Sunday, September 23, 2018

Life in the Fast Train

Laura and I went up to Madrid today. I'm flying to the US out of Madrid for a conference tomorrow. We used that as an excuse to go up a day early and do a little sightseeing. The day started at a relatively humane 8am. We walked across the bridge and caught the 21 bus out to the train station. We were pretty early, so sat around for about an hour until our train to Madrid boarded. They took our tickets as we got on the escalator to the platform. At the bottom of the escalator there was a bag scan and metal detector. On the other side of the security check, I snapped this picture of the train (actually a couple of trains):
The seats were comfortable and the ride smooth. At one point my phone told me we hit 171 mph:
Everything ran on time and we arrived in Madrid at around 1:15pm. A short walk across the train station took us to the metro station. We still had our metro cards from when we visited Madrid in July. We just recharged them and took the metro out to our hotel (near the airport). Check in at the airport hotel went fine. I also made a 9:20am reservation on the hotel's airport shuttle for tomorrow. We took 5 mins in the room and went back down town to visit the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina SofĂ­a--our primary goal for this trip. This is a largely contemporary/recent art museum. They have some Dali and Picasso and many others. There was also a Russian dada-ist exhibition.

Here are a few pieces that caught my eye and that I actually remembered to snap pictures of. This one is in the "cubist" collection. I didn't remember to note the artist's name.
 Here I like the quote above the painting:
 These next two were by Dali. Done when he was young and definitely not like his more surreal stuff:

 This was in the room with the Dali's. Not my favorite pieces, except, I love the expressions on the two horses' faces:
This giant metronome actually worked:
The museum closed at 7pm. I snapped this picture of the stairwell as we left:
And of the front of the musuem:
We walked over to the Parque de el Retiro. Along the way we passed a statue of the famous Spanish artist Murillo. Mostly an interesting coincidence since we visited his feature exhibit in the art museum we visited in Sevilla yesterday:
In the park itself, there were a lot of people. It was a beautiful evening and I'm sure the throngs were not unusual:
Like everyone else, Laura and I took a selfie in front of the lake:
That's all from Madrid. Laura heads back to Sevilla tomorrow. I go to Miami for a few days, then to Utah for my conference.