We have found a local cafe for breakfast, tortilla (Spanish potato omelette) and toast with tomato, which comes pulped with olive oil and enough raw garlic to ward off vampires for a week. Central Madrid is wonderful to walk around, handsome streets and squares, the enormous Retiro Park and the lavishly over-decorated royal palace are under our belts so far. We spent a rainy afternoon in the Prado today, some great Spanish paintings, in truth too many of them, but at €12 to get in I don't like to miss any, so I dragged an increasingly weary but resigned Martin around them all.
Thursday night we went to the world premier of a show by a famous flamenco dancer. We should have known; 30 years ago we went to the premier of an untuneful modern classical work which I made unsubtle uncomplementery comments about only to find, when he rose to take the applause, that the composer was seated right in front of me. This piece depicted the extermination of gypsies in the Second World War! Great flamenco guitar and singing interspersed with the sound of a two year old playing the piano, someone standing on the cat's tail on violin and sax, stampeding elephants and an approaching express train, steel girders scraped across the floor and dropped, the innards of a piano kicked and twanged, dancers, great when they danced also writhed and crawled across the floor. Some people walked out noisily but there were no boos until the end, better reception than the opening night I gather, but it was also very intense, passionate, emotional and mesmerising. Would I go again? No. Am I glad I went? Yes. In a strange and challenging way we both enjoyed it.
We had skipped dinner as lunch was a whole forest floor of sautéed mushrooms and a large clay crock of cocido madrileño, a casserole from which the waiter first poured a rich chicken soup over a bowl of vermicelli (either the Spanish Inquisition got the Jews to write down the recipe for chicken soup before they expelled them in 1492 or the remaining converts just added pork to hide their origins and it gradually became the national dish), then the rest of the crock is poured out, chickpeas, chicken, meat and potatoes with gigantic garlic cloves, a lifetime's protection from vampires is assured. After the show we visited another Madrid institution, a chocolatería which serves thick hot chocolate and churros, long fluted donut sticks for dipping. Open 24 hours for locals who apparently go there for breakfast after a night of clubbing before going home to shower and then straight in to work. It was certainly full at 11pm. Martin wanted to try the porras, like churros but much thicker, but I drew the line at eating an unashamedly phallic donut dripping with chocolate in public.