Visiting the Museums of Madrid

After a 14 hour journey from Boston with a short layover in Frankfurt, we arrived in Madrid.  The Wife had arranged for a car service to take us to our Airbnb apartment in the Plaza Mayor section of the city.  Our base of operations for the next several days would be this 3 bedroom loft on the top floor of an apartment building.

We would later discover that the 2nd floor "master" bedroom has very little noise insulation.

The roomy common room is below on the lower floor

The shower in the "master" bathroom seemed pretty ordinary...

...until we realized there is a window where
anybody in the common room can see into it.

The apartment had an outdoor sitting area, but it was way too cold to enjoy it.

Since we had arrived in the early afternoon, we had plenty of daylight hours to explore the surrounding area.  Our location was great.  It was in the heart of the city with most of the tourist destinations and mass transit systems within walking distance.  There were also a multitude of restaurants, shops, and a grocery store nearby.  Unfortunately, it also meant that the area would be crowded and noisy.

We walked to the nearby Puerta del Sol, probably the busiest public square in the city.  Since it was only a week before Christmas, the square and much of the city was decorated for the looming holidays.

A large conical structure was placed
in the square as a Christmas tree
that would be lit up at night.

A horde of parents with young children crowd around a holiday attraction. 
We couldn't get close enough to see exactly what was going on.

There were a lot of shops around this touristy section of the city.  After seemingly stopping inside every single one of them, the sky became darker and the air got colder.  It was a perfect time to stop off at Chocalateria San Gines, the most poplar hot chocolate cafe in Madrid.  Although chocolate originates from Central America, its popularity in Spain is only natural considering the country's long history of colonization of the New World.  Originally established in 1894, Chocolateria San Gines began as a small cafe tucked away in an alley.  As the cafe became more popular, it expanded and expanded, taking up the whole block.  This allows them to serve hundreds of locals and tourists daily.

We weren't the only ones with hot chocolate on our minds.  The line to get a seat inside the cafe was long.

This seating area off the main cafe
was oddly decorated like a theater .

Unlike the hot chocolate usually found in the U.S., the hot chocolate in Spain is so thick it coats a spoon.

Unlike the churros that are usually served in the Western hemisphere,
these in Spain were not coated with sugar and rather unsweetened.

The churros are supposed to be dipped into the thick hot chocolate, creating a perfect snack.

We backtracked a bit towards the Plaza Mayor, the central public square of the city.  Created in the late 16th century by order of King Phillip II, this plaza was the site of several cultural and political events in Spain's history.  During the Spanish Inquisition, heretics were often tortured and executed in the Plaza Mayor.  When we visited, the only thing being tortured was the spirit of Christmas.  The Plaza Mayor was the site of the city's main Christmas Market.  Garish and cheap junk were sold at temporary stands in the square.  Visitors could pay money to take photos with people wearing large stuffed animal costumes.

I wouldn't have been surprised if indulgences were also being sold at the Plaza Mayor.

The ornate Casa de la Panadería looms over the Plaza Mayor.  This building was originally
the main bakery of the city.  Now it serves as the headquarters for the Tourism Board.

There really wasn't anything to see or purchase at the Plaza Major so we decided to find some dinner.

Many famous restaurants are located off the Cava de San Miguel. 

Our destination Meson del Champinon is famous for their mushrooms.

Like many tapas eateries in central Spain, this restaurant has a bar in the front of the house where patrons can order a drink and munch on some specialties of the house.  As we would find out countless times during our trip, trying to cram six people into a limited space at a bar is a bad idea.  Luckily, the Meson del Champinon has a couple of tables in the back where diners can be seated.

Fake fungi decorate the ceiling of the restaurant, an homage to their expertise with mushrooms.

Jamon Iberico

Padron peppers

Croquetas de jamon 

Their signature mushroom and chorizo dish.

The wait staff were very friendly and patient with us with our very limited Spanish.  It did help that their menu was on electronic tablets, and we could just point to the photo of the dish we wanted.  Overall the food was good.  However, the mushrooms were truly exceptional--the star of the meal.  Even The Boy who dislikes all things fungus thought it was the best dish.  We enjoyed the mushrooms so much we ordered a couple more plates until we were stuffed.


*****


Monday, December 18, 2017


*****


The next morning, The Wife announced to The Kids that we were going to visit some of Madrid's best art galleries.  They responded with silent stares.  I'm pretty sure they were celebrating inside.

The best part of a family vacation is when everybody gathers
around without any distractions and converses with one another.

The museums were only a 20 minute walk from our apartment so we eschewed the subway or a taxi.

Along the way we stopped at a boutique store called Lola Fonseca.

Silk scarves and shawls are beautifully hand painted in their small studio.

Although these textiles are mind-numbingly boring to me, The Wife and
The Mother-In-Law found them fascinating enough to purchase several scarves.

Eventually, we continued on our journey and made it to the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum.  The museum contains over 1,600 paintings that were once a private collection.  The artwork consists of a hodgepodge of styles spanning the 13th to the 20th centuries.  Although I am an unabashed Philistine, there were several paintings that I did like.

I like this Dali painting.  It has a hat trick of
cool things: Tigers, a gun, and a naked chick.

This painting was pretty cool as it uses camouflage schemes from the armed forces of several countries.

The Wife would have stolen this Degas painting if given the chance.

WTF?!?!?!?!  Seriously.

Once we finished soaking in all the culture of the Thyssen Museum, it was time for lunch.  Using Yelp as our guide, we dined at Restaurant Laveronica.  Each one of us ordered the lunch special which  consisted a handful of choices from 3 set courses.

House salad

Cream of zucchini soup

Cream of carrot soup

Hake with roteña and rice

Laveronica hamburger

Filet Laveronica

The food was pretty good, but the service so slow to the point of being inattentive.  It wasn't just for us non-Spanish speaking tourists, but for the entire restaurant.  It took quite a while to get our food and we had to remind them to bring desserts (the 3rd course).  They then brought it out for The Kids only, skipping all the adults.  It was bewildering, but we just chalked it up to a cultural gap.

Since lunch took almost two hours, we had less time than we had planned to see the Prado Museum.  We definitely didn't have time to visit Reina Sofia Museum, the last of the 3 "must-see" museums in Madrid.

The Kids stand in front of the statue of Diego Velázquez
who served as court painter to King Philip IV.

The Prado Museum is the former collection of Spain's royalty and focuses on European artwork from its expansive empire.  Therefore, in addition to having numerous works from Spaniards such as Francisco Goya and Diego Velázquez, there are numerous works from Flemish and Italian painters such as Bosch, Rubens, and Titian.  What that meant is that a significant portion of the collection is very Baroque with religious themes--not a favorite of The Wife nor I.  The most famous painting in the museum is Velázquez's Las Meninas, which I found interesting only because I studied it in art class an eternity ago.

The Prado Museum is actually very large and it took us the remaining afternoon to breeze through it.  As we left, there was a long line of people that snaked around the building.  They were all waiting for entrance to the museum as the general collection is free to visit from 6PM-8PM.

As we walked back to our apartment, The Wife wanted to stop off at a confectionery called La Violeta.  Not surprisingly, they specialize in candies made with violet flowers.

An assortment of violet-flavored hard candies.  The flavor was interesting, but not my favorite.

For dinner, we only had to walk 5-10 minutes from our apartment to Casa Toni.

The restaurant specializes in less popular cuts such as organ meats. 

A pitcher of their sangria was inexpensive, but it
was also watered down  to the point of being bland. 

 

Pimientos de padron (padron peppers)

Berengenas de la casa (fried aubergines)

Zarajos (braided lamb intestines)

Revuelto de chorizo (eggs and sausage)

Rinones a la plancha (kidneys on a hot plate)

Mollejas de cordero (lamb sweetbreads)

Boquerones fritos (fried anchovies)

Callos caseros (stewed tripe)

While the food was a bit greasy, it was inexpensive, delicious, and not too gamy.  For me, it would be one of the better meals we would have in Madrid.

A Frigid Few Days In Boston

Historically, Spain has not been known for gastronomy.  Much of its food has traditionally been based on the conquering group of the day whether it be the Celts, the Romans, or the Berbers.  Whether their food was considered too rustic, too spicy, or too foreign, Spanish cooks were not held in the same regard as chefs like Auguste Escoffier in neighboring France.  However, over the last 30 years, a new generation of Spanish chefs have created a cocina de vanguardia based on creativity, innovation, and new cooking techniques.  This has propelled Spain to the top of the list of countries to visit for food enthusiasts as several restaurants such as El Cellar de Can Roca and Ferran Adria's El Bulli were named the top restaurants in the world.  While this cuisine has inspired a trend towards modernist techniques, it has also focused much more attention towards traditional Spanish cooking.  It's uncommon not to see the trendy restaurants in the United States now serving tapas-inspired "small plates."

Since I love food (probably too much as my belly can attest), Spain has long been high on my list of countries that I wanted to visit.  One of the reasons that The Wife and I had been procrastinating in going is that we don't speak Spanish.  We had been hoping that the Spanish classes that The Kids were taking in school would allow them to be fluent.  Nope.  An hour of Rosetta Stone on the computer made me just as fluent as them in Spanish--meaning none of us could complete a sentence.  Another event that dampened my enthusiasm for visiting Spain was the closing of El Bulli in 2011.  There was no need to rush to see Spain if the temple of modernist cuisine was no longer open.

Spain had been an afterthought until The Wife stumbled on a really good deal on airfare.  It would be during the Christmas holiday which is off-season in Spain.  I was fine with that because I wanted to avoid the 100+ °F summertime temperatures that often occur in southern Spain.  The only catch was that the flights would leave out of Boston, 1,300 miles from where we live.  To keep this trip economical, The Wife also found a good deal on a flight to Boston.  We would have to drive three hours to get to Nashville where the flight would originate, but it would save us several hundreds of dollars.  We would also have to stay in Boston overnight.  Since they hadn't traveled to Spain before, we also invited The Father-In-Law and The Mother-In-Law to accompany us on this trip.

Our journey to Boston via Nashville went as planned, and we arrived at Logan Airport in the early afternoon.  I had lived in the Boston area for four years during college, but had not been back in the last 20 years.  When I took a step outside and was met by a blast of the the frigid New England air, I remembered why.  It was a typical winter day there, with temperatures in the low 20's °F.  

28-3

For convenience sake, we reserved a room at the Hilton Boston 
Logan Airport, which is about a 10 minute walk from the airport.

Despite the cold, we weren't going to let an opportunity to do some sightseeing go to waste.  Boston was the catalyst for the American Revolutionary War.  We wouldn't have time to walk the Freedom Trail, but we wanted to find an interesting educational activity for The Kids.  We bundled up in our warm winter clothes and hailed the airport shuttle bus which took us to the T station.  From there, we took the subway to South Station and walked several blocks until we arrived at the Boston Tea Party Ships and Museum.  

The Eleanor and the Beaver, replica tea ships from the 18th century, are docked at the museum.

The Kids pose next to the statue of Samuel 
Adams--failed businessman, tax collector, 
maltster, and leader of a seditious mob.

It was already late afternoon when we arrived, but we were able to buy tickets for the last tour of the day.  An actor dressed in colonial garb led us into a replica of the Old South Meeting House.

On December 16, 1773, a band of miscreant colonialists convened at the assembly hall and conspired to destroy the sweet, succulent tea that was carried on East India Company cargo ships docked in the harbor.  This mob of disaffected British colonialists had been angry for years at the tax levied from the Townshend Revenue Act of 1767.  The Tea Act of 1773 which gave the East India Company the ability to import tea at a lower cost than smuggled Dutch tea was the final straw for these rabble-rousers.

Each of us were given a card with the identity and biography of a real person who had attended that meeting 244 years previously.  We recognized none of their names.  The actors then proceeded to reenact some of the speeches that the colonialists made arguing against allowing the tea to be unloaded into Boston. 

Fie! Fie! Down with Governor Hutchinson!

The Wife and The Kids prepare to dump chests of tea into Boston harbor.  

The Girl failed in her attempts at steering us to warmer waters.

I was surprised to learn from our guide that the Sons of Liberty worked all throughout the night destroying the tea.  There were 342 heavy chests of tea and each one needed to be hacked open and the tea dispersed into the water.  As onerous and time-consuming as the job was, it's impressive that it was  done in the middle of December.  As I froze my butt off on deck despite wearing thermal underwear and a down coat, the colonialists were merely disguised as Indians.

The tour also brought us down into the cramped interiors of the merchant brig.  Imagine
being a crew member having to spend weeks crossing the Atlantic in the cold and tight 
quarters of this ship, only to have your valuable cargo destroyed by your customers.

We disembarked from the ships and gladly went back inside the warm building where the next part of the tour focused on the aftereffects of the Boston Tea Party.  Holographic and cinematic technology educate visitors on Britain's heavy-handed response to the incident which incited the remainder of the colonialists to declare independence.  On display is also one of only two remaining chests that was salvaged from the Boston harbor on that fateful day.  The tour concluded at a gift shop and a small cafe where visitors could enjoy a warm cup of...tea.

There's no way Hamilton gets a bobble-head if there weren't
renewed interests in his life from the popular musical.

It was dark and really cold outside by the time our museum tour had concluded.  We walked around the neighborhood in a fruitless search to find a decent seafood restaurant for dinner.  We stumbled upon a place called the Barking Crab.  It didn't get great reviews on Yelp, but we were pretty desperate to find someplace warm to sit down.  And there were plenty of patrons inside already, so we figured it was worth a try.  Bad decision.

The food and service were mediocre.  This was disappointing as we had expected to get good seafood in New England.  To make matters worse it was also expensive (pretty much everything in Boston is pricey).

The hot crab dip was the best dish we had.

Lobster corn fritters with maple syrup

Lobster mac and cheese

New England clam chowder

Lobster roll

Traditional New England clam bake

*****


Saturday, December 16, 2017


Our flight to Spain was not leaving until the afternoon, so we had the morning available to see a little more of the city.  Unfortunately, The Boy woke up complaining of nausea and stomach cramps.  Perhaps, the clambake that he had the night before didn't quite agree with him.  Like the nurturing parents that we are, The Wife and I told him to suck it up and get dressed.  Chinatown was calling and it was saying "Dim Sum."

Many of the restaurants that I used to patronize when I lived in Cambridge had long closed.  The Wife wanted to try Hei La Moon which turned out to be a pretty good choice.  She was, however, disappointed that they didn't have her favorite dim sum dish, lo bak go (daikon radish cakes), which is a usual mainstay of most places.  The Boy spent an inordinate amount of time in the restaurant's restroom, breaking the unwritten rule of never using a bathroom in Chinatown lest you want to contract hepatitis.  I don't know or want to know what went on in there, but he felt much better afterwards.

After that meal, we wandered around Chinatown trying different bubble teas and stuffing our already-full bellies with Hong-Kong style egg waffles.  Eventually, we headed back to our hotel, picked up our luggage and checked in for our flight.  While we waited to board, I did notice how much nicer and more modern Logan Airport looks compared to how it was twenty years ago.  I guess when terrorists use your crappy airport as a staging ground for one of the worst events in American history, then it only makes sense for you to beef up your security and decor.