Madrid

Madrid, Spain – Wednesday, May 5th to Friday, May 7th

“¿Cómo se dice ‘grazie’ en español?”

As I rode the crowded city bus to Roma Termini I realized how underprepared for this Spanish interim trip I was. My last exam in Rome finished not even three hours ago, I had only my first few days in Madrid mapped out on my itinerary, making last-minute tour and hostel bookings. While many people would plan for months in advance before going on a ten day tour of Spain, I had barely a week to prepare the actual details of my sojourn between studying for final exams and projects in Rome, completing predeparture arrangements for a summer study semester in London scheduled to commence as soon as I was done in Spain. The previous night I neglected the opportunity to do more planning (or even packing!) in favor of taking a five hour farewell walking tour of the city I had called home for four months. And now I was on a bus to catch a train to catch a plane to Spain… and I realized all the Spanish I thought I had agonizingly learned in high school believing it would never come to any practical use had now, just when I would finally need it, had all been replaced with Italian.

“Gracias, that’s it!”

One other thing I had forgotten was that our apartment complex didn’t renew our monthly public transportation passes since we were only going to remain tenants for the first week in May, so they figured if we had buses or Metro to use during finals week we could buy our own damn tickets for once. Which really only meant restricted use of the Metro, since as far as I or anyone else could tell the buses were a free unlimited public service, the drivers hidden in their own little compartment and ticket validation consisted of these small punch boxes that were totally optional as who was going to check if they had been validated or not?

As I ran over my Spanish vocabulary in my head while frustrating at the Roman traffic which made me wonder if I might be late for the trip to the airport, I noticed two uniformed gentlemen boarded the bus at the second to last stop and appeared to be checking for everyone’s tickets as they worked their way to the back. Oh, shit! No room to move, no more stops to jump off of before they get to asking for my nonexistent pass. So this is how it’s going to end, taking the 23 route twice daily for four months with a valid unlimited pass never once checked, and now on my very last day on the very last bus which is the one time I don’t have a pass is when I’m going to get pinched by the fuzz? I quickly think of what to do when caught… do I show them last month’s pass and pretend I’ve lost track of the calendar? No, that’s not going to do any help, that’s just admitting to negligence. Perhaps I should play the clueless American tourist and pretend that I thought you’re supposed to pay your fare while on the bus as in the U.S. rather than buy a biglietto from a tabaccheria, say scusi and get off at the next stop, egg on face. Surely they will have mercy, right?  As they approached I just pretended to look off out the window like I had randomly seen the Pope from the streets (which did already happen to me once that morning) and for whatever reason they never bothered me to produce any evidence that I wasn’t on board this bus illegally. I fucking hate buses. We arrived at Termini and as quickly as I knew how I alighted, breathing a sigh of relief that I somehow escaped what would have been my last Italian adventure. Arrivederci Roma, e grazie davvero! I’ve finally endured the last of your total batshit insanity.

Upon arrival in Madrid I discovered another way I had underprepared for my trip was sending my jacket directly to London rather than pack it in my backpack for the travels in Spain without checking a weather report first. It’s springtime in the Mediterranean; of course it’s going to be sunny and 80° every day! Getting off the metro and walking to my accommodations late that night revealed a slightly different story, a damp, cold wind blowing through the air as I stumbled through the shadows trying to find the unmarked entrance to my place for the night. On the plus side, I was very centrally located near the Opera House and Royal Palace, in a cheap but characterful establishment several floors off the ground that seemed to be halfway between hotel and hostel. A single room at €16 a night was more than welcome, although this was also the first of many locations that would advertise free wireless internet in all the rooms, only to discover the signal was nowhere near strong enough to actually reach my room.

The first morning I took a walk to see the outside of the Royal Palace (Palacio Real), exploring a few of the nearby gardens such as the Plaza de Oriente, and then walked down Calle Mayor where I found a funky and chaotic delicatessen that advertised a sandwich and a bottle of coke for only two euro, an offer I was not going to pass up on. By the time I reached Puerta del Sol (a large plaza iconic to Madrid similar to how Times Square is iconic to New York and also the official ‘Point Zero’ in Spain by which all other distances are measured) the sun had warmed the skies sufficiently, but I was still slightly chilled so I decided to return to my room for a while before catching a Metro to begin my afternoon at Parque de Atracciones de Madrid (read that report now and then come back here if you wish to read the series in exact chronological order).

Madrid has its own unique look, somewhere between the lacy classical style of Paris and the eclectic earth tones of Rome. However, more so than those and other historic capitals of Romantic Europe, Madrid is also very modernized between the historic landmarks. It has wide, clean avenues with a logical infrastructure, and the underground Metro system in particular is very up-to-date and efficient. This makes getting the full flavor of the city a bit more difficult if confined only to foot and one’s own resources, so at the advice of a friend who also visited Madrid alone earlier that spring I booked a couple tours to aid in my discovery of the city. Unfortunately as they were booked last minute I for whatever reason ended up buying tickets to bus tours. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I fucking hate buses.

This two hour tour was supposed to be a nighttime look at the city, scheduled to begin just as the sun was setting, and when I bought it online I noticed it said “transport included”. This was at least wholly truthful, but  it also was all the tour consisted of, just getting on a bus and then being carted around the streets while the driver mentioned over the P.A. system when we were passing an interesting landmark that was impossible to spot because it was on the other side of the bus viewable only through tint-glassed windows at night while driving by at 40 mph. It’s like a restaurant advertising that “food is included in the price,” you wonder what you would be getting for your money if that were at all otherwise. Plus the tour ended a good 45 minutes earlier than stated. Feeling  cheated I decided to make the most of the rest of my night by walking along the Palacio Real road for a while, turning back to look at Plaza Mayor, and finding not much else of interest, retiring to my room where I hoped my next full day in the city would fare better.

I wisely decided that by my proximity to the Royal Palace should take the time and money to invest in an actual tour inside the palace so long as I was in Madrid, thus I started my next morning handing over a generously discounted €3.50 for student admission at the palace security. This is quite an incredible landmark to witness, located on a hillside that the King supposedly chose (and therefore picking the location for the nation’s capital city itself to develop) because of the pleasant winds that gathered across the desert and blew upon this hill. It also overlooks the expansive park Campo del Moro which Parque de Atracciones de Madrid is located in, and Abismo can even be clearly seen from the Plaza de Armas, a large outdoor courtyard in the middle of the palace (now you know what I’d look for in a window view if I were deciding where to build my palace!)

While I chose the self-guided tour to see the palace, all this really meant was that as I was herded along the predetermined, roped-off pathway through rooms and corridors, I had to rely on the printed info clip-on signs rather than a plastic audioguide or a Japanese tour host soliloquizing a million words per second while their clot of listeners blocked the way for more nimble visitors. The interior was massively expansive and ornate, almost oppressively so. While it certainly causes many tourists to ooh and awe, it’s no place any sane person I can think of would want to live, because who wants to walk a quarter mile through endless hallways of gold-leaf trimming just so they can get to the nearest Royal Commode? The sheer quantity of crafted antiquities adorning the walls is staggering, but every flourish and frill seems to represent a sort of anti-aesthetic, one intended to intimidate and bully the viewer, designed so that only a God could comprehend it at once. Rooms busy with sculptures and chandeliers filling every corner would feel surprisingly empty, the mass of collectibles numbing the eye until one must tune them out and focus only on the Royal Void left hanging in the air. Little wonder no one lives here anymore. Photos were not allowed but I managed to sneak a shot from inside the dining room. I would have tried in the throne room but security was much tighter in there.

Finishing with a look around the Royal Armory (La Real Armería) museum I needed to move on with the day and start seeing the rest of Madrid. This brings us to part three of “I Fucking Hate Buses” for this travel journal, starting with I Fucking Hate Buses; part 3A. The other tour I hastily booked was an all-day hop-on/hop-off tour bus route by Madrid-Vision, with the promise that it would be the easy way to see the city, stopping at all the major landmarks, while being given all the interesting facts and stories via a personal headset while being whisked to the next destination. Since I needed a meal before starting the tour I headed back in the direction of Puerta del Sol, and once I had finished I discovered that the bus stop had a line of tourists waiting for a bus extending for several building lengths; overhearing some people towards the end of the line they commented it might take a half hour before those at the end of the line will get a seat. Not exactly what I’d call “hop-on” service. So then I had to walk all the way back to the Puerta de Toledo, which was where the next nearest stop I could figure was located. Alright, no wait here, which was as much of a problem because in the entire roundabout with at least six major roadways joining around there was no one obvious spot for a pickup location, which I eventually found after watching several buses pass by the circle and trying to figure out where they stopped, a small 8×5 sign on a post. After a good 45 minutes of just trying to find a bus to get on, I finally boarded, where my ticket was exchanged for a guide consisting of advertisements with a small map on the inside. The headphones didn’t work well (it took me five minutes before I figured out they weren’t broken, the narration was really just that sparse) and predictably buses are total crap to take photos from. I got off at the Royal Botanical Gardens (Real Jardin Botanico) where for a slight €2 fee I was able to spend over an hour wandering around a mini-oasis quietly tucked inside the middle of a busy metropolis, taking close-ups of flowers, plants and statues.

Once this had finished I decided to attempt to get further use of the day’s tour bus by catching the secondary blue line that would run down the more modernized financial districts of the city, which included several museums as well as some great architecture such as the Torres de Colón. That was the plan anyway, which leads us to I Fucking Hate Buses; part 3B. A twenty-five minute wait at the clearly marked pick-up point for the blue route, when the clouds turned a gloomier shade of gray I eventually gave up and walked the distance instead. Since this wasn’t a tour intended for walking and I had wasted enough time waiting around, I had to curb my planned sight-seeing and stopped once I got a third of the route down to National Archeological Museum (Museo Arqueológico Nacional), which I was pleased to find was offering free admission to everyone, most likely because much of the museum was undergoing renovations and therefore only a small corner of the collections were available for public viewing. Even taking the time to examine every display I was done in 45 minutes, not to slight some of the great pieces they had (an incredibly delicate statue of a flower bouquet was my favorite).

Parque del Retiro is Madrid’s answer to every European city’s massive parkground, and I must say it was every bit as impressive as Rome’s Villa Borghese or London’s Hyde Park. The degree of sculptured landscaping (including some funky, polyp-esque topiary trees) was impressive for a public space, especially coming from the United States where publicly funded services have a stigma attached to them that they are of inferior quality to private commercial projects, and a place like Parque del Retiro would likely either charge admission, fall into disrepair… or be considered a nationally recognized landmark rather than just another European city park.

The Prado Museum offers free admission to everyone everyday from 6:00pm to their closure two hours later. The time was drawing near enough to think about joining the queue before the opening, although I was not the only one in Madrid that day for wanting free admission to a national art gallery as when I arrived there was a line stretched halfway around the building. I’m sure it had enough time after I joined for it to double once more, but as soon as six rolled around we quickly streamed into the building. Good timing too, because only moments before I entered the skies opened up to truly magnificent quantities of precipitation, the likes of which I had never witnessed before or after in Europe (and I spent over a month and a half  in the UK). Standing in the warm, dry indoors in the presence of some of the world’s finest artworks whilst listening to the rain thunder down upon the roof, there is an ineffable pleasure to be taken in that which no admission ticket could ever buy. Many fine works of art were to be found throughout the Prado, although the section which rings most clearly in my memory was the gallery of Francisco Goya’s Black Paintings, especially the haunting ‘Saturn Devouring His Son’.

By this point I had been on my feet for the better portion of the day and needed to return to my room for the night. I was hoping to get one more use of the tour bus service to see the rest of the route around the city before getting off at the end near the Opera House. So I sat at the bus stop and waited, and waited… and waited. I think I smell the approach of I Fucking Hate Buses; part 3C. After sitting on a hard stone bench (not alone, there were others who were equally curious how their money was being spent for this service) for 45 minutes, a bus finally arrived. After sitting down, the driver announced over the intercom that because it was getting close to 9:00pm, they would be shutting down the tour after the next two stop. I checked the map, and discovered that I would only be taken further away from where I needed to go. Disembarking after an hour long wait before it had even taken me an inch in the direction I wanted to go, I grumbled my way back to my room halfway across the city, not wanting to spend any more money than the 30-some euro I had already wasted between the two bus services over the last two days. Spirit sagging, I caved in to what was easiest and had dinner at a Burger King, not really caring any more if I was making full utility of my time to experience Spanish culture. Tomorrow would be a full day at Parque Warner Madrid.

Next: Parque de Atracciones de Madrid

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