Madrid

I am always floored when in large European cities; there is so much focus on food and shopping.  There are restaurants, bars and cafes by the zillion, no matter what time of day it is, people are eating and drinking.  We are going to miss the food shopping in Spain, as it has been endlessly wonderful for us.

This morning, we set off for the archaeological museum, which is terrific.  Everything is displayed so well, but the Spanish really set the plot for the visitor by planning your route.  We have noted this before and it has got to the point where we want to just go about at random to subvert the plan.  The museums also provide the most dullest jobs on the planet, there are a lot of attendants who just stand around and watch, we don’t know how they don’t go out of their minds with boredom.  If any visitor even looks as though they may do something untoward, the attendants are wheeling in their direction immediately.  A screaming kid was chastised while the mom was trying to get him to stop, even though he was having his screaming fit in a corridor between two sections.

As is often the case in most countries, the city museums get all the goods, when it would be better if the artifacts were left where history put them.  We are seeing the originals which we should have seen on our recent travels through Spain.

The museum is just too large to cope with all in one day and we burned out after about 3.5 hours.  So we pretty much flew through a lot of the Roman and Greek sections as we are quite familiar with those after our travels to Italy.  We completely skipped the Christian era and the more modern sections as they don’t hold much interest for us.

The strength of the archaeology museum lies within its Iberian and Celtic collections, in our opinion, of course.  We spent most of our time there looking at some really wonderful pieces and the historical information provided is extensive and informative.

After we left the museum, we basically walked around the city for the rest of the day.  The city centre is rather compact and can be walked a lot quicker than we realized.  We walked through a lot of the main plazas, which are quite busy.  The traffic is heavy and the streets become mobbed as the evening wears on with people on foot.  Other than those who are constantly trying to hand out food leaflets, you really don’t get bugged in Madrid, which is great.

This is an art city, known for world-class art museums, but we have a limit on the amount of time we can tolerate in a museum and the archaeology museum did us in today.  We want to visit the naval museum tomorrow and will see how much more we can take.  We really like Madrid and want to explore more of the city, it is a great city to just walk in.

Iberian 4th - 1st century BC

Iberian, The Lady of Baza

This is exquisite, Iberian, The Lady of Elche

Iberian, 3rd century BC, The Great Lady Offerant

Vettonian culture, 3rd - 1st century BC, they think these granite animals marked grazing territory

Celtiberian culture, 2nd - 1st century BC, a familiar tool

Lusitanian culture, 3rd - 2nd century BC, silver and gilded silver

Bronze Bull from Costitx, 5th - 3rd century BC

Livia, wife of Emperor Augustus, from Paestum, Italy

This is what we looked like after spending too much time in the archaeology museum, Roman mosaic, of course, The Genius of the Year, late 2nd century

Rooster from the Greek collection

Gate that we are too lazy to bother to identify

An overdone monster in Madrid

Plaza Mayor

Palace Real, another one where the architects went all berserk