June 13 to 14—Estaciones, Reina Tour, Las Brujas Salem, and a Slow Day at El Prado

Dear Family and Friends,

Wednesday, June 13, Martha and Dani had a full, full day. Up earlier than normal (read: 10 AM), we trekked up through Plaza Mayor and happened upon the five or so minutes that some of the stars of this summer cinematic extravaganza, Shrek III, out for a photo shoot! We got some photos of Justin Timberlake, Cameron Diaz, Antionio Banderas, and some poor dude dressed up as Shrek himself. How exciting for Dani to get to see her boyfriend, Justin, on this side of the pond. She wanted to wait around so that they could rendezvous (and she could kick Cameron Diaz for being there with him!) before he hit the road again, but Martha managed to drag her away so that we would accomplish all that we needed to do today. Our main focus was collecting information about bus and train schedules to the NW of Spain, so we headed out to visit different bus stations and pick up schedules.

We figured out where to pick up a bus to Segovia (for our out-of-Madrid excursion on Monday next week) by dropping by the Estacion del Norte, which also has a big shopping plaza inside. We learned that they had no information in the North station about getting to Salamanca, Spain (our first stop out of Madrid on the next leg of this adventure). So, we hopped on the Metro to get across town to the Auto-Res office, where we picked up a couple of bus schedules to know more about our options. They did not know about getting from Salamanca to Leon, and recommended going to the Estacion del Sur (where we went to get to Toledo last week). Hoof, hoof, we managed to get there around 4 PM, grabbed a schedule that told us how to get to Leon via Villadolid (a town that we know we can get to on Saturday that is located between Salamanca and Leon). Anyway, enough geography lesson … we got what we needed, we hope.

By the time we left Estacio del Sur, it was 4:20 PM, and we were cutting it close to arrive at Reina Sofia by 5 PM. Every Wednesday, the modern art museum offers a free guided tour of some of the highlights of the permanent collection on the second floor for an hour. Practically running, we made it up to the Reina-side of Madrid with plenty of time to spare for a refreshing Fanta. Inside, we enjoyed learning more about Joan Muro’s vision and expressionist scribbles, Dali’s impotence, a 16-year-old’s intense view of the world as she knew it, and cubism as a structured snapshot of fractures images. All in Spanish, mind you, so it was pretty cool that we got so much out of the woman’s explanations! We had time leftover before the museum closed, so we headed up to the fourth floor to finish viewing its offerings. Afterwards, we heading back up the hill homeward, but turned a bit North to Plaza de Santa Ana.

The day before this Wednesday adventure, when we lounged in the Plaza de Santa Ana, we noticed that one of the theatre signs touted tickets for three euro. The ticket window was open when we arrived tonight from Reina-direction, so we asked about the cheap tickets, and scored two for the 8:30 PM performance of “Las Brujas Salem” (“The Crucible”) for just two euro twenty five cents each!! Now, tickets for this price put us WAY up in the very last row of the third floor of the gorgeous theatre, but, lucky for us, the place was not full, so we got to sit on the second floor! What a great show, what a beautiful theatre.

After the show, we were pretty well wiped out from running all over town, so we headed home for an ‘early night,’ which ended up being later than usual as our neighbors were up late. The lady next door has been having some serious emotional issues with events in her life, and spent much of the night again yelling on the phone and crying. Upstairs, the young boys were awake late, yelling out the windows, riding their plastic bicycle across the floor, and dropping something repeatedly on the floor. Ah, city living.

Thursday, June 14, Day 31 … we have been gone a month! And we awoke to some of the same noises that kept us up the night before: those darn kids upstairs were up before 8 AM, riding that bike, running back and forth across the room, and dropping something repetitively on the floor. Martha was the first awakened, and did bang a bit on the ceiling with the broom handle, but managed to get back to sleep, instead of going ahead and getting Dani up since we had planned a long day out-of-town visiting San Lorenzo de El Escorial.

The late night then took its toll, and we slept too long. It turned out to be an okay change to our plans, however, as it rained most of the afternoon and was rather chilly in Madrid, which would have made it much moreso in the mountains where El Escorial is located. So, instead, we headed back to El Prado to enjoy more of the art there that we had not yet viewed—a large collection of Goya paintings, including many from his black period after the death of his wife that included Saturno and El coloso, as well as two very famous paintings: La maja vestida and La maja desnuda. Martha particularly enjoyed a painting by Livio Mehus called El genio de la pintura, two child-representations of Christ and John the Baptist by Bartolome Murillo (El buen pastor and San Juan Bautista nino), and an interesting composition by Claudio Coello in El triunfo de San Augustin, which had a really cool flaming sword dashing down the demon in the right hand corner of the work. Two Jose de Ribera pieces also caught our interest, one for its beauty and subtle detail (El sueno de Jacob), and one for its unusual content (Maddalena Ventura con su marido, also known as La mujer barbuda—The bearded lady). Note that because of the hormone imbalance that caused the bearded lady’s beard (hirsutism), she would not likely be able to breastfeed … making that detail of the painting particularly interesting.

It was raining and late-evening when we left El Prado, so we headed home for the night, ready for a good night’s sleep (after Grey's Anatomy in Espanol, of course ... and yes, I did take photos of the television to prove it *grin*; this is not an in-person sighting as with the photos above) before our day trip to El Escorial on Friday!

In love and light,

Martha and Dani