For the same reasons
as in Athens, I’d expected Madrid to seem a little bit miserable. Weren’t both Greece and Spain in the European Union’s dog house for their disinclination to get
their national debts paid? Weren’t both of them supposed to be enduring austerity
to placate their German creditors? But Madrid seemed almost as prosperous as
beautiful — and colder then either prosperous or beautiful. You’d never guess
from its capital city in December that Spain is the country most loved by Brits
fed up with the cold and dampness of their own country. Its frigidity was nearly as
brutish as Berlin’s.
Our first day in town,
we took one of those hop-on/hop-off tourist buses, and it, at least, seemed very austere
indeed. In Berlin, I insisted that we kept going round and round the city
because the prospect of getting off the lovely warm bus was too daunting to
contemplate, but the Madrid version seemed not to have the heat on, and it was
nearly as vindictively frigid inside as out. The pre-recorded narration advised
us of the names of the architects and dates of completions of a succession of
noteworthy buildings, and was so boring as almost to make us want to expose
ourselves to the brutish cold again. I would estimate that at least 60 percent
of the great, great many queued up to get into the Museo del Prado suffered
hypothermia. Around the corner from the museum, a beggar lacking shoes was
trying to get culture-lovers to drop a few eurocents into his rumpled McDonald
McCafe cup, but few were doing so, and Dame Zelda fretted that he might lose a
couple of toes to frostbite.
Noting that they
intended to charge each of us 95€, and that their deluxe New Year’s Eve menus
weren't exactly crammed with the vegetarian options on which she insists, I was
able to persuade Dame Zelda not to have our last dinner of 2016 at one of the
restaurants near to our gorgeous, stylish hotel. Instead, we trudged up Calle
de Toledo to the La Latina area, and there found a modest, but very warm local
restaurant with a charming, ebullient proprietor/server, no pretensions, and
good food. While we ate, a quartet of English girls, one in a very short
sequinned dress in which one less gangly might have caused traffic jams, fended
off the pair of Belgian bachelors at the bar who apparently didn’t mind
the prettiest one’s gangliness even a little. At meal’s end, we agreed that
welcoming the new year in the nearby Plaza del Sol, in which we’d earlier seen
mobs of machine-gun-brandishing policemen in bacalavas practicing their
terrorism-discouraging glares, might be 20 glamorous and fun, but, because of
the weather and the crowding, 80 unpleasant. We headed eagerly back to our
hotel, and there, at midnight, watched the bombs bursting in air from our warm,
comfortable room.
On the first day of
2017, we took ourselves on a little walking tour, and enjoyed the world’s most
delicious hot chocolate (molten Heaven!) and churros at a place near the plaza we'd avoided the night before. Our
considerable pleasure was slightly lessened by the guy who greeted us, if
greeted us is the right word, when we came in. He made pretty clear that he
resented our interrupting the exchange of texts he seemed to be conducting on
his mobile phone. When I wondered if we might have a wee peek at the menu, he
sneered contemptuously, and said, “Only chocolate and churros,” though we soon
ascertained that coffee and croissants were also on offer. Our server fairly
threw our churros and chocolate onto the table in front of us, but my own
displeasure was lessened by the fact of his and other servers wearing beautiful
white jackets, with gold buttons and braid epaulets, of the sort the captain on
our 2008 cruise to the Caribbean had worn on Dinner with the Captain! nite.
Later, Dame Zelda
elected to remain in our cozy, stylish hotel room catching up on emails on her
tablet while I traipsed down to the river, which turned out not to be much of a
river, but to be surrounded by beautifully landscaped grounds, and traversed on
one’s choices of bridges, one ancient, the other as modern as modern can be. As
is my custom, I took a series of shadow self-portraits. I liked to imagine when
I first began the series, in Wisconsin, in 2007, that they suggested that I’m cool
and sexy and mysterious, but I have since realised they more eloquently suggest either that I
lack self-esteem, or am too cheap to spring for a selfie stick.
I think both are probably
true.
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