Madrid, Monday 5 October
Back in the city mid afternoon we then got extra value from our guide and a tour of the highlights of the city. My favourite for today was the Bullfighting ring. Seems that 60 per cent of the locals would agree that’s the number of supporters that still follow it and one of them is the King (so I guess that wont change any time soon). It’s another cake tin like structure and seats 23,000 people. Seats start at E3 and go to E126, the sun and shade are the only determiner of ticket price. Our guide’s recommendation… go cheap on a cloudy day! This is also where all of the city’s decent pickpockets congregate, every bullfight. On television here recently a pickpocket was interviewed (I suppose with the benefit of disguise?) and said that he was making E5000 a day from the bullfights. Lucky it is not my thing so lucky bullfighting season is over in two weeks time when the Matadors head to the States to work. I never quite got to the bottom of what they would do there though.
The only other thing I wanted to do in Madrid was to get to the Contemporary Arts Museum to see the Picasso’s. His great work Guernica is here and I was very keen to see it. Guernica is/was a small town in Spain that was bombed (with agreement of Franco) by Hitlers forces during the Civil war. 1600 civillians died and the town burned for 3 days. (You will know this work when you see it I am sure). The painting was controversial and travelled Europe but not Spain. Picasso didn't want it there until the public could enjoy public liberties and democracy. It returned to Spain only in 1981.
From 7pm there is free entry for everyone until 9pm, so several new friends and I enjoyed relaxing Tapas and the local beer in the Plaza adjoining the gallery before joining the 7.01pm queue. A 40 minute walk back through the city to the hotel in the warm night time enabled me to wring as much out of today as I possibly could before we head north tomorrow.
While there is much more to Madrid than my first uninformed impressions, there are loads of trees in Madrid and some really lovely parks and Avenues, I will still remember it as the City of Road Works. Every second place we went had some sort of construction thing going on. Either a sculpture was dressed for cleaning (the Columbus sculpture), had a backdrop of another building in construction (the Don Quixote memorial) or was in serious re-modeling (just about every major intersection).
In two or three years this will be a great city to visit. So for now I will try and hold my judgment and try to find my way back here when it is really ready for visitors.
Pic is of a sculpture I fancied outside Madrid's bullfighting arena.
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