No Es Carne!

probably the best photo from this trip

26 November 2011

Jack has taken on the job of being master of the map and guide book, which is fine with me.  I can navigate through the country roads of New Jersey, but put me in a city and I get all turned around.  Unlike Barcelona and Cordoba, and despite what we've been told, finding decent food around here isn't easy.

Yesterday Jack sleuthed out a restaurant outside of the main tourist area.  We took the Metro, and when we surfaced, we were face to face with the most glorious candy store window ever.

Because I've been buying lots of candy all along (Spain has candy shops all over), and because everything in this store had to be asked for and wasn't labeled and I don't know my way around the Spanish candy vocabulary, I didn't buy anything here.  This place was overloaded with marshmallowy thingies anyway, and I'm not fond of marshmallows.

Aside from three locals at the bar, we were the only ones in the restaurant.  2:00 p.m. is early for lunch in Madrid.  On the wall, next to a wine rack that stretched to the ceiling for the length of the bar, hung a row of dried meat.  We weren't sure if any of it was real until the bartender sliced some of it and put it on Jack's tapas.

The plan was to go to another museum.  We headed in the wrong direction by accident and wound up overlooking the western side of the city again, this time south of the palace.  The camera's battery door, taped shut, was holding.  As you can see, the pictures are much better.  This one didn't wash out as it would have on the other camera (no matter the settings).

More grand architecture:

We eventually found the right way to the museum, the Collecciones Thyssen-Bornemisza, which I blogged about yesterday.  After that, we stopped at a street cafe for something Spain is famous for:  chocolate.  Not the candy kind.  The liquid kind.  Think dark chocolate pudding before it sets, so thick that we began eating it with a spoon, so thick that, if left for just a minute, it starts to congeal.  One of the guide books points out that the optimal time to drink one of these is at 8:00 a.m., after one has been out partying all night, before going home for a shower and heading off to work.  Jack and I have been preferring ours around 5:00 p.m. so that we can hold off on dinner til after 9:00 (some restaurants don't even open until 8:30).

I told you this camera was better. 

Our evening plans were to meet one of Jack's former grad students, Dianha, who is in Madrid teaching English.  Spain's high unemployment rate is pushing people to learn English so that they can flee the country for jobs elsewhere.

The Spanish custom of dining at midnight and partying til dawn can't be helping much either.  We'd read about this, been told about this, and even witnessed some of it in Barcelona, where even on a Sunday night the streets filled up around 9 p.m.

But what we witnessed last night takes it to a whole new level.  The plan was to meet Dianha at 9:30 p.m. in the Puerto del Sol, a plaza in the center of the city  from which all the main roads radiate.  It had been plenty crowded there the night before, like Leicester Square in London on a Saturday night.  We decided to walk from the hotel, which we figured would take us about 20 minutes.  We also figured that, it being a Friday night, we'd encounter crowds.  But we weren't prepared for this.

These people weren't walking.  They were strolling, three abreast, arm-in-arm.  If they'd been cars they'd have been cruising.  And they were all headed in the same direction, towards the plaza.  This was worse than Penn Station, NYC, at rush hour.  Already not terribly fond of this city, I became annoyed.  There are too many people on this planet, and half of them are on the Gran Via in Madrid.  I found an opening in the crowd and, despite the traffic jam I might be causing (or even because I might cause one), I held my camera over my head and snapped a picture.

I found some relief when, closer in to the center, in a spot where the crowd was thinner, where street vendors laid out blankets with shady-looking goods, we spotted a woman selling ashtrays.  Beside her was a black kitten, maybe nine weeks old.  We crouched down to get a good dose of kitty, the first we've had since we left home.

Dianha found us in the crowd as we waited by a statue of a bear rearing up to a tree (a symbol we've seen elsewhere in the city, and if I weren't feeling lazy I'd do some research about).  We found a noisy tapas bar.

Spain has been a challenge for me when it comes to food.  Not only am I vegetarian, but I also have a high-protein, low-fat diet.  Since arriving here I've had little choice for protein but scrambled eggs or cheese.  That's more fat than I'm used to, and my stomach has been somewhat upset by it.  In Barcelona, John led us to a tapas bar that made a vegetarian fava bean stew.  It was a welcome change.  In this Madrid tapas bar we saw a fava bean stew on the menu.  When we ordered, Jack made sure to ask, "Sin carne?"  (Without meat?)

"Si," said the waiter.

So we were a little surprised when it arrived with lumps of sausage floating in it.  "No carne," I told the waiter.

"No es carne," he said.

"Es carne!"  I shot back.

"No es carne.  Es chorizo!"

"Es carne!"

He took it away.  The three of us burst out laughing.  Moments later the waiter came back with the dish, having scooped out the sausages.  I stuck my fork in and let the sauce drain out as much as possible before eating it.  My guts being in turmoil already, I figured that I'd either not get any worse or start throwing up in five hours.  I hedged my bets and ate only a few drained forks full.  I didn't get sick.

Today we headed west towards another museum, the Museo Cerralbo, the former home of aristocrats at the end of the nineteenth century.  The goal of these people was to show off their wealth as much as possible, and boy did they.  I liked their Venetian glass chandeliers.  Boiled down to one word, the descriptor for this place would be "overwrought."  But that's what wealthy Europeans were shooting for back then.  Spanish Donald Trumps, maybe?

At lunch in a sidewalk cafe, I had the following conversation with the waiter when I told him, "Sin carne."

"No pescado?"  (No fish?)

"No."

"No pollo?"

"No."

He was walking away when I said, "Si hay ojos, es carne."  Bad grammar, but what I was trying to say was, "If there are eyes, it's meat."  I'm pretty sure he didn't hear me anyway.  As with the rest of this city, it was pretty noisy.  For lunch I had roasted vegetables and bread.

We wandered about in two city parks.  The first was just a little one, backing up to the palace.

Hooray!  I can shoot into the sun!

In the second park, the Casa de Mores, a manicured garden with only one entrance, my tissue-and-tape solution to keeping the battery in its door shut gave out.  I lost two pictures because the door popped open before the photos went onto the memory card.  The worst of the three survived.

We took the metro to one more museum, the Reina Sofia, a former hospital that now houses, modern art, Dali, Miro, and Picasso's Guernica.  Once again we got in for free because it was after 2:30 on a Saturday.

Below are my last two photos from Madrid, taken from inside the museum and looking out on the rooftops as the sun was low in the sky.

I was holding the battery door closed with one hand and controlling the shutter with the other.

We stopped for one last dose of liquid chocolate before taking the Metro back to the hotel. We're going to have our dinner downstairs soon.  It's just about 8:30, when the restaurant opens, so we'll be the early birds.

Then I'll try to get my suitcase closed around all the chocolate and books, and take one more glass-doored-bathroom shower.  If we can use the last of the shampoo I brought from home then there will be more room for everything else. 

Tomorrow I'll purge myself of caffeine, sugar, and fat.  After I find one last hot chocolate at the airport...