Week 5 – Tuesday 29th July – Madrid and Toledo

Today we planned to see both the Thyssen Bornemisza gallery and the Prado gallery. After breakfast at the hotel we packed up the meager possessions that we’d bought in from Toledo and headed for the Thyssen. I’d seen the Thyssen many (many, many) years ago when it visited Dunedin and was interested to see it again. The sun was already high in the sky (9:45am) as we made our way to the gallery, so we had to chose the side of the street that would protect us from the sun.

The Gallery is now owned by Spain, but at the time I had seen it in Dunedin it was still a private collection that was on a world tour. That was about 1982-83. In 1988 the Spanish government agreed to host the collection for 9.5 years (don’t know why that long) and then in the early 1990’s, they had agreed to buy it from the TB family. We were interested to learn why it was sold, as it had been brought together by the TB family over two generations since the 1920’s. We never did find out, but given that it had been on tour in the early 1980’s and was then farmed out for 10 years at the end of the 1980’s, maybe they just felt like something new.

The collection is amazing, but like all art galleries, I find that there is only some art that I am interested in and the rest I can only give a passing interest to. My interest is mainly in 19th and early 20th century art – particularly the impressionists and post impressionists, but as this collection dates from the early 15th century it was good to see a wide range of art, appreciate the early stuff for what it was and then spend time looking at the art that I really enjoyed.

Art for me is a bit like a switch – it’s on or it’s off – I like it or I don’t, so we spent time at the stuff that we liked and moved more quickly past the stuff that didn’t interest us. Having said that, by the time we left it had been over 3 hours at an art gallery and that is as much as I can handle in one day.

Emerging just after 1:30, we went for a walk around some of the gardens, with the intention of catching the 3:50 train back to Toledo. Fortunately, we were close to the train station at 1:30, so went in to buy our tickets back to Toledo. This was fortunate, as we then found out why catching the train in Madrid can be difficult.

Expecting to get a self service vending machine, where you punch in your destination, chose your trip time and seat number, we were surprised to find that there were only very long queues to buy your tickets off a human ticket seller. The queues were for either the individual trains if they were about to leave, other ticket sales for that day and ticket sales for other days. The queues were huge and so we decided we’d better get our tickets before we did anything else. The whole process was massively inefficient and even the locals were getting very frustrated by it. The sellers in the queues for the upcoming trains, wouldn’t sell tickets for any of the later train services that day, the sellers in the other days sales were completely under utilised and the sellers of the rest of today’s sales were completely over worked. People were pushing to the front of the queue to try and get tickets for soon to be departing services.

Once we’d got our tickets, we were able to go and have lunch at a nearby café and wait for the return train to Toledo.

Dinner was a quiet affair that night, catching up on part of this blog entry, before we head for Barcelona tomorrow.

Every night, we get musicians coming round the restaurants and playing to the crowd in general. It ‘s good to hear them and we always give them a Euro for their trouble. There’s only two instruments they play – piano accordion or guitar, but there is one song that we get every time, it’s always played really fast and we’re over it – “Those Were the Days my Friend”. Here’s a little bit of it just to get you in the mood.

“Once upon a time, there was a tavern, Where we used to raise a glass or two. Remember how we laughed away the hours, Think of all the great things we would do.

Those were the days, my friend, We thought they'd never end, We'd sing and dance forever and a day, We'd live the life we'd choose, We'd fight and never lose, For we were young and sure to have our way.”

Now my recollection of the song was that the first verse was slow and the chorus was medium paced. The way the musicians play it, “Those were” is played slowish, and from then on, it’s a race to prove your manlihood and virility by playing it as fast as is humanly possible. From Barcelona, to the Costa Verde, to Segovia in Central Spain it is the same. I was reminded of this last night when we were watching the video that Anne has been creating, and there in the Placa Reail in Barcelona was that same bloody song again. Musicians playing that particular song are on the exclusion list when it comes to donations.

Fortunately, in the malls you also get musicians, but they are more varied in both their choice of instrument and the songs they play. Two that come to mind are the classical violinist in Salamanca and the guy playing a very good rendition of dire straits Sultans of Swing, so it adds a nice atmosphere while you are walking home from dinner.