Ambling, or shuffling, around the city: Madrid Day 4 (24 Aug 2013)

We spent our last day in Madrid doing chores – like laundry and postage – and exploring some of the city sights.

Parks and Gardens

Madrid is a beautiful city full of wide streets, squares (though we’d call them circles), and parks and green spaces. We love visiting parks and gardens, so chose two to explore here: the Parque del Buen Retiro and the Jardin Botanico. As it was a Saturday morning we enjoyed seeing Madridenos at play.

The Retiro was once the garden of the Habsburg summer palace but has gone through many iterations since. It’s a pretty huge park containing the Palacio Velazquez, Palacio de Cristal, a lake overlooked by a statue of Alfonsno XII. There are cafes, spaces for skateboarders and buskers, etc. For us, the enjoyment was walking in a lovely environment with the locals.

The Real Jardin Botanico was originally established in 1781, commissioned by Carlos (Charles) III. We loved the fact that outside one of its fences was a string of many, as in well over 10, second-hand bookstalls, selling anything from antiquarian books to classics and serious literature to cookbooks by a Spanish Masterchef winner. Remember our Day 1 post and Spanish readers? As a Botanical Garden it was interesting but we probably didn’t – it being late summer – see it at its best. It was more formally organised than any of the Aussie botanical gardens we know and yet it lacked the formal aesthetics that we’ve come to love in Japan. But that may just be us!

Squares

Madrid is full of Plazas (or Squares), many of them having some sort of historical significance. Our hotel is near Plaza de Legazpi which is named for the Basque Spanish navigator, Miguel López de Legazpi. There is a statue in the middle of the square but it is currently covered so we can’t see its details. Our focus for our last day, though, was elsewhere: Puerta del Sol and the nearby Plaza Mayor.

Puerta del Sol is apparently one of the busiest places in Madrid, and it sure was busy the day – a Saturday admittedly – we were there. It has, among other features, the kilometre zero plaque, marking the centre of the radial network of Spanish Roads, and the Bear and Madrono Tree statue, which is the heraldic symbol of Madrid. According to Wikipedia, it has also, since 2011, become the centre of Spanish democracy demonstrations.

Plaza Mayor was built by Juan Gomez de Mora in 1619, and was an important centre for Habsburg Madrid (16th-17th centuries). It was the location for auto-da-fés, mounted bullfights and royal proclamations. It is surrounded by gorgeous buildings and the edges are now pretty much all flanked by cafes, reminding us a little of Venice’s Piazza San Marco. Nonetheless, it is gorgeous.

Beggars and Buskers

We hasten to explain that the link here is alliterative not thematic. While the buskers, like the beggars, are asking for money, the quality of their performance ensures that they could by no means be taken for beggars. Our first busker was an excellent guitarist playing, yes, Spanish favourites, near the entrance to the Prado; the next a rather good cellist in the Paseo del Prado area; and another musician playing some sort of hammered dulcimer style instrument in Retiro Park. We also enjoyed human statues, comic figures and illusionists. All good fun.

But, we’ve seen quite a few beggars too – some sleeping or sitting on the footpath, others walking around outdoor cafes with plastic cup in hand. We’re been uncertain about donating – who is the most worthy, etc? – and our uncertainty was justified by our tour leader whom we met tonight and who said that many of the beggars are under the control of crime syndicates in the city. You just can’t tell she said …

Funning around with the locals

Some of the best travel experiences are interactions with locals – and we’ve found the Spanish (generalising wildly of course) to have a great sense of humour. For example:

• the afternoon/evening manager of our hotel has a dry sense of humour. His accent is thick and we weren’t initially sure of what sort of person we were dealing with, but we soon discovered his wicked sense of humour. When Len queried him about whether we needed to check out as ourselves and then check in for our tour group, he indicated that no, that wasn’t necessary, that “when you leave you can settle your bill … no, before, before, you leave, you can – must – pay your bill”. The play on “when” and “before” was done well and that’s just one of many lingustic-based repartees we’ve had with him.
• the postal office worker who helped us mail a package pack home. He had very little English but that combined with our few words of Spanish and some gesticulating enabled us to get across that we wanted to mail a parcel and buy some envelopes for future mailings. As he weighed our parcel for posting, he leant his elbow on the scales and said 10 kilos! And laughed and repeated the action. It took a long time to undertake our simple transaction but we wouldn’t have missed the fun for anything!

Naming rights

In this post’s slideshow you will see the name of the station at Puerta del Sol as vodaphone Sol. This tickled Sue no end, given her recent reading of Michelle de Kretser’s Questions of travel in which there’s a discussion of companies having naming rights of countries. A railway station isn’t the same thing as a country but it certainly made us stop and think about how far naming rights are going. A commercial stadium or enterprise is one thing, but a government operated railway station is something else …

Three-words-of-the-day

SUE: Humour, Leisure, Money
LEN: Culture, Food, Parks

And the stills …

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