Madrid: The Prado, and more

This morning we had a marvelous tour of the Prado Museum with Pablo.  Pablo is not your normal tour guide.  He is Dean of a local art school, an artist himself, and a graduate in fine arts from Yale.  He doesn't give these tours very often, so I'm not sure how our travel company (Made for Spain) managed to sign him up.  In addition, Made for Spain had the special ability to get us into the Prado a full hour before it opened, so we had the whole place to ourselves.  It was amazing to be walking through totally empty galleries with Pablo, not having to elbow people aside to see the works.  Quite a special treat!

Pablo did an excellent job of picking out about a dozen important works and explaining them, rather than trying to show us everything.  The Prado is full of paintings by Velasquez, Goya, Bosch, Titian, El Greco, Rubens, etc.  Usually I find these kind of paintings not too interesting but Pablo highlighted all sorts of things that I wouldn't have seen on my own. (No pictures allowed inside, of course.)

After the Prado and a short bus ride through the city, we visited Reina Sophia, the modern art museum where we focused on the Guernica, Picasso's monumental black and white painting about the horrors of war.  The story of the painting is as interesting as the work itself.  Here there were significant crowds but we still managed to get close enough to see it well.

Then, we had lunch in a lovely outdoor cafe overlooking the Cathedral.  We tried a "Spanish omelette" which was not at all what I expected, more of a egg and potato quiche than an omelette.

We then walked all together through a bit of Madrid, seeing the palace, the gourmet food market and tasting a churro dipped in chocolate (Madrid speciality).  Then we separated with Joan/Karl and Debbie/Keith headed to shop for espadrilles shoes (quite an exciting experience, apparently, as they only let in 4 shoppers at a time, and the line extends down the block!) and Ann/Jere and me/Lenny heading back to the hotel.  Lenny and I took a rest and then a walk through the magnificent Retiro Park, right next to our hotel.  It was full of people and beautifully manicured lawns and shrubbery.   The highlight was the Crystal Palace, an enormous glass and iron structure that was being used to house a contemporary art exhibit.

Ann and Jere decided to go to Shabbat services.  This turned out to be surprisingly challenging.  Ann wrote to the synagogue because there was no address on the web site.  They responded that you cannot come to services unless you had been approved in advance!  Ann had to send them copies of her passports as well as contact info for her rabbi at home to vouch for them.  Only when they were "accepted" was she given the address.  Unfortunately this meant that we could not join them spontaneously, so Ann and Jere went on their own, while the rest of us went out for dinner in a nice open air restaurant.

Donna