to Madrid

We got up fairly early to pack, check out, and walk to the train station. It looked like a long distance on the map, but it only took about 15 minutes. We had breakfast there – café con leche, fresh squeezed orange juice, and something called a tostada completa. I was thinking that “completa” would imply that the toast would come well filled, perhaps with ham. As Eric pointed out later, it’s better to just ask for what you want. Still, what I learned is that tostada completa means a toasted roll with butter. Then I thought, this seems familiar; maybe I did know this already. Anyway, there was a little pitcher tomato sauce (the sort of pitcher that serves maple syrup in the US) on the counter, and following the lead of a middle aged woman ahead of me, I liberally doused our tostadas with tomato sauce. They were good, though with ham would have been better. The juice, meanwhile, was exactly what I wanted it to be – tart, refreshing Sevillian orange juice.

The train was pretty nice. Eric reported that it was not as nice the first class train had been, but still better than a plane. We did not eat anything on the train. Eric read and I attempted to draw La Marquesita, with marginal success. Looking out the window, you would think that the Spanish survived on olives alone – nearly all the agriculture we saw was olive groves.

We arrived in Madrid and I found it to be vaguely familiar (I had been there for about 3 days in 1999). The walk from the train station to the hotel was actually quite long, and mostly uphill. We could have taken the subway, but decided not to bother. Walking is healthy!

Our hotel is a on the third floor of a building on Plaza Santa Cruz (so unintentionally, we went from Santa Cruz to Santa Cruz). Plaza Santa Cruz is right next to the Plaza Mayor, which in Madrid is a large, elaborate, rectangular, Habsburg creation. Our hotel, meanwhile, is like many hostals in Spain: inexpensive, clean, and tackily decorated. It will serve quite well. But on to lunch! We were ravenous.

We strolled around for maybe 20 minutes before settling on a restaurant called Chiky that was close to our hotel and had outdoor seating on a pedestrian street. We started with an iberico plate consisting of two kinds of sausage (one with ground pimiento and the other without), plus serrano ham and manchego (or something similar) cheese. Generally, as I approach the end of a trip to Spain, I start to feel that I haven’t had enough ham products; I do the same thing in France with duck confit and steak tartare. As a main dish, Eric had cochinillo (suckling pig) with crispy skin, and I had cod with ajillo. (Funny how it always feels so Iberian to have cod, even though the cod has traveled almost as far as I have to get there.) Dessert was an egg flan for Eric and a baked apple for me; both were more or less lackluster.

Eric wanted to go to the department store El Corte Inglés – we’d been in Seville, and bought some things, but wanted to go again. Would it be open on Sunday? Yes… it’s open the first Sunday of the month; what luck! We bought more euro-underwear (why is their underwear so much better than ours?), picked up some goodies from the supermarket in the basement, and stopped in the music store to by an album by Ojos de Brujo, a band from Andalusia that combines traditional flamenco with modern styles like rock and hip-hop.

We left and wandered around town. We ended up in the Parque del Retiro, which is a nice large park, sort of a cross between the Luxembourg Gardens and Central Park. We stopped at a café in the park for some coffee, but they didn’t have any, so we had beer instead – not the sort of substitution that you’ll find recommended in a cookbook. Oddly, though, we did feel less tired.

From the Parque del Retiro, we crossed town again to the Palácio Real (Royal Palace). The park next to it was beginning to fill with folks on their paseo, and the sun was beginning to set.

I pulled out the guidebook to find places for dinner that wouldn’t be too far away. The area south of the Plaza Major is known as Madrid a los Austrias, since it was developed under the Habsburgs, and it had a few recommended tapas places. We were tired and not exceptionally hungry, so good tapas seemed like an excellent choice for a last meal.

We headed into the Madrid a los Austrias area, and found ourselves descending into a madhouse of 20-year-old Spaniards and tourists. All the recommended places were spilling over with noisy 20-year-olds. Was the food good? I have no idea. I was too tired for that nonsense, so we headed back to the Plaza Mayor for something quieter, yet overpriced.

We stopped first at a promising place just outside the Plaza Mayor. Well, somewhat promising… I had trouble finding a menu in Spanish; all the ones scattered here and there were in English or German. I prefer a Spanish menu, because I know the names of the dishes in Spanish but don’t know how they will be translated in English. I was not able to order sherry again. As Eric pointed, we were no longer in sherry territory. The waiter had no idea what I meant when I asked for “fino” – he replied, “¿vino?” So I had mineral water – no bubbles, as they were out of that – and Eric had beer. We decided to have just one dish, a tapa of ham croquetas, which were unspecial.

We left there and headed to a place in the corner of the Plaza Major (Restaurant Carmen, I think) that I’d noticed earlier. It was pretty good, actually. I ordered a tapa of lomo de puerco (preserved pork loin, not entirely unlike Italian coppa), and red wine (Marques de Caceres, which we often buy in Chicago). Eric had another beer. While we waited for the lomo, the proprietor invited us to take a peek at his dining room, a beautiful space in the 300-year-old vaulted brick basement. We also served us little tapa of mussels with peppers and onion, and octopus and zucchini sliced and served on bread, which were both pretty good. The lomo was delicious, and satisfied my need for one last ham before leaving town.

And so to bed!

Labels: journal, personal, spain

posted by Tony at 11:40 PM