tinto was pretty epic too. ink sauce!!!
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