Madrid, etc.
At Shyama’s request, here are some more photos (with some thoughts) of Madrid:
It’s not a city that immediately strikes you with big monuments or massive plazas or tall buildings. The downtown, whose churches and domes make it look like a series of upturned cups amidst a lot of flat buildings from my friend’s top-floor apartment in the southern Vallecas part of town, is unimpressive visually at first, but you slowly start to notice the winding streets (below, left), or the fascinating shops as you walk through 16th and 17th century streets and plazas (see the Museum of Ham, below centre) and shudder as you think of the Inquisition and all its brutality in what is actually a fairly innocuous-looking Plaza Mayor. The city’s architecture and physical feel sort of creeps up on you, rather than hammering your senses with size. The royal palaces do try to do that, of course, but still.
But the city also has some fascinating architecture from different periods cheek by jowl: the new Diputados building, one of the Parliament buildings has a modern extension that amazingly, seamlessly, blends into the old Greek-style columns building (far left), and its right near the Puerta del Sol, just near where there are some lovely (and some really garish) 19th century ornate office buildings. The one right above looked better lit up at night than during the day.
The amazing thing about Madrid is its bars (the sheer number of them), the number of people who drink beer before noon on a regular basis, and the tapas. I put some food photos for some friends here but I mostly drank and ate rather than take pictures. Otherwise all the photos would have been like the one on the left! That’s four sherries we tried in a bar that serves 64 different types of only sherry, nothing else.
What else? We had a great evening with Maggie and Cristina, with whom we had a walking around and eating and arguing about postcolonial theory and the politics of the global academy, among other things, in Lavapies, the neighbourhood right behind the Reina Sofia museum that has a lot of new immigrants and lots of new desi restaurants cropping up. Madrid has a new Bangla magazine, too! I’m not going to go on about the Prado, the Reina Sofia and the Thyssen-Bournemisza museums, all of which took my breath away. Mercedes, my friend who works at the Prado, told me some amazing stories about the things tourists sometimes do in museums, especially in rooms with nude statues, when they think the attendants aren’t looking. Ewww. I saw Bosch’s Garden of Delights at the Prado, which was absolutely the best part about going there.
And now, in keeping with the dominant theme of this blog, here’s what I found in Madrid, right in the heart of the Plaza Mayor:
A huge yarn shop that sold yarn by the kilo. They had a lot of blends, but also some pure wool, mohair and alpaca, and tons of colours. Also doing brisk business. Nobody spoke English and my rudimentary Spanish ran out while asking them for permission to take a picture for my blog. They were very suspicious and said only one, but I took another from the outside. They have two rooms like the one pictured above, and a lot of the pure worsted wool was for around 60-65 euros per kilo. I was good, and did not buy any. <<halo shines bright>>
Okay, more later…