MADRID FOR THE WEEKEND

We liked Madrid. It’s a very easy city to get around and it feels like real people congregate in the centre of it – unlike Paris or London these days. Rent didn’t seem to be too expensive although I suspect that has something to do with the fact that Spain is still suffering their financial crisis and consequently there are still a lot of empty buildings around. It was Carnival during the days we were there – not entirely sure what that meant, we didn’t see much carnival, just lots of people dressed as Mr Bean and Sponge Bob Square pants, but everywhere we went seemed to be buzzing with locals. We walked everywhere – admiring the combination of splendidly ornamental buildings, juxtaposed with other rather less grand buildings covered in graffiti – all very accessible and it felt safe. Apart from when we were nearly pickpocketed with a rather clever scam…more of that later.

On the first morning, from our hotel we walked to the Prado along pretty tree lined, incredibly wide streets, with nothing but our rather hopeless hotel map. As my daughter’s boyfriend noted, I had hyped her up as the Christopher Columbus of navigation, which was a mistake because we walked a lot further than we needed to, until he took over (not my forte – I tend to leave directions to other people and as a single parent, it’s been quite a learning curve for all my children to have to take control).

Here we are arriving at the Prado to meet our friends – quite a cheerful team:-

The Prado is free for anyone under 25 but don’t forget to take ID – it was a struggle for us to get my 14 year old in without ID. To be honest, it was a struggle to get him there at all – even after a massive sales job on how much fabulous art we were going to see, his response, from his bed was “can’t we just Google it?”

I wanted to show them “The Garden Of Earthly Delights” by Hieronyimus Bosch, which I thought I’d recognise. Knowing full well that the best way to get (my) children into art galleries was to rush around and look at three pictures properly max and to be done and dusted and out in a cafe within an hour so that they get a feel for it but don’t get too bored and start crying. So we went straight to the first floor to find above mentioned painting, I wandered up to the one I thought it was (mostly concealed by a large group of tourists) but the plaque said it was by El Bosco – so I assumed I must have got it wrong. Unluckily for my daughter’s boyfriend he was the only one of us who spoke Spanish so I kept making him ask for assistance. We went back down to the bottom floor. Checked out the El Greco’s and searched for the one Caravaggio which my daughter studied in art history “it’s the one that has extreme light and dark” was all she could tell us. Pretty much looked like all the paintings had extreme light and dark in them, so we struggled to find that one too.

But here we go….a sneaky photo that I got told off for. Nothing more satisfying than presenting something amazing to your children that they actually appreciate, if only briefly:-

Caravaggio’s David and Goliath – suitably gory enough to interest all the children:-

Then off we went back up the stairs as I was insistent on finding the Earthly Delights – turns out we’d already found it and I’d failed to recognise his name. There were too many people in front of it to entice my children to spend hours looking at the detail of the triptych but we got the general idea of heaven, hell and all the badly behaved stuff that goes on in the middle:-

From there we found somewhere to sit outside. Suddenly there was a massive commotion and a man came running up to us shouting “mobile, mobile!” in a Spanish accent which meant I had no idea what he was talking about. There was a woman standing at our table holding a menu down to show us with a huge number of revolting looking plates of food. She sauntered off, leaving my daughter’s mobile on the table. Then we realised what she was doing. The woman behind us had not been so lucky. She realised her mobile had gone, threw me her bag to look after and went running after her with her partner in tow. She got it back. Then we had all manner of drama with someone else clearly involved in the scam pretending to be a policeman. Clearly it’s common practice there so BE WARNED. Look after your stuff.

We wandered about the shops, then stopped for a beer and a ? No idea what on earth it was…

Then lunch, Spanish style:-

Followed by more walking and then my daughter and her boyfriend peeled off to go and watch Real Madrid – I went shopping with my son. Great for him. Boring for me….