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Madrid, Spain
I want to stumble around on a merry go round and when I fall I want to land in heaven, in heaven, heaven
The slideshow starts just like all good slideshows start, with a few soldiers wearing funny hats aimlessly riding around on suspicious looking horses. Who could ask for anything more?
Still weary from the flight from Atlanta (where despite the flat bed seats you can never really get enough sleep), I found myself in Madrid with six hours to kill before I needed to board a late afternoon train into the hills and mountains of Andalusia (see Page 2). From my arrival downtown, I instinctively started wandering uphill, following the crowds right to the city center. Then suddenly the crowds got a lot bigger as everyone seemed to stop and stare as a series of horses and a carriage seemed to circle into and out of Plaza Mayor for reasons that still escape me. They really weren't going anywhere and no one (except for one person holding a protest sign) seemed to understand what the hell was going on. Still it was nice to enjoy the surprising pointless pageantry, to see the horses and horsemen come and go and come and go again as a flurry of photographers (myself included) took pictures and pretended to understand what was going on.
A better view of the plaza, not just a place where unlucky and not quite Catholic-enough Catholics faced the Inquisition (almost every city in Spain seems to have its own Inquisition torture/murder site) but also a place where tourists (like me) can take some pictures and try to figure out exactly who the statue of the guy on the horse is supposed to be- it's the super boring King Philip III by the way, not the way cool King Philip II that you probably hoped it would be.
Whoa. Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron's attention grabbing Caixa Forum building in Madrid is easy to find and hard to miss. Maybe it's the giant green planted wall (which is tacked onto an otherwise not quite as green normal enough looking building). Maybe it's the jagged perforated Cor-Ten steel top (which is tacked onto an otherwise normal enough looking building). Or maybe its just nice to find a nice plaza on the Paseo del Prado with free wifi- a truly rare amenity in Madrid and (in my experience at least) the entirety of Spain.
The Caixa Forum is a free art gallery and a free library and a not free restaurant (there always seems to be a not free restaurant) that features temporary exhibits that (when I was there) could best be described as forgettable. One of them was something about Mexican archaeology or something I think. Still I didn't come to see the free exhibits, I came to see the building which (unlike the exhibits) was far more memorable.
The Caixa Forum is located in a building that used to be a small power station, although you would never know that now. You also would never know that there used to be a ground floor. In an exceptionally impressive move, the entire ground floor has been taken away allowing the existing/new building to hover over the plaza, held up only by magic or, quite possibly, a not quite obvious and carefully designed steel structure- it's hard to ever know for sure I guess.
My (free) flight to Spain was in and out of Madrid Barajas but you could say that my time in Spain was in and out of Madrid Puerta Atocha, the rail station that isn't Chamartin. The Spanish high speed rail system is kind of like a bicycle wheel with Atocha in its center, it's often easier and faster to head back to Madrid and go hundreds of miles out of your way than it is to go slow but direct between cities. In eight days in Spain, I found myself storing my luggage at Atocha no fewer than three different times, enough that I was soon able to help other people figure out the unnecessary complex locker NFC ticket system and enough that I was even starting to bond with the slightly angry woman who ran the luggage x-ray machine.
This picture is at Atocha but in a hard to find corner (even for someone who has been there as often as myself), where a retail store was replaced with this monument to the Spanish Rail Attacks. On 3/11 in 2004, people just trying to get home on a commuter train were victims of a terrorist bomb while pulling out of Atocha. The monument in its entirety involves a dark blue room with a skylight, and in the skylight are written consoling messages in almost every imaginable language. Oddly the monument was very effective from the concourse looking in and not so effective inside looking up at the skylight, where the multi-language text is interesting but oddly detailed and honestly kind if distracting.
