The next morning, we awoke to find that we had been spared the cruel fate of being impaled by a falling chandelier. This was, however, accompanied by the unfortunate realisation that we were still staying in the Spanish equivalent of the Moulin Rouge, which proved even more disturbing to our tired eyes than it had the previous evening. This would be our first full day in Madrid and we opened the shutters to a city shrouded in foggy, persistent rain- a positively homely sight coming from England.
We began our day with a trip to a nearby churros shop- one that was evidently popular among locals, judging by the queue for a table. Anne-Lise masterfully ordered on our behalf and taught me the useful vocab of ‘sin gluten por favor’ (gluten free please) so that at some point, I could try ordering my own. Having decided that Anne-Lise was best equipped to collect our order, Claire and I were dispatched to try and secure a sought after table. Anne-Lise returned with three freshly fried portions and together, we gazed out onto the damp square in front of the shop. Munching our churros contentedly, we savoured the cinnamon-y chocolatey taste and congratulated ourselves for briefly escaping the drizzle. A miserable day had already been much improved. Churros consumed, we decided to discard any plans for culturally enriching activities in favour of shopping on account of the grim weather.
We retraced our steps from earlier that morning and headed through Sol, the square with the giant christmas tree, towards Gran Via, the main shopping area in the heart of the city. On our way, we passed several pop up shops in wooden cabins boasting a variety of Christmas ornaments and decorations. While in the UK we might have encountered jolly Santa decorations or twee felt reindeer, in Madrid these shops primarily sold serene Biblical figurines with sincere expressions. These ranged from lifelike models arranged in extremely beautiful Nativity scenes to rather alarming hanging angels with questionable eyebrows. Indeed, these poor ceramic cherubs would have looked more at home wafting free eyebrow threading vouchers from a counter in Debenhams than hovering in the rafters of a Bethlehem stable.
Given that we had arrived in near darkness, it was nice to be able to walk around and admire the city in all its glory. The architecture was certainly impressive; many of the buildings we passed were capped with gold clocks, statues and domes and, as we arrived on Gran Via, we realised that even the shops were housed in extravagant premises. At one point, we stumbled into a branch of H&M, which, with its green marble walls, mirrored ceilings, balconies and lavish chandeliers bore a closer resemblance to Gringotts Wizarding Bank than my local H&M. The only thing Didcot H&M could boast in this competition would be its suspiciously fuzzy floor and lighting so harsh and unflattering it makes you wish you weren’t born. In central Madrid, even the McDonalds we passed had a sense of grandeur.
All around us, agitated shoppers raced around like well-dressed wasps, hurrying into shops to escape the rain. It seemed we weren’t the only people who had used shopping as an excuse to escape the inclement weather. Unperturbed, we threw ourselves into sampling the best of Spanish high street fashion. Spain has conquered the affordable fashion market, with Spanish retail giant Inditex able to name Pull & Bear, Stradivarius, Zara and Bershka among its successes. Keen to channel the immaculate women that surrounded us, we set about purchasing some items that we hoped would inject a bit of Spanish ‘polished casual’ into our wardrobes.
As the day went on, we observed that a lot of the shops stocked very similar wares and while everyone looked incredibly stylish, the ‘Madrid look’ had a sense of uniformity to it. As I looked at yet another collection of olive leather jackets, I began to pine for the unpredictability and individuality which has come to be associated with British fashion. There’s nothing quite like the familiar London sight of a woman clad in head to toe Gucci sharing the same street as a man sporting Hawaiian shorts, a pinstripe blazer and the same stained, cereal-encrusted t-shirt that he’s worn all week….
The shops were packed and the novelty of trudging round in our sweaty raingear eventually began to wear off. Having had our fill of shopping, we returned to the flat, before venturing out for burgers with a friend of Claire’s. It was a lovely meal, marred only by my highly anticipated delivery of ‘sin gluten por favor’, which emerged as a squeak so pathetic that Claire’s friend ended up rescuing me with her fluent Spanish. It was clear that I would have to put up with more psychological abuse from the machiavellian mastermind that is the Duolingo owl before I would be ready to inflict my dietary requirements on unsuspecting Spanish waiters.
After dinner we whiled away an hour or so in a gorgeous bar with dark, moody lighting and beautiful tiled walls. Both our dinner and drinks had been outrageously cheap and I thought to myself how marvellous it must be to live in a city where an Aperol spritz nearly costs the same as a bottle of water.
On our way back to the apartment, we stopped at the large Christmas market in Plaza Mayor. Despite the fact it was gone midnight, when we arrived the market was still buzzing, in accordance with the Spanish tradition of rising and staying up late. The candle decorations fixed to the front of the buildings that faced onto the square were lit up in all their glory, their light reflected by the wet cobblestones underneath our feet. The market itself consisted of neat rows of red huts trimmed with fairy lights. It was a charming sight to behold and Claire and I hoped some of the red cabins would provide us with some authentic Spanish Christmas gifts for our families. We were, therefore, disappointed to find that, rather than the traditional decorations we had spotted earlier in the day, this market’s interpretation of timeless yuletide gifts consisted of fidget spinners, bunny ears, Rastafarian hats, Hello Kitty balloons and squeaky rubber chickens.
Disappointment at our unsuccessful gift shop turned to alarm when we encountered a street act, known simply as ‘The Goat Man of Madrid. The act consisted of a wooden goat mask bobbing atop a cape made of multicoloured tinsel. While this might sound harmless, there was something truly unnerving about the mask, which looked as if it had been designed by a Medieval monk hoping to keep wayward parishioners in line by convincing them it would snaffle their soul in the underworld. There was also something creepy about the series of unnatural movements executed by the goat as it clapped its wooden jaws. Most terrifying of all, was the realisation that beneath the layers of tinsel, there lurked an old Spanish man, who occasionally revealed himself to light a cigarette or to shout at kids who got too close. If you wish to witness the horror of the Goat Man for yourself, you can do so here.
Tired and empty handed, we finally returned to the garish apartment, wondering how we would explain to our families why we had managed to purchase so many clothes for ourselves but had failed to locate a single offering for them. We went to bed, dogged by a creeping feeling that we were terrible siblings and children. Perhaps we should have bought a squeaky chicken to prove our point….Hopeful that the next day’s plans for cultural sightseeing would prove more fruitful, I tried to sleep only to find these efforts underscored by Claire, who proceeded to hum the same two bars of ‘A Wonderful Christmas Time’ over and over again. As I heard ‘ding dong ding dong’ for the fifty second time, I figured that I would rather take my chances with tinsel-goat-themed nightmares than stay awake any longer.
****
The next day dawned and faced with more promising weather, we decided to go ahead with our original plan of a more cultured program of activities. First stop was the Reina Sofia gallery, home to ‘Guernica’, one of Pablo Picasso’s most striking works. It was a short walk to the gallery and the streets seemed quieter than the previous day. The gallery building itself was surprisingly unassuming in comparison to all the ornate buildings we had seen the previous day. A long cream rectangle with small square windows, its only feature of note was the two large glass lifts attached to the exterior at either end.
Having purchased our tickets in the foyer and stashed our belongings in the designated lockers, we set off on a ‘Guernica’ Hunt (“we’re going to catch a big one”). We stepped into one of the glass lifts and found to our relief that it was devoid of strange men trying to take us away from our bed-ridden grandparents by luring us into chocolate factory related business partnerships. As we raced skywards, we faced out onto the city, basking in the fantastic view over the rooftops of Madrid while wrestling with the strong sense of nausea that accompanied it.
We arrived at our destination and quickly discovered that the gallery itself was designed around a central quad, which proved very disorienting. Having spent several minutes watching a short film about the Spanish Civil War, I turned around to realise that:
a) I had no clue where I was
b) I had no idea where Claire and Anne-Lise were
c) Anne Lise and Claire were also most likely unaware of where they were
d) There was no phone signal to be found.
I was hit with the kind of irrational panic that can only be triggered by losing your mum in the supermarket. Suddenly, I was acutely aware that I was stranded and that my Spanish vocab consisted of ‘gluten free please’, ‘sandwich’ and ‘yellow’, which I doubted would prove useful in my mission to find Anne-Lise and Claire. At long last, it seemed that my mother’s despotic regime of mandatory Christmas Day charades was about to come in handy…Mercifully, we bumped into each other without having to enlist the help of a poor unsuspecting gallery assistant. It turned out we had been chasing each other round the various wings in a cross between the ‘Changes’ sequence in Shrek 2 and a giant game of ‘Where’s Wally’, or should I say, ¿Dónde está Wally.
As Virginia Woolf famously never said:
‘I was the
Wally
all along and I had been
found…’
…which meant that we were now in a position to locate some famous art. We wandered along some corridors and stumbled upon a hefty collection of Picasso paintings. All around, the walls were covered with angular galloping forms, but we struggled to find the painting that we had come to see.
Having anticipated a canvas the size of a postage stamp obscured by a sea of selfie sticks, we were somewhat surprised to see that the ‘Guernica’ was housed in a deserted room on its own. Furthermore, unlike the Mona Lisa and your ex, the painting was actually much bigger than expected. A lone security guard patrolled the room, looking poised to disarm a selfie stick and hurl foolish tourists to the ground at a moment’s notice. He had probably cut his teeth defending Anne Lise’s landlady’s magnets and snow globes.
‘Guernica’ takes its name from a Basque town that was mercilessly bombed by Nazi Germany during the Spanish Civil War. While it is widely regarded as a powerful representation of one of the darkest periods in Spanish history, it also serves as a stark reminder of the price paid by innocent people during situations of conflict worldwide. It’s certainly a harrowing image to behold and it was hard not to feel discomfort looking at the famous angular mass of strangled horses, wailing faces and big block shapes spanning the length of the wall. Often, famous works of art fail to live up to their reputation, however ‘Guernica’, impressive and grotesque in equal measures, is not a painting you would not forget in a hurry.
*Here is a picture taken from the Encyclopedia Britannica. They say a picture is worth a thousand words but I decided this picture definitely wasn’t worth having all my teeth knocked out by an angry security guard.
Frustratingly, as well as being the most famous painting in the gallery, it was also the only one which was not allowed to be photographed. Further research from my dining room table has unearthed that this camera ban is part of an attempt to preserve the painting by removing its exposure to camera flashes. It is definitely NOT a conspiracy to boost the sales of the overpriced ‘Guernica’ tea towels exhibited in the gallery gift shop. After all, nothing perks up scrubbing a colander quite like the decimated monochrome ruins of a bombed out city… We decided that we had had our fill of art and begrudgingly bought a couple of ‘Guernica’ postcards before stopping for some lunch at a nearby McDonald’s.
Next on our itinerary was a walk through El Retiro, a large park not far from the Reina Sofia. We headed up a steep slope, passing a row of wonky stalls selling vintage books and the botanical gardens or the ‘Real Jardin Botanico’ on our way to the park. It was at this point that I grew slightly perplexed. Clearly there were a lot of imposters in Madrid if every point of interest had to assert their status as a ‘real’ attraction. However, Anne-Lise explained, much to my embarrassment, that ‘real’ is Spanish for ‘royal’. I have to admit that I was somewhat disappointed that we wouldn’t get to see Real Madrid challenge their old rivals Pretend Madrid to a game of football…
We entered the park itself via an elaborately decorated gate and proceeded to stroll down its numerous tree lined paths. The routes ahead were peppered with the dark forms of strolling city-dwellers, who stood out against the white, cloudy sky- it was as if we had stepped into a Lowry painting. Despite the fact that it was early December, many of the trees had clung onto their autumn leaves, adding a bright, rusty orange tinge to the black branches which spread towards the sky like runny trails of ink.
As we walked on, an enormous glass palace which backed onto a large pond with a tall, bubbling fountain at its centre, was revealed in the middle of the park. Built in 1887, this glass palace had initially been intended as a greenhouse but now hosts numerous exhibitions. It certainly seemed to belong to another era and looked as if it could have housed one of the controversial ‘World Fairs’ popular in the Victorian period. We took plenty of time to admire the architecture and enlisted the help of a very kind man to take an outrageous amount of photos with the impressive structure, before deciding to move on. We walked past ice cream kiosks, tiled buildings with giant sphinxes and colonnades, breathing in the fresh air and marvelling at how such a deep sense of peace could be found in the heart of a bustling city.
Eventually, we arrived at the edge of a broad lake, dotted with the little rowing boats that were available to hire. We sat by the edge and watched as couples, friends and families with children swaddled in coats with big eskimo hoods sculled across the green grey surface of the water. Seagulls and ducks bobbed amongst the flotilla, indifferent to the tangle of oars that scooped the water worryingly close to their heads. Occasionally, enormous carp that called the bottom of the lake home disturbed the surface of the water with wide, gulping mouths, keen to snap up crumbs of bread that passersby had thrown for the ducks.
Having watched the boaters come and go, our attention turned to the path at the edge of the lake, which was lined with caricaturists, popcorn vendors and balloon artists. A somewhat unusual addition to this mix was a group of people wandering around in enormous Disney character suits, the kind you can spot at theme parks. This seemed to be a popular gimmick in Madrid and Anne-Lise explained that they encourage people to take photos with them in exchange for tips, much like the living statues or buskers that can be found around Covent Garden. Charming as this idea was, we soon found out the alarming side of this venture, as a loud holler of ‘HOLA GUAPA!!’ (Hello beautiful) forced us to turn around, only to find it had been emitted from a leering, sweaty man clambering out of a Goofy costume. This was disappointing as we would have had a much better chance of outrunning him had he stayed in the costume. Either way we didn’t want to hang around to find out the land speed of a lecherous Spanish man so decided it was best to move on.
According to Anne-Lise, harassment at the hands of sleazy animated characters is a regular occurrence. Cat-calling is a jarring experience at the best of times but feels especially surreal not even Hello Kitty, Peppa Pig and Mickey Mouse are safe. As Shakespeare never said,
‘Exit pursued by a lustful Goofy.’
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