Madrid day 2
At the breakfast room, a muzak-like cover of “What is Love” was playing, simultaneously the muted TV in the room was showing a long montage of scenes depicting violence as part of the news. The speakers went “…don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me no more” together with the unsolicited acts of violence in the most bizarre vaporwave-ish collage of nineties-centered nihilism hitherto conceived.
I walked to metro station, but the entrance was nowhere near the Google Maps location. Thus I ended up walking all the way to Park de El Retiro and subsequently dashing through it to make it in time for my 10am ticket at the Prado museum. Spent five hours there. Almost one those hours was spent admiring “The Garden of Earthly Delight” by Hieronymus Bosch. This is now my favorite artwork of all time. At two meters in height and four meters wide it depicted the fall of man and the end of days. What was most striking, though, was the surrealistic notions completely incongruous to it having being painted in the fifteenth or sixteenth century. It was filled with so many delightful and idiosyncratic details. Someone even made a song based on the tiny nodes seen in the rightmost panel here. Las Meninas was also interesting, but slightly self-indulgent. Goya’s “Saturn Devouring His Son” was a terrifying depiction of what one does to avoid the loss of power. Goya’s Colossus was also nice (or whoever actually painted it). I Had a focaccia and a schweppes at the cafeteria. Later an americano and chocolate cake. Also there were Brueghel paintings and the odd one out Picasso. The later of which related to the time Picasso directed the museum.
Next a walk in the rose garden in Park de El Ritero and a visit to the Crystal Palace and along that square bassin with all the sail-boats. Caught a metro back to the hotel, swam and relaxed by the hotel pool. I started to worry that I’d get a tan line from the face mask.
