Site-Seeing on a Bad Knee in Madrid

Randy's idea of travel is to walk up and down every single street in any given city. We pretty much did that today, although hampered by his bad knee. We did take in the Catedral de Nuestra Senora de la Almudena after breakfast. It's Madrid's version of the gigantic gothic cathedral, but wasn't built until the 1880s and finished just in 1992, so the religious art is quite modern and ornamentation rather minimal. Interesting nonetheless. Then we took the 20-room tour of the Palacio Real, the royal palace initiated by Felipe V, the first of Spain's Bourbon kings. It has 2800 rooms in all, but only 1/4 of what the original plans called for. Some rooms are still used for state functions, but the royals today live elsewhere in much more modest digs. The rooms have some beauty, and admirable craftsmanship, but are basically an exercise in wretched excess. Not to be missed in case you haven't seen many palaces. And I haven't.

We lunched at Cafe Vergara, selected totally at random. Randy's knee needed a sit-down. I had gazpacho (excellent), shrimp with garlic (good) and apple tart (so-so). Randy had a Spanish soup of some sort and sirlion with fries (Spanish fries?). Then we walked until the knee and its owner wiped out. He was so desperate to sit that we landed in a Starbuck's where he promptly fell asleep, poor thing. We walked back to the Hotel Plaza Mayor for a proper rest and then went out for more walking and a tapas dinner at Mercado San Miguel. It looks like the Mercado was supposed to be a neighbor grocery market of the upscale sort, but it has evolved into a very large tapas bar. It is THE place to be in the area. It really is lots of fun.

I'm totally intrigued by this whole tapas concept. Bought a cookbook of authentically Spanish recipes at the Palace gift shop, although I've seen a few American tapas cookbooks in the area, too. This is not the first time I've travelled out of North America, but I certainly have a whole new set of ideas about how people relate to food in various countries as a result of my recently TAOSF adventures and this mere 2-day visit to Madrid. It's all about respecting food and eating. Which Americans don't. If we did, we wouldn't be eating high-fructose corn syrup and all the other junk we eat in massive quantities. Not that this is a black-and-white matter, of course. We're eating plenty of seafood on this trip (like our whole tapas dinner tonight), but there's the issue of sustainable fisheries. For example, salmon is now a luxury where we live, but it's on every single menu here, as common as potatoes. Where are the Spanish getting all this salmon? Nothing's easy and no one seems to have all the answers.

More tomorrow!