Let’s start with the bad: (1) the subway car doors do not open automatically. They require pushing a button or lifting a lever. This is a minor inconvenience, but it’s the only public transit system that I have ever been on where the doors don’t open automatically. (2) It’s one of the few international destinations that Americans go to in droves, some wearing turkey headdresses, others yelling at children, all to be avoided, and, (3) navigating the main train station is a pain in the ass. After a long and arduous task of finding the ticket office, we almost missed our train because we couldn’t find the entrance to the platform. For reasons unknown, one side of the sign says platforms 1 - 12, the other side say 13, 14, 15. It’s the same entrance, just put 1 - 15 on each side. So, in a nutshell, these are minor inconveniences and really there’s nothing not to like about Madrid.
Tanya joined me for a week in Madrid. We rented a small AirBnB near the Franco Rodriguez Metro stop on the 7 line. Madrid has an outstanding Metro system (except for the doors) with 12 lines to put you within walking distance of just about anywhere in the city. The system was also clean enough for the city’s teens to be at home sitting on the floor of a car on a Saturday night, drinking.
Madrid was a city that felt very much like home from the start. The neighborhood we stayed in was away from the tourist bustle in a five story building on a side street. We began our days with Tanya sleeping in and me walking to a nearby bar called La Mina. It was a small place with only a few tables. I imagine it as typical of many neighborhood joints scattered across Madrid. They were open for breakfast, lunch and dinner six nights a week. I ate breakfast there nearly every morning and we ate dinner there most nights as well. In Spanish culture, breakfast and dinner are smaller meals, with breakfast served before work and dinner usually after 8p. Lunch is eaten in the mid-afternoon followed by rest before returning to work.
So, my morning usually started at La Mina with a Cafe con Leche served in a glass. The glass was filled halfway up with coffee, then the server returned with two pitchers of milk and gave you the choice of caliente or fria, or a combination. I always went with caliente as I have never developed a taste for cold coffee. Then, I explored the breakfast menu, trying several different offerings during our stay. I would take a croissant relleno jamon y queso back to Tanya (para llevar). Until this trip, I never realized that dolma and relleno mean essentially the same thing in different languages and carry more meaning than the English equivalent ‘stuffed’. This experience gave me an opportunity to mutter a few words of Spanish to people who could only mutter a few words of English and be understood and laughed at in the best possible way. When I returned to our building, there was usually a worker shoveling coal into the boiler through a door on the first floor. The coal smell eventually wafted through the building.
La Mina is also where most of our evenings ended. Tanya and I would get a table and order a few things off the menu and drink wine. Tanya would talk to the bartender in Spanish who would help her with her pronunciation and understanding. Dinner time was a little slower paced than breakfast, with one bartender as opposed to the two or three servers working breakfast. At breakfast, the bar was lined with saucers, spoons, glasses and a sugar packet ready to be filled and set in front of customers as soon as they walked through the door. Small tapas, pastries, churros and tortillas (spanish omelets) were in display cases at the bar, ready to go. Dinner seemed to have none of this advanced preparation. Finding a neighborhood place, briefly establishing a sense of community is what Tanya dreams of in a vacation and it was restorative and relaxing.
One night when we didn’t eat at La Mina, we went to Sobrino de Botin (nephew of Botin), the oldest continually operating restaurant in the world. When Tanya and I travel, we try to eat at least once in an upscale restaurant and try to eat a more local cuisine the rest of the time. Botin was the upscale night. Botin is a tourist trap and we were there on Thanksgiving, which meant it was an American tourist trap. We booked the Botin experience, which included a tour of the restaurant prior to dinner.
Our tour group consisted of two other groups of Americans. The first, was a nondescript group of three young southerners transplanted to New York. The other group was five middle age or more American women, all wearing turkey headdresses and drinking from a bottle of wine when they arrived at the restaurant. Tanya turned to me and said that we would not be sitting with those women. She then pulled the guide aside and told him that it was our wedding anniversary (it was not) and asked if we could get a private table. We were seated at the Hemingway table. This is the table favored by Ernest Hemingway as the restaurant was a favorite of his during his time in Spain. Seated next to us was another table of four Americans. Parents and a younger man and woman, we were unsure whether the younger were a couple or brother and sister. The girl did most of the talking, loudly. At first she prattled on about a variety of mundane subjects including the virtues of zucchini spaghetti vs. squash spaghetti. Eventually, she went into a full blown meltdown about her lack of a career, no babies and a class reunion coming up. The younger man was mostly silent, the older woman threw a few jabs, but the conversation seemed to go on between father and daughter.
We enjoyed our dinner enough. The house specialty is suckling pig. It is served as part of a larger menu of several courses. The tour of the restaurant was good, seeing the original wine cellar and foundations built on top of another building and the oven dating to 1725 were interesting. If none of those things interest you, a less expensive dinner of better quality is not hard to find in Madrid.
Madrid has at least three of the world’s finest art museums: The Prado, the Reina Sofia, and the Thyssen-Bornemisza. We went to all three, which is a testament to their greatness. We are not normally ones to spend a lot of time in museums, but these were extraordinary. The Prado featured work acquired during the Spanish monarchy and dates to the 16th century and before. There are many, many paintings of the life of Christ, his birth and sequence of events of his death, mostly. There are also enormous number of paintings of noblemen and women, most of which would have been entirely forgotten by now if the picture did not hang in The Prado. The Prado also had a number of Rubens, who painted mostly about rape, beheadings and Satan. The collection is enormous and I don’t think we even saw it all.
The Reina Sofia featured mostly works from the late 19th century forward. The most notable work in the collection was Picasso’s Guernica. It also featured more work by Picasso, and also Dali, and everybody who is anybody from the 20th century.
The Thyssen-Bornemisza, we almost didn’t go to because we thought it might be too many museums for a week. I’m glad we did, because had a broad and magnificent collection. It had some of the same artist as the other two in its collection and it also filled in the gaps. Its collection was broad and expansive. If you find yourself in Madrid and only have time to go to one museum, this would be a good choice.
In addition, in this city of art, we say a Brueghel exhibit in the city center which featured all of the Brueghels. I am sure there are many fine museums and galleries we missed. In fact, the tour guide on our tour of Botin was a painter. There is not shortage of art in Madrid.
There is also no shortage of excellent food. I would try to stay out of the tourist areas to save money, but there is good food everywhere and there is no need to eat anything but the local fare. There are also a number of markets or food courts in the city, the most famous with tourists is Mercado San Miguel. Go there if you don’t want to hear Spanish spoken. It serves up mostly nuevo-Spanish foods and wines from a number of booths at an inflated price. I still maintain that the best food is available outside the tourist areas. Specialties include jamon iberico, paella, all manner of tapas — a few favorites include patatas brava and tortilla patatas.
So what is there to do in Madrid besides eat and see art? There’s the royal palace, a number of churches, mostly catholic. Madrid is also a convenient place to be for day trips. We went to Toledo one day by rail. Segovia, Avila, Cuenca, and Salamanca are also easily reachable by rail for a day trip.
Toledo is a medieval city that is the former capital of Spain before it was moved to Madrid. It is also known for its knife and sword making. Most of that has left the city by now, but one can still by some beautiful handcrafted blades. It’s a fun place to wander for the day. At one time (before the inquisition) there was a sizeable Jewish community and the city has been compared to Jerusalem. Having been to both, there are similarities, most notably, both have been conquered by Jews, Muslims and Christians. One of the synagogues has served as a house of worship for all three. Overall, it is touristy, but a side trip worth making.