Madrid, Spain
On Tuesday, I woke up to find that since I had kept my laptop plugged in overnight, the converter had melted, Dalí-style. (Luckily I had a spare, since Stacy was nice enough to loan me hers before I left.)
Today was the first day in class, and I had the morning Art & Culture series, given in the Teatro (theater). After class let out, Kristin, Danielle and I headed downtown. Don Quixote signs were everywhere, since it’s the 400th anniversary. We stopped at Starbucks for some coffee (this was the only time I caved and indulged in non-European fare–must have been some leftover Americana in me from the Fourth) and then we swung by El Corte Ingles to pick up tickets for the zarzuela.
In case you didn’t know, zarzuela is a very Spanish form of theatre, comparable to the opera, but with a bit more acting/dialogue and dancing thrown in. We looked for and located the theatre and discovered it was right next to a vegetarian restaurant called Au Naturel.
We also visited the Thyssen museum, which rocked. To do a bit of name dropping, I got to see art by Monet, Renoir, Degas, Rubens, Rambrandt, Tintoretto, El Greco, Van Eyck, Van Cleve, Rafael, Van Gogh, Goya, Manet, Gaughin, Toulouse-Lautrec, Cezanne, Munch, Picasso, Felix Muller, Hopper, and Dalí. (Whew!) One of my favorite paintings was “Expulsion, Moon and Firelight”.
Next we were off to the cinema, I with my free ticket in hand. However, the queue was insane and wrapped around the block. Clearly, more passes had been distributed than there could possibly be room to sit. We ended up at a different theater to see Batman Begins, which I enjoyed. Since Spanish films are dubbed, whenever something important happened, I made sure to whisper what was going on to my classmates who didn’t speak Spanish.
Something interesting: the theater was like a Theatre. Our tickets were real tickets, complete with assigned seating and an usher to guide us to the right spot.
