November 21st Getting on with in Madrid

Yesterday was primarily a market day but we did go to our library to update the blog and catch up on our email.
Today however we wanted to make sure that we got our museum fix so we headed down to Plaza de Cibeles which is the bus stop for both the Prado and Reina Sofia museums.  The last few days have been quite cloudy and cool but no rain so we dress accordingly.  A wool jacket and cotton shirt for Deb and a leather jacket over a shirt for me seems to be enough.   We got to Reina Sofia and spent a couple hours going through the art relating to the Spanish Civil War; the greatest of which is considered to be Guernica by Picasso.  It was quite a graphic experience and very brutal, many of the works descried the Nazis as early as 1936-7 and showed how the church was in lockstep with fascism at the time.  That period of time still affects the Spanish society today but I suspect the exhibition of these paintings could not even have happened until many years after Franco’s death.   We decided it was time for lunch so we left the museum and headed into the back streets away from the main tourist haunts. 


Several blocks away we came to few little bar/restaurants, and finally decided on a little place called, ‘Taberna El Alembique’.  What a fortunate choice for us, the menu del dia included Cocido which is one of the main dishes I wanted to try in Madrid.  It comes in two courses, the first of which is the broth used to cook the main dish.  It is separated from the solids and has pasta much like spaghetti, called Fideo, added.  The second course is the meat and vegetables that were simmered in the broth of the first course and what a feast it is.  The plate is heaped with cabbage, carrot, turnip, potato, onion, corned beef, ham, chorizo, chicken, and morcilla (blood sausage), the whole of which was smothered in garbanzo beans.  It sounds like a lot and it is; but I acquitted myself with honor and finished it.  It won’t be the last by any means.   After lunch we went to the Prado to continue our explorations and this trip was focused mostly on Poussin, Lorraine, Ribera, and Zurbaran.  We both thought that many of the Poussin paintings suffered from overzealous cleaning sometime in the past.  So much has been cleaned off that in some cases they look almost like paint by numbers, compared to the ones that have been carefully restored.  I’m sure most of this has happened quite a long time ago because the Prado is so careful and very open about things that have taken place in the past where they know about it.  Be that as it may, the vast majority of the paintings looked wonderful and I gained a new appreciation of Zurbaran.  I feel that so many of his paintings are so dark or if you will ‘muted in palette’, as to be practically opaque; but many today were quite lovely.   We had our Spanish class in the evening which is always fun for us.

Our host at El Alambigque