MADRID 2016 (Jac-21, Dad-51, Grandma-82)

MADRID 2016

(gallery)

FRIDAY

Rouse selves at 2.30am (!) for very early start.
Set out on adventure by driving past Oxford (rubbish) and on to Stansted, arriving in jolly good time. Nearly miss the M11 junction on M25 because of Grandma's nonsense.
Park car in car park F2.
Extricate and assemble wheelchair.
Rehearse infirmities.
Board transit bus to terminal. Grandma hamming it up a bit. Kind chap gives up seat for infirm lady (Grandma).
In terminal receive VIP treatment, shooing all ordinary, non-infirm, walking passengers out of the way.
Find way to gate 59. Are whisked to front of queue and then wheeled out to aeroplane ahead of others.
Grandma completely hams up climbing steps up into aeroplane, aided by dad whispering 'slow down' into her ear.

Nice flight. Exciting sunrise on left side over blanket of cloud.
Clearly see Cherbourg peninsula, Jersey, and other islands.

See little bit of snow on Spanish mountains.
Land.
Have own VIP transfer service to VIP terminal entrance. No queues. No waiting. Straight through.

Meanwhile Jacquie has got up, brushed her teeth and boarded the bus from Salamanca to Madrid airport. She is excited. She is going to see dad and grandma.
Annoying child on bus. Jacquie disapproves.

Arrives at Madrid airport and positions self at disgorging point for arrivals with amusing greeting sign.

VIP party are wheeled through by special airport helper and are greeted enthusiastically by Jacquie. Excellent.

All advance at wheelchair speed through airport terminal to metro station.
Tourist/metro office helpfully sells x-day metro passes for all lengths of stay apart from specifically the 3-day pass required. Same story at specific metro help desk, where not only are all x-day travel passes sold apart from 3-day passes, but a cardboard we-are-now-closed sign is helpfully erected when the questioning becomes too difficult.
Expert Jacquie saves day by purchasing tickets from machine.
Fine adventure advancing into Madrid city centre on the metro, using correct wheelchair techniques, positioning, and lifts.

Arrive at main Puerta del Sol square, now re-branded as Vodafone Sol for some bizarre reason.
Present selves at Hostal Madrid. Enjoy entertaining 20 minutes as small procession of staff-type people arrive and busy themselves with papers and calendars and markers and pencils and rubbers, and then eventually admit to thinking that Grandma and Jacquie and dad were all boys, so would we all mind sharing an apartment.
No problem.
Apartment is ace.
Drop stuff off in apartment.

Venture forth in rain to nearby Plaza Mayor.

Girls decide that food and a sit down are required, so choose excellent tapas café at edge of Plaza Mayor. Croquetas. Patatas bravas. Jarra de tinto de verano. Yum yum.

March on through pouring rain to metro and Museo Sorolla (info).
Sorolla museum is excellent. Full of paintings by and of Joaquín Sorolla himself, his missus Clothilde, and their son Joaquín junior, all having a nice time. See their dining room and sitting room. See his brushes and paintbox. All good.

Back out into the tipping rain. Make a sodden wheelchair journey to the nearest metro station.
Go on metro ride to the Palacio de Cibeles (info) to buy tickets for the Kandinsky retrospective exhibition.

Stand in rainy, cold, windy queue for half an hour. After 25 minutes realise that the queue is in fact just for tickets. Next entrance time is 8pm, 2 hours later.
Decide on rainy, freezing cold wheelchair stroll up Gran Via. Go to excellent buzzing café bar. Choose seats at best table, on which remained a full, steaming cappuccino, and the bill for same, and the money for same, and some extra money for the tip. (?!) Warm hands on said cappuccino.
Wait reasonably long while for waiter/waitress to come. Then conclude that no-one was coming, so leave again. A little further on discover fabulous Galician Natura restaurant.
Choose delicious caesar salad (dad) and chicken and cheese Galician pasties/empanadas (girls). Receive complimentary beef pasties via some minor culinary mix up. Yum yum.

Make way back for Kandinsky exhibition.
Absolutely fantastico. Over a hundred paintings from throughout his life, from early beginnings all the way through to jelly fish and blobs, calling at all stops on the way.
Easily a couple of hours' worth.

Good gift shop at the end. Many items regrettably of greater cost than the anticipated joy/thanks of the prospective recipients.
Dad cleverly teaches Grandma how to use Snapchat. Grandma is impressed.

Metro home. Jacquie protesting vigorously against all notions of horses in Kandinsky paintings, even the ones with horses in them. Don't mention the horses!
Quick visit to mini supermarket for drinks and some breakfast items.
Back to apartment for quick cup of tea.
And so to bed. Tired teddies.

SATURDAY

Happy birthday, Grandma and dad!
Dad ventures forth from apartment to purchase fresh breakfast items.
All breakfast together, opening cards and presents (none actually), and giving hearty encouragement. Wash up. Tidy up.
Embark on stroll through Sol, past the parliament building, to the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza (info).
Entertaining ten minutes with stroppy teenager on ticket desk when credit card machine says to take out card before it was really ready. One day she might learn to keep the situation in order by being nice instead of rolling her eyes and huffing. In the meantime she might come across customers who a) know how to, and b) enjoy causing considerable disruption for rude employees.
The supervisor was nice, so things were quickly resolved.
So, with a fine spring in our step we go on into the museum itself.
Wow! Wow! And wow again! What a fantastic place. Every single one of the rooms (just about) is full of completely mind-blowing pictures. In many rooms all 8, 9, 10 paintings are the best ones.
Seventy (?) rooms in total.
Meticulously do as much as possible in chronological order.
Muchly enjoy the medieaval paintings, and then going through the discoveries of perspective, and optics, and landscapes, and domestic genre paintings, and portraits.

Stand in reverend awe before Carravaggio's St. Catherine.

Smile back at old friend Rembrandt's self portrait.

Feel comforted by Gerrit Dou's girl at the window.
Allow Sisley, Monet, Manet, Degas, Berthe Morissot to embrace and uplift us.
Have pulses quickened by Van Gogh and Cézanne, and the fauvists.
Be exhilerated by Otto Dix, Schiele, Kandinsky (again), Franz Marc, Auguste Macke.

And then Picasso, and Braque, and Chagall, and Dali, and Francis Bacon.
Wow, wow, wow, wow!
Spend three hours going round museum, and still need to rush at end. Next time budget three and half to four hours.

Very exciting - meet Anna for lunch.
Leave wonderful Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza and go for short wheelchair traipse to find best lunchtime crêperie.

All enjoy delicious savoury galettes and nutella-themed sweet crêpes, washed down with fine beverages. Dad has French cider served in a teacup (!).
Have fun talking to Anna. Anna in turn has fun arranging birthday candles in birthday people's crêpes.

Yum yum.
Further short traipse to the Museo Reina Sofia (info), the (enormous) modern art joint.
Wish Anna well and bid each other a fond farewell.

Notice big Madrid conservatoire directly adjacent to the Reina Sofia. (No concerts that evening.) Go into museum. Whizz up exterior glass lifts. Wheeee!
Gosh, this place is big! Room after room of sqiggles, blobs, lines, rips, televisions, string, huge steel cubes, video installations.
Some of it is good.
Two enormous floors of temporary-ish exhibitions.
Then the permanent collection.
Lots of Juan Gris, Joan Miró, and Picasso.

Guernica. Good. Well, good and awful at same time.
Man Ray's huge eye metronome.
Lots of fun pieces. Marcel Duchamps.
A few pieces not quite there, but well intentioned.
Come across a good mime show / performance art act, with a couple of lads pretending to be cleaners/workmen/clowns looking at the pictures. Funny. They have an ace foldy-up creased thing which they fold and unfold into seemingly thousands (exaggeration) of different props, e.g. a wine glass, a hat, a bird, a door probably, etc. A good crowd of kids and parents all laughing. All in Spanish, so dad was fine, obviously.
Girls now exhausted, so whizz selves back to apartment for nice rest.
Then go out, sans wheelchair, for walk to Chueca district.
As time is now approaching 9pm on Saturday night, obviously every single person in the whole metropolitan area of Madrid is congregated in the Sol - Gran Via - Chueca districts, doing their shopping, wandering about, having a nice time. Packed.
Find excellently suitable Cuban restaurant with handsome, statuesque, beefcake waiter. (This is good for girls, most boys in restaurant, and almost certainly waiter himself.) Enjoy muchly typical Cuban fare. Dad/Jac - prawns in sauce with rice and crazy fried Cuban vegetables, Grandma - beef stew with rice and crazy fried Cuban vegetables. Then puddings of guava and mascapone style creamy cheese, and ice cream.
Yum yum.
Stroll back to apartment via bookshop. Choose metro option for couple of stops.

Quick cup of tea.
And so to bed at midnight.

SUNDAY

Massive lie-in and breakfast.
Wash up. Tidy up. Pack.
Decide to take bags out for the day.
Drop off keys for apartment. Good apartment.
Long, quite-hard-work-pushing-the-wheelcuhair-with-all-that-extra-weight stroll to the Museo Arts Décoratifs.
Curious mixture of extreme friendliness (non-stop talky lady) and bored, civil servant indifference (most of others). Really quite small, considering effort put into getting there. Many rooms cordonned off. Enjoy marble-inlaid cabinets, beds, writing desks, Pope's robes, Spanish Delftware, and Lindsey's costume exhibition.

Cause reasonable disruption to matters by leaving own wheelchair on ground floor, and failing to understand how their wheelchair lending scheme worked on upper floors - sometimes well, sometimes without a wheelchair. Cause consternation on floor 1 by accepting invitation to descend from floor 2 in secret lift without phoning ahead first.
Very entertaining.
Leave.
Wheel selves round corner.
Make short visit to Naval Museum. Very short, as access is denied on the grounds of having too many travel bags.
Decide to continue on 100 yards to Prado café for lunch. (Yes, I know we have only just had breakfast.)
Do go to Prado. Do not go in Prado café, as Prado café shut.
Cross back over into town and find nutty Los Gatos pub/restaurant. Nutty waitress/owner crawling under bar hatch, and loudly wondering why we ordered two half rations of chorizo instead of one whole ration. Consume chorizo, omelette rolls, and chicken nugget dips with hoi sin sauce. Nutty but nice. Yum yum.
Stroll relaxedly to Plaza Mayor.
Sit peacefully in glorious sunshine, obscured only by thick clouds and biting, Siberian wind. Occasionally get breaks in cloud - then warm.

Wheel selves out of Plaza Mayor.
Girls cheekily visit our erstwhile hotel for refreshment purposes.
Wheel path through crowds in Puerta del Sol to metro station.
Start homeward journey.
Wish each other well as Jac departs for Salamanca, and Grandma and dad turn for aeropuerto.
Big hug. Hasta lluega (check).
Jac catches bus back to Salamanca (rubbish). Reports snow en route. Brrr!
Grandma and dad have much adventure going up lift and down ascensor. This metro line, that metro line.
Arrive at airport.
Bluff way into fantastic VIP treatment again.
Personal helpers through security, passports, duty free.
Personal transport out to plane.
First on plane.
Brilliant.

At Stansted collected from plane by personal limousine (transit van) again, and then whisked through the thousands of people in the milling crowds at passport control, right to the very front. Must have saved half an hour to an hour.
Have to wait at passport control for half an hour to an hour as Grandma nearly gets arrested for having the wrong passport, or something. Eventually convinces the border grunts that having Ronnie Biggs's passport is a genuine mistake and not an act of terrorism.
Bus (not very wheelchair friendly) back to the car.
Drive home.
Nice holiday.
Well done, everybody.