CHASING PAINT

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Prepping for Madrid

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I’ll be landing at Barajas  airport in 87 days.

I’ve fired up the app https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/dreamdays-countdown-to-days/id585947384?mt=8 that does a automatic countdown.  When I peek at it, I get a little frisson of anticipatory pleasure. The Mary Cassatt painting of a matador in his suit of lights is my Dreamdays trip image. Is he lighting up in the spirit of a final smoke before the firing squad, or in a post-coital mood, spent with relief at surviving his bullfight? Mary Cassatt-229663Now that the holidays are over, I’m buckling down to research,  accumulating possibilities for my day by day planner, and pre-booking tickets and museum passes.

Most of the museums I plan to see have pages on Facebook and I spent a happy couple of hours making a new Madrid/Lisbon interest list for my newsfeed. I’m now getting updates that give me glimpses of the paintings and treasures I’ll be seeing in person. And hooray for that handy ‘translate’ tab at the bottom of foreign language posts. It’s not perfect, but I get the gist.

Filled in the April day-by-day calendar with preliminary excursions and quickly realized there won’t be enough hours in the days or days in the month to fit in everything I’d like to see. Decisions must be made – El Escorial or the Royal Palace? I’ll take those kinds of inquiries to www.TripAdvisor.com which has never failed to give me cogent advice.

Figuring out which days museums are closed, what holiday to be aware of, the best days and times to visit is a lovely puzzle. I like having rain vs shine options too. Getting those all-important museum passes that permit me to bypass lines will gain me time that otherwise I might have squandered. I’ve booked one tour, with Context Travel. I’ve had excellent experiences with them in the Vatican Museum and Rembrandt’s House in Amsterdam.

I yearned to stay at the Hotel Orfila for my last five days in Madrid, but it’s really pricey, and I worried it couldn’t possibly be as lovely as I imagined. Then I came across this on the Wendy Perrin travel site: “Best bang-for-your-buck hotel -Orfila, a 32-room hotel housed in a nineteenth-century palace that feels more like a family home than a five-star Relais & Chateaux property. It is located only 15 minutes by foot from the Prado Museum in a quiet, mostly residential neighborhood. Rooms are furnished in top-quality antiques that the owner has been collecting for years, and there is a beautiful garden for guests to enjoy. It’s the kind of place where you get much more than you pay for.” That last sentence pushed me over the edge, and I found a ‘four days for the price of one’ deal, and booked it. Okay it didn’t push, I gladly jumped. Wouldn’t you? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hPZw-sbU1SA

Practiced my Spanish on Duolingo, something I’ve promised myself to do five days a week until I leave. It’s day 2.

 

 

 

 

Q & A Success

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Started posting on questions on the TripAdvisor Madrid Forum this week. I had great luck on the Paris board. Lots of helpful strategic info. One of my favorite replies linked to a Youtube site that had homemade videos of just the Louvre ceilings. Amazing and inspirational. I looked up the whole time I was there and was dazzled.

On the Madrid forum, 90% of the questions are the cheapest way to get from the airport, how to get soccer tickets, restaurant recs, best hotel at the cheapest price, and the intricacies of buying railroad tickets online. I figured my questions about art  would be a welcome change or there would be crickets.

I hit the jackpot! Art lovers on Tripadvisor who have been or are living in Madrid came out of the woodwork. One great tip was a link to a blog “Every Museum in Madrid” – a kindred spirit who lived there in 2012 and explored them all. Got some excellent leads on art in churches, plus this tantalizing exhibition –

‘A Su Imagen’ is a selection of around 100 pieces of great quality and artistic value (Rubens, Murillo, Goya, Velázquez, Valdés Leal, Cranach) These are works covering a large period of time –from the 10th to the 20th century– that come from 22 dioceses and from public and private collections. Until 12 April 2015.

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Note the closing date, which moves it up in priority. I probably would’ve missed it, blinded by the glories of the Prado. Now I have it plugged in on my Madrid day by day calendar.

I may not be able to pry myself out of the San Francisco El Grande Basilica, it looks so luscious. I Googled Almudena Cathedral and somehow ended up watching a video snippet of the royal wedding there. The dresses of the maids of honor looked like something out of a Velásquez court painting. 500x500_bridesmaids_spainAnd I can’t wait to visit Goya’s tomb in San Antonio de la Florida. I hope it is permitted to leave a little sketch or a very small paint brush. You can recognize the tomb of Fra Angelica in Rome just looking for the scraps of sketches, pencil stubs and tiny brushes, little offerings from artists paying him homage.

Holding Out For A Hero

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One of the pleasures of trip anticipation is  reading.  Blogs posts and travel sites for real time, boots on the ground information and insights, but also histories, biographies, and novels.  I came across a bio of Vasco de Gama, who, in my hazy grade school memory, was a bold seafarer and explorer. Turns out he was also a vicious, bloodthirsty bastard. A man of appalling and horrifying acts of torture and vengeance. Take this example:

“After demanding the expulsion of Muslims from Calicut to the Zamorin Hindu, the latter sent the high priest Talappana Namboothiri (the very same person who conducted da Gama to the Zamorin’s chamber during his much celebrated first visit to Calicut in May 1498) for talks. Da Gama called him a spy, ordered the priests’ lips and ears to be cut off and after sewing a pair of dog’s ears to his head, sent him away.”

I thought I’d visit his tomb to pay homage to his nautical prowess. Turns out I’ll be going to make sure he’s still dead.vasco

Ever hopeful, I turned to an audio book biography Isabella, Warrior Queen. More mayhem. I am all for strong female role models,  but when I discover she invented the Inquisition, I’m outta there.

Isabel_la_CatólicaOn the whole, I prefer the lives of the painters. Like, say, Diego Velasquez or Sofonisba Anguissola. Not that artists don’t get up to mischief, but it isn’t havoc on the grand scale that royalty and their sanctioned pirates tend to wreak.

Velasquez

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