Marty Stepp

More of my adventures in Madrid, days 2 and 3.

I’m out walking the streets of Madrid once more. One thing that is nice here (as in most of Europe that I’ve seen) is that they don’t BS you around about prices.  When they say something costs 10 Euro, it costs 10 damn Euro.  That’s with the tax already included.  And they don’t treat you like an idiot and say it’s $9.99, they just say 10 damn Euro.  This always annoys me in the US.  You think you are getting something for 9 bucks and it ends up being 13.  Of course, even with tax already included, the prices kind of stink for everything.  You tend to think of a Euro as a buck, but it’s actually worth around $1.47 as of this writing.  So that entree for 12 Euro, or that T-shirt for 9 Euro, they actually aren’t quite such great bargains.

Still sampling the yummy local cuisine.  One thing about restaurants overseas is that the ordering and departing etiquette is often different in some subtle and annoying way.  For example, they often won’t come ask you what you want until you put your menu down.  That kind of happens in the States, too, but here it’s more rigidly adhered to.  Also, when you’re done, they are not bringing you the check unless you flat out ask for it, probably 2-3 times.  They don’t want you out of there.

On all the TVs they are showing coverage of the Spanish national basketball team, which I guess just won some games in the latest Eurobasket tournament.  The amount of bias in the TV coverage is a lot higher than you’d find on, say, ESPN.  They make it out as though Spain is this juggernaut, they win every game, the rest of the world trembles before their basketball prowess.  They love their point guard Ricky Rubio, whom the announcer calls “Ricky Business.”

Today I visited El Palacia Real (The Royal Palace).  Kings and queens of Spain lived here, and apparently not all that long ago.  The last one died in it in 1885.

I was a little annoyed because there was a super long line to get into this thing.  I probably waited almost an hour just to walk around this palace.  And there were these super impatient German-speaking old ladies in line behind me who kept trying to cut in front of me and were complaining about how long the wait was.

There were about a dozen tourists scooting all around the palace gardens on Segways; they must have had them for rent somewhere.  Now that looked fun.

You’d think the palace was ancient, but then you discover that it has a BILLIARD ROOM in it.  That’s right; there is literally a pool table in the Royal Palace.  Spanish royalty know where it’s at.  There is also a “cinema” room where they would watch films.  FILMS.  In this old old looking royal palace.  So really it’s been in use not so long ago.  No wonder the Spanish people went nuts and revolted in the 1930s; their rulers were living in a prime bachelor pad.

There are a lot of interesting rooms, including a very lavish throne room and a room just for the queen to perform her ceremonial donning of the vestments.  That’s right, they had a whole hoopla every day just for the queen to put on her clothes for the day.  I don’t know much about the lineage of Spanish royalty but they had a lot of things from King Carlos III and IV, as well as Queen Maria Francesca something.  Room after giant room, each with some very simple purpose, such as a thinking room, a sitting room, a dressing room.  They never did any two things in the same room, these people.

The dining hall in there is amazing.  It’s like something you’d see in a movie, 50 seats long on each side.  There are also several rooms with a distinctly Asian decoration.  I guess “Chinoisation” and Japanization was in at the time, so they’d bring in regarded designers from there and have them design a room or two.  Looks cool but kind of out of place with the other architecture.

I also visited El Museo de la Reina Sofia, a museum of modern art named for a past Queen Sofia.  It is actually very new; it has only existed since 1992.  It’s full of modern art painted during the 20th century.  There are  Pablo Picasso (the uber-famous Spanish painter who did most of his work in the early 20th century.  He founded the cubist movement and basically inspired a generation of ugly-ass paintings.  A quote of Picasso’s adorns the entrance to the collection: “Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth.”

The most famous painting in the museum is Picasso’s Guernica, which is a weird montage of stretched people and animals and things, all flailing about as though they are in pain, dying, or dead, or something.  It’s supposed to be about the attack on Guernica by the Germans during the Spanish Revolution of 1937, I think.  Picasso wanted to show how much innocent people are hurt by the decision of their rulers to go to war.

Guernica is sectioned off in this room all by itself; it’s a giant mural, probably 25-30 feet wide.  Lots of people are crowded in the room to look at it, and two security guards stand at each side.  But it’s not encased in glass or roped off or anything; were it not for the guards, you could walk up and poke at it.  As Jay Sherman’s dad on The Critic would say, “Take THAT, Guernica!”  The painting was actually stored in New York City’s Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) for many years before they sent it back to its native Spain to be put in the Sofia.

There are a lot of other Picasso paintings in the museum.  Picasso likes drawing minotaurs for some reason.  Or at least, people with cow/bull-like heads.  That is pretty cool.  He is also into drawing “nude women,” or at least, things that look like you took a Claymation nude woman and put her in the microwave for a few minutes.  Everything is drooping and falling off and all over the place.  I guess he’s a genius and perhaps the greatest of all modern artists, but as many have said before me, it’s all quite bizarre.  He likes to draw people with two big eyes next to each other and then a big droopy nose that hangs off to one side.  Lots of people have made fun of this style over the years, such as a Season 2 episode of the Simpsons where Mr. Burns commissions several paintings of himself.

The Sofia Museum also houses many works by Salvador Dali.  He is a Spanish surrealist painter from around the same era as Picasso.  He is probably best known for his famous painting of the melting clocks, which is called “The Persistence of Memory.”  Sadly, that one is not in Madrid.  But he has a lot of similar paintings of things melting, such as telephones and Hitlers.  Really.  He has one called “The Enigma of Hitler,” with a melting telephone dripping onto a melting Hitler on a plate.  Yeah.  He also did one called “The Great Masturbator” which depicts a woman, only she looks like she is stuck inside a banana or cow or something.  There is a giant mutant fly on the bottom of the banana/cow trying to free her.  She is also standing vaguely next to a guy’s package.  Unfortunately for her, the man in the painting is Han Solo and his nether regions are encased in carbonite.    Hey, it’s my interpretation; if you don’t like it, you fly down here and look at it yourself.

There are some other famous artists here on display, such as Joan Miro and Juan Gris, and a number of foreign (non-Spanish) artists.  But Picasso and Dali are probably Spain’s two most famous, and their work gets top billing and best placement in the museum.

The last place I visited was the Museo del Prado, which is the King Kong art museum of the area.  It houses older art than the Sofia, and it is much, much, MUCH bigger.  It is huge.  I gave up after a few hours walking around in there; you almost can’t see it all in one visit.  I remember feeling that way in the Louvre when I saw it in 1999.  I read that there are over 3000 canvases of art in the Prado.  Among the famous artists there are Diego Velazquez, Francisco Goya, Raphael, Rembrandt.

Unlike in the Sofia where there are a few rock-star artists or paintings that you must see, here there are like 100 fairly famous ones but not a lot that you’d immediately recognize if you aren’t a scholar of art.  There are a toooon of religious paintings, Jeebuses on crosses or in various states of agony, lots of Virgin Mary paintings, various paintings of muscly nude men fighting each other, that sort of thing.  There are paintings of gallant Spanish conquistadors and of rich Spanish rulers who could afford to pay people to paint them and their families.

There are some Rembrandt paintings, from before he turned into a full-time teeth whitener.  His Artemisia (1634) is supposedly very famous. It depicts a peasant giving a cup to a noblewoman, possibly containing poison.

There is a cool one from Francisco Goya called Saturn Devouring His Son (1820) which Goya apparently painted onto the wall of his dining room to remind of the ravages of age and time.  That’s an appetizer.

There is a famous two-piece set called Maja Vestida (clothed) and Maja Desnuda (nude).  Before and after shot?

Anyway, the place was so, freaking, huge that I kind of got overwhelmed and had to leave at some point.  I didn’t get to see everything.  It was very impressive, but it was a little too big for me.  I got a little lost in there and missed a few famous paintings because I couldn’t find them.  But it is clearly the art powerhouse in the city and was well worth seeing.