|
Thursday, February 07, 2002 The following is an unfinished entry from last week -- Written on Tuesday, 27 Jan.: The weather here yesterday and today has been spectacular -– mild, sunny, benign. Still with a coolness to the air, but the kind of weather in which one can feel the distant spring advancing. The mornings start off chilly and slow, the air a bit misty. By early afternoon, the temperature's risen to the mid- to upper-50s. Easy conditions to live with. I sat at an outdoor café for a while today after classes, the first time I've seen chairs and tables set up outside since last October. In a beautiful location, actually –- over to the west side of the city center, between the royal opera house (el Teatro Real) and el Palacio Real, in a large sprawling, semi-circular plaza called La Plaza de Oriente. One side of the plaza is lined with beautiful old buildings that face the palace across a warren of gardens, at the center of which stands a large, impressive fountain/statue of King Philip IV. The gardens extend to a north-south pedestrian road which runs alongside the east wall of the palace. The palace (actually called el Palacio de Oriente): a monstrous, eye-catching structure, built on a bluff overlooking a spread of parkland called El Campo del Moro (the Country of the Moor) which contains the palacial gardens, then the river (el Rio Manzanares), and more parkland, la Casa del Campo, (the Country House? the House of the Country? -- with a zoo, an amusement park and more). Impressive stuff, and it's nice to have it all so close by and accessible. By the way, the Time Out Guide to Madrid states that the palace contains 3,000 rooms, which differs from the substantially lower figure of 1,000+ rooms I've heard around Madrid, still a gargantuan, grandiose collection of living spaces. I have no idea which of those figures reflects the actual number. It may be that the higher one is on the money, but I have to confess I have trouble wrapping my feeble wits around the idea of that many rooms in one structure. We sat in front of the Café de Oriente. Inside, the café is a lovely space -- old, genteel, beautifully taken care of, having the kind of look and feel I'd expect to find in a comparable establishment in Vienna. With good food and good coffee at reasonable prices. Outside, the attraction is the location and the view -– beware: the prices go up steeply for service at the tables in the plaza. That may or may not matter to a visitor, but unless one knows beforehand the bill can be a bit of a shock, as it was today to Philip (a German mensch I know from Spanish school, a gregarious, hilarious person with a seriously resonant, inescapable voice) and Veronique (a young, attractive French woman also taking classes at the school). I warned them but they made the German and French vocal equivalents of pish. Until the bill arrived, at which time they were outraged. C'est la guerre. ********* Post-script, 7 Feb. – The spectacular weather of those two or three days last week passed, leaving the usual late Jan.-Feb. conditions: mostly sunny, temperature 50ish. Not a brutal change. In fact, not a huge change, just less sense of spring on the way, which meant the tables and chairs that suddenly materialized outside some cafes vanished once again. I met two people from school for lunch today -– mmmmmmm, Korean food -– and on my walk home through Chueca, I realized all over again how much I love Madrid. A beautiful city, packed with history and culture, with interesting natives and lots to do. You're out of your mind if you don't spend some time here. (In my humble, ignorant opinion.) rws 4:48 PM [+] |