Category: Madrid

Mercado de San Miguel

We blogged about the market in Barcelona which was a large central market with fresh fish, vegetables, fruit, etc. Looking for something similar, we went to the Mercado de San Miguel in Madrid:

We found something completely different. It is a tapas food court. But don’t think of the low-quality food courts in malls and airports. This stuff is top quality. You walk around and see a wide variety of delicious looking food, all available in small quantities for 2-4 euro. There are high tables, mostly stand-up, in the center. The glasses in this picture are filled with gazpacho:

Lots of beer and wine is consumed:

and “postres”:

We ate there twice. We could have eaten every meal there, there was so much variety. It was hard to decide what to have. What we did was have something that looked good and repeated that until we weren’t hungry any more.

And then we had churros dipped in thick hot chocolate:

Palacio de Cristal

Madrid has a wonderful, very large park, the Retiro. The park was once the exclusive domain of the Spanish royalty, but after Franco died the new king gave the park to the citizens of Madrid. As we walked through the park we came across, without knowing it was there, the Palacio de Cristal:

 

The lake has black swans:

 

Tragically Hip

When I tell people I’m from New Mexico the most common response is some variant of “Oh, I love Santa Fe”. Of course, I am from Albuquerque. Santa Fe has the hip image, a distinctive architecture, an identity. Albquerque is more of a mixing pot with lots of things. It is also a much bigger city.

I am familiar with this kind of competition, growing up in Los Angeles where San Francisco was the hip city and LA was the sprawling, all-inclusive metropolis.

It seems that Madrid and Barcelona have a similar relationship. In the US, at least, Barcelona has a much hipper image than Madrid. It has legendary night life, good restaurants, the whole Gaudi thing going for it, the Ramblas. Madrid is the workmanlike big city.

We felt the same way and so we were surprised when we liked staying in Madrid much better than Barcelona. Barcelona seemed like the busier, more touristy city. Madrid was surprisingly calm, with lots of small streets. It seemed more walkable than Barcelona.

Of course, Madrid wins the art competition hands down with three world-class, wonderful museums.

And you never know what to expect in the Plaza Mayor:

(We took the above in a hurry with Charlie’s iPod Touch camera and it was starting to get dark so, too bad, it came out a little blurry.)

Glass Elevators

The Museo de Reina Sophia in Madrid is in an old building. When they added elevators they did them on the outside. A nice engineering solution (no internal changes required) and pretty too:

with nice views:

Two banks of two elevators along this wall.

Paella and Sangria

Paella and sangria seem to be the main food and drink associated with Spain. In Barcelona, the Ramblas is probably the most touristy place in all of Spain. A big wide boulevard with cafes, stalls, human statues, etc. You walk down and every place offers paella on these signs that are all the same. You see people sitting at the cafes with large goblets of sangria.

I guess I am a bit of a tourist snob because I continue to be amazed that people would sit at a cafe along the Ramblas and order sangria and paella. You know they are going to be overpriced and of dubious quality.

We did, ourselves, order sangria at a tapas cafe in Toledo and it was pretty good actually. In another tapas bar ordered English cider. I don’t know where that places me.

In Cadaques we got some cheap sangria at a supermarket, which, by the way, are not that big in Spanish cities. A bit outside the cities they have supermarkets like we are used to. Anyway, we bought some oranges and plums and cut them up into little pieces and made sangria in our room a couple of nights and it was very nice.

We finally had some paella in the market in Madrid. We are less interested in rice dishes these days so that was an issue. We were sitting at the market and this young English couple was sitting across from us having paella and we got to talking. They said it was good so we had it the next night. It was pretty good, not great.

This English couple were very nice, we chatted a while. There were from outside London and in Madrid for four days. I think they said the round trip air fare was about 40 pounds (about $65 I think). They came for some nice weather. It was clear but pretty cold yesterday in Madrid so they were a bit disappointed.

Hotel Technology

In Madrid we are staying in a four star business hotel but over the weekend so the rates are pretty low (80 euro a night). It has hard-wired ethernet but none of our devices can use it. The wireless is 10 euro a day, the typical pattern, the No-Tell Motel has free wireless but the fancy hotels charge for it.

The interesting thing is that it has phones by the toilet. I’m not sure when that was big but I imagine very few business travelers use the room phone these days.

Our hotel in Girona was also a four star hotel and it had phones in the bathroom as well as Sony entertainment system in the room that seemed like it was from the 1990s. No iPod connection. I guess you have to be careful about technology as it can become outdated so quickly.

Food and coffee in Madrid

Post by Wynette: We’ve been in Madrid for 3 days.  Tomorrow we head back for the USA.  We have liked Madrid, more than we expected.  It’s a beautiful city and relatively restful, inexpensive, and easy to navigate for a big city.  Of course, we are tucked into our hotel room by 8 each night and we hear the city really comes alive at 10 or 11.  So, we are missing the main attraction: the night life (called la marcha as I have learned from Ben and Marina).

The first 2 days we were disappointed in the food here.  And, I have to take back what I said about coffee in Spain being consistently good.  We haven’t really liked the Madrid coffee very much.  It must be Catalonia that makes such good coffee.  The coffee at the place below didn’t taste very good but they sure had a cool looking coffee machine.  And all the waiters wore pink shirts:

But this morning we did find a place with good coffee, and yesterday we found a tapas market (really!) (Mercado de San Miguel) that had tapas fenomenal! (Yes, that’s a Spanish word.)  Here is Charlie trying to decide what to have for dinner:

And today we ate in an Asturian restaurant (Asturia is a province in northern Spain, so it’s like a foreign food place in Madrid) named Casa Lastra. Delicious food. Seemed like peasant food.  We had a white bean stew with sausages and ham.  I’ll dream about that one in days to come and try to make one like it but will never come close. Here is the bread and the huge helping of (fenomenal) blue cheese spread that they brought to the table before taking our order.  The only problem is that we were stuffed when we left. No, we didn’t eat all the bread and cheese.  We couldn’t finish the stew either.

I love the description of their restaurant in English on their website. (I’m pretty sure a computer program did that translation for them. Maybe Google Translate?)  I hope we go back to Madrid so we can go back to Casa Lastra several times.  Hmm, maybe we should go to Asturia someday too.

The coffee in Spain

Post by Wynette:  If you’ve read our blogs from trips to Italy you know we were always raving about the coffee. To our surprise, we like the coffee in Spain even more.  It’s been fantastic.  We always order cafe con leche (coffee with hot milk) which is pretty much like a cappuccino except the milk is not as foamy.  So it’s really like  coffee latte in the States except in a cappuccino-sized cup.  And the coffee tastes a lot better than any coffee I’ve ever had in the States. It’s rich and full bodied but never bitter or harsh.  We liked the coffee in Toledo (where we spent the first 5 days) and we find we like the coffee in Catalonia (NE Spain) even more.

A few times, when we would leave a bar, we’d tell the person behind the counter how much we liked the coffee.  Their face would light up.  They really seemed to appreciate that we told them that.

I wanted to include this picture because it’s only one of a couple we have of us together so far. The  nice woman behind the bar asked us if we’d like a picture when she saw us taking pictures of each other.  Wouldn’t you know, this happens to be an Italian coffee bar (Illy) that we stopped into while waiting for a train in Madrid, on the way to Barcelona. (You can see our suitcase handles there behind us.)

People in Spain

We like to take pictures of the people we encounter. People love it when you ask to take their picture. Here is Hannah from our hotel in Toledo. She cleaned the rooms, made breakfast and checked us out when we left, she does it all.

Here is the woman running a coffee bar in the Madrid train station:

Here are the two chefs at the place in the Barcelona market where we ate twice because it was so good:

And our hard-working waitress, from the back unfortunately, she never stopped moving long enough so that we could ask her to pose for a picture: