A brief stint in Madrid

Happy Valentine’s Day, I suppose, although it’s not like there are Hallmarks or flower shops full of roses here or anything like that. But I felt like I should at least give a nod to the things going on stateside, since I’m not completely Euro-fied yet. Anyway, so Tuesday I went to Madrid. It was a 15-minute errand that I was there for, really, I had to get fingerprinted for my foreign work identity card. As a side note, international travel is really eerie… it’s like they always know where you are! Plus, it’s going to take about 3 more months to get the physical card (seriously?!), and so if I do any international travel in the meantime, I have to apply some sort of return permit, even for leisure within the EU. I don’t actually know why I had to go to Madrid, because all I did was go to a police station, but I guess I went to the CENTRAL police station, I don’t know. Anyway, so like I said, it was a very short errand, except that Madrid is 2 hours and 40 minutes away by AVE, Spain’s high-speed train. By a happy coincidence, though, I bumped into a coworker on the train in the morning, who was doing a similarly brief errand, so before we parted ways we agreed to try to reconvene in the afternoon to do some sightseeing. One of the first things I saw was this bull:


Well it worked out perfectly, I finished up around 2:00 and then headed back to the southeastern portion of the city via metro, where I met up with my coworker, Thor (from Sweden), outside of the Museo del Prado. The entrance fee was cheap, only 6€ for general admission, but because Dow is treating me like a student, I felt inclined to try for the student price, so I showed my MIT alumni card (“alumni” happens to be very close to the Spanish “alumno”, incidentally) and muttered “Estados Unidos” before handing over a paltry 3€. Maybe I should be supporting the arts more, or something, but I figure that’s why they have generous donors. Anyway, I liked the museum. There were a lot of your typical religious works, icons and depictions of the birth, crucifixion, and ressurection of Jesus, but they were still amazing. What really impressed me with a lot of them was the sheer size—some were easily over 10 ft. (I’m sorry, at least 3 meters) tall. I also liked the brilliance of the gold on the icons, and the absolute precision in color, shadow, and detail. Some of my favorite works were

1. The Garden of Earthly Delights, by Bosch, for it’s daring content and beautiful color. (Also accompanied by The Garden of Eden and Hell.
2. Moisés salvado de las agues, by Paolo Veronese, for being a painting about the finding baby Moses in the river yet having some oddly white Egyptians… (can't find a picture right now)
3. La historia de Nastagio degli Onesti, by Sandro Botticelli. Um, it was just plain crazy, basically. I'm looking for an English page to tell the story, but for now you can throw it into Babelfish or something.
4. I also was excited to see, in real life, famous works such as La maja desnuda, by Goya, Las Meninas, by Velázquez and El caballero de la mano en el pecho, by El Greco.

It was also quite a shock that the works were so open to the public. For the most part, the paintings were all hung on the wall with only a low rope stretched in front of them, a few steps back. As Thor pointed out, there wasn’t much between the paintings, and say, some high school kid with a knife…

Anyway, so here’s the museum:

After the museum, Thor and I went for a light snack, i.e. tapas and una caña (a small glass of beer). I went for the blasphemous combo of jamón serrano (Serrano ham) and queso manchego (farmer’s cheese, from sheep's milk), two staple Castellano dishes that I haven’t yet tried. They were pretty scrumptious, I have to admit. Afterwards, I headed back to the train station, where I intended to catch the 7 o’clock AVE back to Tarragona. Unfortunately, it looked like RENFE (Spain’s train company) had other plans in mind for me. Basically, what happened was I bought a ticket with a vuelta abierta (open return), since I didn’t know what time I wanted to come back in the evening. Before leaving the train station in the morning, I asked three different people about my ticket, and how to go about getting a seat assigned for the return. Each person directed me to someone else, and the last person told me that I could just get on the train with it. In the evening, when I got back to the train station, the person working at the baggage scan also told me that my ticket was valid, and let me through. I got to the boarding area 20 minutes before the train was supposed to leave, where I learned that what I had in my hand was indeed, not a ticket. Exhausted, angry, and already stressed out over an ongoing housing search, I was determined not to miss that train. I argued with the woman at the counter, gave up and complained to some men in suits, was directed to the customer service office, and then sent back out to the automated ticket machines, where I was told to ask the associate out there for help. The minutes ticked by (I did discover that in urgent situations, my Spanish is actually quite reliable), and finally, the NINTH person that I talked to told me simply that I had to close the ticket before I could board the train, and that could only be done on the internet. The train was gone at this point, but I was told there was another at 8:10, so I had no choice but to leave the station and go to an internet café. The saga didn’t end there, because it was at that point that I discovered that it was actually too late to close the ticket on the internet, so back to the train station I went. Finally, three MORE employees later, I was back at the taquilla, the ticket window, buying a separate return ticket. Mmm…. Fun! Haha, well, I guess I can laugh about it now, because I did make it home that night and only about 90 minutes later than I had expected. Plus, I think if I moved to Europe and didn’t ever miss a train, my experience would certainly be incomplete. But I’ll be sure to close my ticket next time.