Reading this week:

• Freedom’s Debtors by Padraic X. Scanlan

My super amazing wife and I got married about a year ago (as loyal reader(s) of this blog will recall) but we never went on a honeymoon so we decided it was time to go on a honeymoon. We also decided that honeymoon is a state of mind and that we can call any vacation a honeymoon but this is the first vacation we called a honeymoon so we had to go big. Specifically, we had to go to Spain.

Travel to Spain was straightforward and everything went perfectly smoothly. The first city we were going to was Madrid. We arrived in the evening and got a taxi to the place we were staying, the biggest hiccup being that I couldn’t figure out how the key worked but luckily my super amazing wife saved the day and so we had a place to sleep. We were pooped but needed dinner so we grabbed something easy, spotting on the way a fantastical-looking pastry shop which we returned to for dessert. The only mistake we made here is that within mere hours of landing in Madrid I had one of the best cheesecakes I have ever had in my life and I spent the rest of the trip chasing that same high with only varied success.

The next morning our first destination was yet another wondrous pastry shop where we got some heavenly pastries for breakfast. Fortified, we quickly made it to our first big honeymoon adventure: Museo del Prado. The museum was great! For those that haven’t clicked the link, it’s an art museum, and a big one, focused on classical art. In line with their pre-20th-century vibe, photography was not allowed, so I can’t do my normal thing of showing you bad photos of great art. Instead I will have to simply describe the journey and use links along the way.

Overwhelmed by the layout, the first wing we managed to focus on was where they kept all their Hieronymus Bosch works. I already used “fantastical” in this post to describe a pastry shop but man that was a waste because now I need to talk about Bosch. The biggest work with the biggest crowd was The Garden of Earthly Delights of course. I had seen pictures of that thanks to the Spanish classes I did poorly in (I would also have seen it if I had done well), but his other works were more astounding. I am disappointed to learn it is merely attributed to the “workshop of,” but the single most surprising was The Temptations of Saint Anthony Abbot, which features prominently an old lady that is also a house (which apparently makes it a brothel? Or maybe it is the naked lady that makes it a brothel. Not knowing St. Anthony I don’t know which is the tempting part for him). I mean, look, if this was a Dalí that would be run-of-the-mill, pedestrian, expected. But Bosch(‘s workshop) painted this in 1510! How did they know to do that? The past is both a foreign country and yet exactly the same, I don’t know how they do it.

From Bosch we wandered into some religious iconography which I am usually pretty whatever about, but all the works in the Prado were bright and beautiful and being a big fan of art restoration YouTube I was desperately impressed by their restoration department. Those people know what they are doing, it is evident. Another extremely fun exhibit they had was “Reversos,” which was all about the backs of paintings. A couple of things fell under that bracket. One was the literal backs of paintings, which held other sketches and earlier works and clues to the history of the paintings on the front. Another batch were painters being cheeky, imagining works from another perspective or painting the literal backs of paintings as a meta-joke. Even meta-er was the painting we bought a print of, which featured a cat busting through some canvas to try to eat some sardines that are hanging off the back of a painting, which is not where I would store sardines but there you go.

You of course also can’t go to the Prado without talking about Goya. They got a lotta Goya at the Prado. A whole lot. Multiple rooms are dedicated to the Black Paintings. I knew about the Black Paintings and was expecting all of Goya to be surreal and dark and wicked but the Black Paintings wing was one of the later ones we visited, and there is whole other wing full of his earlier works which are bright and cheery and meant to portray beauty. These are also cheeky in their way, the museum displayed side by side both The Naked Maja and The Clothed Maja, which is funny in addition to being an interesting exploration of the cultural background of the time. Sometimes I think I should spend more time in art museums focused on single paintings, but zooming through such a massive collection of one person’s oeuvre has its attractions as well. In the rest of the museum there was tons more to see, and just to name some others I liked there was La suerte de varas, Margarita delante del espejo, La aguadora (so achingly bright even in paint), and The Pearl and the Wave (which is funny for the name alone).

Full of art, we needed to get full on food and found a wonderful little cafe for lunch. Full of lunch we needed to get full of Naval History and so then went to the Museo Naval! But they let me take pictures so I will cover them in the next entry. After the Museo Naval we then had some time to poke more around Madrid and carved a touristy path, exploring the shops and the statues and the Plaza Mayor (above) before finally winding up back at the place we were staying and checking out the closest restaurant which had the significant advantage of being achingly delicious. I did not know if I would be a fan of the blood sausage but I didn’t want it to stop, as you can see below. As a final note, man I enjoy being able to order “una cerveza” and subsequently being served a cerveza without all the hassle of picking one. This is the height of luxury, don’t let anyone lie to you.