Tuesday 23 July 2013

Susie went out shopping in the morning while I stayed back in the apartment to try and catch up on this blog. When she returned, we walked to a plaza on the other side of the main road to book a Thai massage for her, for the following day. Afterwards we re-traced our trip to the Museo Thyssen Bornemisza to view an exhibition of paintings by Camille Pissarro. Susie is a great admirer of the impressionists, so this was an opportunity we did not want to miss.

On our visit to the same museum the previous day, we had viewed hundreds of paintings that were displayed in many rooms on several floors of a large building. The Pissarro exhibition was much smaller, so we had time to study fewer paintings at our leisure. A highlight of the exhibition was a series of paintings that represented the same scenes in different seasons. Susie was completely engrossed, and by the time we emerged back onto the street, we had both gained a new appreciation of an interesting and influential artist.

We made our way back to the plaza that Susie had explored when we first arrived in Madrid. She wanted to try on some dresses in a shop where the owner was also the seamstress and designer. Susie was rather taken by a psychedelic print cut in a 60’s retro design. The size was not quite right, so the artisan shopkeeper agree to alter the dress on the spot. She recommended we kill a few hours by trying out a particular drink at a particular bar. This sounded like good local advice, so we walked to Sol and hunted down a tapas bar that had been operating continuously for some hundreds of years. We had some bacalau and ternera empanadilla, washed down with a caña and (as recommended) a couple of quina Santa Catarinas. On the way back to the shop we noticed that there was a sex worker stationed at each tree along the busy mall.

We paid the balance on the dresses and returned to the apartment, where Susie watched a soccer match on her iPad while I wrote. In the late evening we returned one more time to El Maño for the outstanding bacalau and fino.

Finally, we undertook a somewhat grim task: we did our very last load of washing.  We were officially preparing for the journey home.