Thursday morning began waaaay early: Emily's flight left Charles de Gaulle at eight-something, and our parents had insisted we be there three hours early, in case of multiple long security lines or baggage-checking issues, as they had encountered in the much less busy Copenhagen airport when visiting me. This plan meant a 4:45am shuttle from the hotel--we were up earlier than the Paris Metro, and the transit workers were about to be striking anyway--and we ultimately beat most of the airport employees to the airport. Turns out that they don't keep those maze-lines set up overnight.
We were parted by six, so I checked my bag and settled at my gate with coffee, a croissant, several New Yorkers, and The World Without Us. After several naps, an article on Michelle Obama, and the discovery that microscopic bits of plastic are literally everywhere, I finally hopped on a plane (it wasn't until 11) and arrived in Madrid!
Andy wasn't set to arrive until after dinner that night, and Carlon, a friend from home studying there, was still in class, so I checked into the hostel and took myself to the Thyssen-SE:Fesf? Museum, which had a great ground-floor collection of modern art, particularly Picasso and O'Keefe. The rest went by a bit faster--I was a little spent on nineteenth-century Dutch art by this point in my travels--and ended up sitting in the sun on the grass by the Prado Museum while waiting for Carlon for a bit. She took me to the Placa Mayor for dinner, where I had both my first taste of authentic tapas and the discovery that eating vegetarian in this city was going to be a bit harder than it had been elsewhere. We had a good session of catch-up and I got a few recommendations of what to do in the city over Manchego cheese and a Spanish omelette (which had ham in it the first time around) before she had to meet up with some friends and I headed back to the hostel before it got too dark. Andy arrived within the hour, happily, and was thrilled to go to a bar next door and end up with a free tapas by buying beer (it's a thing in Spain). I crashed pretty quickly afterwards--no more early wake-up calls for at least another couple days!
Friday found us croissants, churros and café con leche for breakfast on the way to the Metro, followed by the Reina Sofia, which is home to Picasso's Guernica and a lot of interesting contemporary art. I think we were in the room with Guernica for a good ten minutes: it's gigantic, and the colors (black, white, and gray) were stark and vivd. There was an adjacent exhibit of sketches and studies for the work, too. The rest of the works were largely by Spanish artists, and their descriptions were in Spanish, which lessened the helpfulness of my Modern Art History class from sophomore year, but Yves Klein popped up again, as did several other familiar names.
We had lunch at a busy sandwich place, where Andy continued his love affair with new and foreign foods while I thanked the tourist industry gods that someone had stuck a veggie sandwich on the menu. (And yet I could get lox and grilled vegetables all over Russia? Go figure.) After lunch we went walking around the central area of town, checking out famous buildings and parks, like Retiro. We eventually ended up at the Palac Real, Madrid's answer to Versailles and Schönbrunn and the rest. While I rented an audio tour guide, Andy ran into a quintet of high school friends, whom we saw again the next day at the subway stop by our hostel, randomly enough. The palace was predictably ornate and lovely; the Spanish look differentiated a bit from elsewhere in central and western Europe, which was interesting. Some of the smaller rooms also had specific themes that tended away from the requisite Asian/Chinese look that at least one room in every European palace seems to need, and the classical portraiture was comparatively more original.
It was raining a bit at this point, so we stopped for chocolate con churros on the way back to the Metro. The treat is churros dipped in the thickest hot chocolate you can imagine; of course, with just three churros for one cup of chocolate, we had plenty left over for straight drinking. We headed back to the center of town and met Carlon at the Prado-- it has free entrance after 6pm most days!--and lazily perused Goyas and Velasquezes for a couple of hours, including the Meninas and more Dutch works (for a small country, they had a lot of output) while wishing we'd kept up better with our European history teacher (me and Carlon) and snickering at my hiccups, which were particularly loud and echo-y that evening (Andy and Carlon). Andy and I went to Placa Mayor for dinner--he dug into chicken paella and shared his gazepacho while I had pizza--and explored the pedestrian streets before crashing for the night.
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