From Hearts in Art to Hearts in the Street

Excellent Rice and Seafood

Salmorejo de Pimientos

Back wall with shelves of Cheese Wheels

CPR would have saved the God

She needed an EKG

Edvard Munch and Cathy

Sometimes you just need to go with the flow.

After a leisurely morning, we went to the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza. This is a major world-class museum built around the collection of Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza and his wife, Carmen, better known as Tita.
The source of the Baron’s wealth is complicated by World War II. His wife’s enormous wealth is simpler to explain: she was a former Miss Spain, married a very rich man, and he showered her with money and art.

The Baron didn’t exactly give his collection to Spain. Spain bought the core collection for about $350 million. Tita’s collection is still hers, and Spain pays millions of dollars a year to display it. The rich really are different from you and me.

Enough with the history of this vast collection, including the parts of the family history we will leave for another day.
What interested us was how different the museum is from LACMA. It is organized traditionally and chronologically, almost as if all art were Western and began sometime around 1500. Cathy and I have very little interest in religious art or portraits of rich people, so we moved rather quickly through about 400 years of art. Or, more accurately, I pushed her rather quickly through 400 years of art until we reached Impressionism and modern art. LACMA to us is revolutionary in how it juxtaposes all art into themes, not chronologically, it is much more imaginative.

What was special for us was a small exhibition of reimagined paintings, all related to cardiovascular health. It was clever, contemporary and political. The artist used digital techniques to take familiar paintings and reimagine them around current cardiovascular treatments and issues. It was surprisingly powerful.

Leaving the museum, we Ubered over to one of Madrid’s premier cheese stores, Quesería Cultivo. They have an enormous variety of cheeses, including many they make themselves. I don’t think I have ever seen that many wheels of cheese stacked on shelves in Los Angeles. Naturally, we bought several samples of cheese to bring home.

A word about Uber in Madrid: it sucks.

You request a car and Uber tells you how long it will take to arrive. Fine. You select it, and then the arrival time starts changing. And changing. And changing. Eventually you are standing on a Madrid street with no idea when, or perhaps whether, your car will actually arrive. We found it incredibly frustrating.

We returned to the hotel to find a bagel sandwich made with ham and cheese waiting for us in our room — a somewhat strange cross-cultural sandwich — so we opened a bottle of Champagne and nibbled on the ham and cheese. Then we started to  pack.

Tomorrow we leave our unexpected visit to Madrid and return to Paris. We fly into Charles de Gaulle, spend the night at the Sheraton that is actually inside Terminal 2, and the following day fly home to Los Angeles.This all assumes no volcanoes or other unexpected events.

For our final night in Madrid, we had reservations for a flamenco dinner show. On our previous visits to Madrid we always include a Flamenco dinner and show. I know it sounds touristy but it is really fun. After some confusion, we realized it wasn’t the place we had been on previous visits. We had accidentally booked a different venue.

But sometimes it is better to be lucky than smart.
The place was quite close to our hotel. We felt as though we had won the lottery — or at least finally gotten a little travel luck. Short taxi ride. Dinner. Flamenco. Short taxi ride back to the hotel.

Wrong.

The taxi — notice we did not take an Uber — headed toward the nearby venue and almost immediately ran into streets closed by protesters. Police were everywhere blocking traffic. Apparently, all of this was because an 85-year-old woman had been evicted from her home.

It seemed to us like a righteous protest, so we sat there while our taxi driver valiantly tried to navigate around protesters, police and completely snarled traffic. Finally we said, forget it, return us to the hotel. We thru away the flamenco tickets and ate at the hotel.

And that turned out to be just fine. We had a wonderful dinner on the hotel balcony, serenaded from the streets below by protesters singing “The People United Will Never Be Defeated” in Spanish.

We didn’t need a translation. We knew the words.

We’ll find out on November 3rd, when we’re back home, if the words are true this time.