Madrid

So two weeks ago I made a weekend trip to Madrid to see Madge and Jo. Madge had come to Spain to visit, well Spain and me (Thanks Madge!), and Jo had come with the Wellesley choir. On Friday Madge and I saw the Palacio Real, the Cathedral and the Plaza Mayor. Though Jo later told us the inside was really impressive, we only saw the Palace from the outside. It was still fairly impressive from the outside. The cathedral was nice, but Madge noted the very modern looking stained glass windows. My friend Miguel later told me that the Cathedral in Madrid is very new. It was started only about 200 years about, but never really made any progress. When they finally decided to get to it, the entire thing was basically constructed in 30 years and was then finished at the end of this only about 15 years ago. The one thing it does have was an amazingly impressive Spanish organ complete with they horizontal pipes called trumpetería that were added around 1650 (Huzzah for connections with my history of Spanish music class!). As far as the Plaza Mayor goes, I definitely like mine in Salamanca better. It may have something to do with living here, but the painted walls just weren’t doing it for me. Madge is pretty though.

Saturday we visited El Prado and el Museo Nacional de Reina Sofia. Prado is the premier art museum in Spain. Madge and I weren’t terribly impressed. It contains lots of works by Goya, Velazquez, and Spanish artists in general. It’s mostly baroque art featuring religious themes and overly rotund, nude babies. Also has a lot of portraits of dukes, kings, queens, and the like. It was amazing for me to see Bosch’s (Flemish artist) “Garden of Delights.” Also really enjoyed Goya’s Third of May and black paintings. It was so strange, because they are pictures I remember Mr. Luedke teaching me in AP Euro as he strived to cover art as well. I loved that class. It was surreal to see them in person. Velazquez’s “Las Meninas” was also fun. Susie informed me that she’d actually just studied that in class, and her professor had mentioned how the reflection was impossible at that angle unless the king and queen were sitting below the floor. Hah.

We both enjoyed the Reina Sofia much more. It’s Spain’s Modern Art museum. One temporary exhibit featured burnt plastic bags on canvas, but after that it improved. One huge exhibit by Adolfo Schlosser displayed many geometric and organic shapes and designs all made with natural materials and lots of wood. It was neat, but as Madge said often appealed more to my engineering side than my artistic one. The Reina Sofia also houses many works by Salvador Dali and Picasso. The rooms devoted to Dali were…interesting. Suffice to say that he must have been taking some strong hallucinogenic and he was a dirty, dirty man. The works were very impressive, however. Picasso’s Guernica is housed there. It’s a huge canvas and something I’d seen in text books. I’d never thought much of it before, but standing in front of it was powerful. Part of it was simply its notoriety, but also seeing the original work and understanding the brutal history (fire bombing during the Spanish Civil War) that inspired it made it moving for me. Unfortunately the Reina Sofia didn't allow pictures.

Seeing both Madge and Jo was really a great blessing. We saw the Park of Buen Retiro (Madrid’s largest park) and wandered the city a little. Just speaking English, being understood, and understanding without thinking was a really nice surprise. I didn’t realize how much I missed it. Talking with them really made me miss Olin, my friends, and family. It was hard to say goodbye. Like Madge said, at least we’ll be enthusiastic to move back to Olin in the fall and live with our good friends.