After the excesses of the previous few days, I felt some exercise was in order. Whacking Now 77 on the ipod I went for a run round El Parque Retiro. Bathed in Madrid´s bright sunlight the park was glittering and the combination of book sellers and old Spanish men playing chess gave the run a great atmosphere. Alas my run ended at a Patisserie and three bites later I had undone all my previous good work. The three bites are shown below. The top two were pretty boring (glorified biscuits coated in unnecessary sugar) but the bottom one was fantastic. From what I gathered it was a ball of ground almonds, eggs and vanilla (essentially a macaron) covered with pine nuts.
On the walk (or more accurately post-run stumble) back to the hostel I passed what must be my 10th political protest. It appears to be the main Spanish pasttime.
At lunchtime I went to a cafe and for the umpteenth time saw ´secreto´ on the menu. My dictionary only translates this as ´secret´ and I´m not sure that any meat that treats its origin as a secret is a good idea! For the benefit of you readers though I took the plunge and ordered it. It looked like chicken, but tasted more like pork. If anyone knows what it actually was please tell me! A lazy afternoon was then spent with some friends from the hostel, a bottle of wine and some jamon.
Dinner was then the clichéd, but necessary, Spanish staple of paella. I found my tastebuds were distracted somewhat by the gruesome tv programme being shown in the restaurant. It was evidently some sort of Spanish horror and involved several dead human bodies being minced and turned into food. Yum!
Feeling like I needed to do something cultural, I headed to the Teatro Real (Spain´s version of the Royal Opera House) to see the world premiere of an opera entitled ´La página en blanco´ by Pilar Jurado. The theatre does a last-minute student deal meaning I got a pretty fantastic seat for less than the price of una cerveza. The promised English subtitles didn´t materialise, but as opera-singing is so slow I actually found I had time to understand what was being said. I use ´understand´ in a loose sense though as this was experimental opera at its most experimental. The story focused around a composer stuck in a white room with writers´ block. He spent most of the time having epileptic fits on the floor (all the time singing about how bad his life was) and ripping the heads off various stuffed birds on the wall. That bit was easy to understand. Then followed a pretty confusing period where the composer´s brain is cloned and inserted into a Japanese robot which then begins to compose far superior music to the original. If the semi-racist attempt to make a robot look Japanese wasn´t sufficient distraction, on the side of the stage played animated images from Hieronymus Bosch´s painting "The Garden of Earthly Delights" - picture lots of fish with human legs running around and dismembered human ears holding knives stabbing each other.
Then the play got really weird when the area beneath the stage opened up and we saw the composer tied up in a chair with hundreds of wires coming out his head and spikes in his eyes. Picture the re-education scene from A Clockwork Orange. It turned out that the composer was in a coma and the white room above was a representation of the inside of his mind. His brain was being stimulated by a gang of evil scientists trying to be the first to commission an opera from inside the brain of a coma victim. The method chosen was to make him fall in love and so they created a femme fatale to tempt him. The characters in the ´reality´ part of the stage then started to sing-argue about determinism - "we choose our own path in life", "no, every moment of our life is decided before". Then the opera switched into Latin and from that point on I was lost. I´m never going to make the mistake of doing anything cultural again!!
Getting back to the hostel I met up with some friends and we went on a massive bar crawl of the city, ending up in a club. I understand this activity much better!
Day 6
My last day in Madrid! I spent the morning with some friends checking out the Templo de Debod (an ancient Egyptian temple moved stone by stone from the Aswan dam) and then met up with a Spanish friend. The Spaniard and I had lunch at what looked like an incredibly posh restaurant, but which cost only 5 euros a course. I had an olive risotto to start and my friend had a chickpea salad. The risotto was lovely, but I couldn´t help feeling (as I do with all risottos) that it would be so much better without the cheese. Why go to the trouble of creating a delicious and complex mixture of onions, garlic, white wine and stock and then drown it all with parmesan?
I then had some rabbit. Not having had much rabbit before I was rather shocked when it arrived on the bone. With larger animals this isn´t much of a problem, but the bones in the rabbit were so small and numerous that I was vaguely sickened when with every bite I pulled a bit more of the carcass out my mouth. By the end there was a full skeleton on my plate. Saying that, the taste was second to none and the balsamic reduction on the side was perfect. Could have done without the chips though.
We shared two deserts - chocolate cake and profiteroles. Yum
I am now off to the airport. My next post will be from Argentina!
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