I like Madrid mainly because I was a little homesick the other night and it provided the perfect solution for me. I was getting a bit sniffly and missing my Vegemite (see previous travelogue) and needed something from home. So I went out for dinner to a Japanese restaurant.
Now, I don't expect any of you to understand that one (except my brother, Richard) but it worked a treat. The miso soup alone could have sustained me for a couple of weeks and the sushi and chicken karaage were just fantastic! On the same street with the Japanese restaurant was an Irish pub, a couple of tapas bars, a Chinese restaurant and a French bakery. Now how could you not like a city that pays that much attention to good food ?
Like a lot of Spanish cities, Madrid doesn't have Eiffel towers or leaning towers or huge statues or whatnot. What it does have is an abundance of galleries, fantastic street life and interesting little bits and pieces on every corner.
To get my fix of fine art I decdided to skip the Prado which is reportedly one of the best museums in the world (it certainly had one of the best queues in the world!). Instead I concentrated on the smaller, more easily digestable Reina Sofia.
The Sofia is a modern art gallery and has works from modern Spanish artists including Picasso, Miro and Gaudi. The most important single piece is Picasso’s Guernica. Hung in a huge gallery, surrounded by some of Picasso’s preliminary sketches and no less than four armed guards, Guernica depicts German atrocities in the Spanish town of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War. The Germans bombed the town on April 26, 1937 in the full knowledge that the town had no military significance and being market day would be crowded with people from all over the country side. There were 10,000 people in the town and after three hours most of the town and the people had been annihilated. Picasso painted Guernica in Paris and insisted that it stay in France until the Fascists were thrown out and it could be returned.
I didn't like it. I don't think Picasso liked it either. It looked unfinished to me. The surrounding preliminary sketches and other works were far more emotive and chilling than the actual painting. I suspect Picasso had enough of the morbid subject about 10 minutes in and decided to pack it in. Apart from that there's some very nice pictures in the gallery (although I think Joan Miro needs her head examined)
From Madrid I also took a day trip out to Toledo. Madrid is surrounded by smaller towns in Castilla La Manche and Castilla y Leon, all of which are purported to be interesting. There is Segovia, Cuenca, Salamanca and Toledo. I picked Toledo more or less at random.
Toledo is interesting, beautiful too. It's another walled Spanish city, this time perched on a small round hill in the middle of the plains of Castilla la Mancha. It has the usual Spanish attractions of a Moorish Alcazar and a fantastic cathedral with the added bonus of a deep gorge alongside, through which the Rio Tajo runs. The town is small and a little bit tourist oriented but very pretty. The streets are cobbled and so narrow that you occasionally have to step into a doorway to allow a car to pass. The city is also full of students, foreign and domestic, who had a bit of a lively air. You can always pick the American students because they will be the ones shouting at each other from either side of the table in an otherwise silent bar/restaurant/whatever. The Spanish students are similar but have the grace to look embarrassed about it and to shut up occasionally.
I spent most of the day in Toledo wandering around taking photo's and sitting in the sun reading a book. I came back late last night and crashed into bed before getting up this morning to stroll down to the Internet cafe to reel off the latest installment of my travel saga.