Reina Sofia

Hola from home!

I can’t believe the last day of our Spanish adventure has already passed. We’ve had such a blast and while I’m excited to go home, I really enjoyed our trip.

For our last full day in Spain, we went to the Museo Centro de Arte de Reina Sofia, which houses a large collection of Picasso paintings and famous paintings by Salvador Dali, among others. The Reina Sofia has Picasso’s magnum opus, entitled Guernica. If you’ve never heard of it, that’s okay – the main reason I had before the trip was because of my first college Spanish class – but it is a large part of why Picasso is a household name to this day. Picasso painted this one at the start of the Spanish Civil War, when Francisco Franco authorized Hitler’s troops to “test” a bomb on the small town of Gernika, a small town in the Basque region of northern Spain which was the center of the Republican movement. The mural is completely in black and white, and represents many of the terrors of modern warfare. Some of the most striking elements include the weeping horse (center), the disheveled bull (left side), the mother, and the child. The Reina Sofia Museum has Guernica in its own room, with information about the town, the bombing, and Picasso’s progress leading up to the work being completed.

Guernica
http://lewebpedagogique.com/histoiredesartscamus/files/2014/10/guernica.jpg

The Reina Sofia’s Picasso collection also includes his favorite work (the one he thought was better than Guernica during his lifetime) – The Three Dancers – and others painted throughout his lifetime. We looked at a series of paintings of women by Picasso and analyzed a cubist technique, in which he takes a real object and transforms it into something surreal and unrecognizable. I may not fully understand Picasso’s “claim to fame,” but I have a better understanding after seeing his most famous works and spending some time analyzing his style.

The Three Dancers
http://www.tate.org.uk/art/images/work/T/T00/T00729_9.jpg

The museum also had some pieces by Salvador Dali, a Spanish painter who lived around the same time as Picasso and experimented with Surrealism. Though his most famous paintings are housed elsewhere, Dali’s style is “remarkably strange” – you just can’t look away. Over 200 Dali works are housed in the Dali museum in Figueres, Spain (a day trip out of Barcelona) and I’ve officially added it to my bucket list as a place I’d like to visit sometime.

Other highlights include paintings by Joan Miro, Juan Gris, the remainder of the Picasso exhibit, and Kandinsky. Overall, the Reina Sofia is worth visiting if you’re in Madrid and a modern art fan.

After the Reina Sofia, we decided to head to the Mercado San Miguel (right by Plaza Mayor) to pick up some lunch. This market is more like a food court, in which you can buy different things to try and create a meal. We ate some Stromboli (bread with ham and cheese), burrata/balsamic vinaigrette tapas, and calzones for lunch, and all was good.

Next, we went to our favorite churros place, the Chocolateria San Gines, to pick up some dessert. We tried their porras, which are just longer, fatter churros, with hot chocolate. These were really good, but my family still thinks the Barcelona churros were better.

Part two of looking a little concerned about my food ;)

We came back for a siesta after tapas and churros to relax a little bit before our long-ish night ahead and long day of travel. We went to dinner at one of Madrid’s top ten places, called Casa 9, for our 8:30 reservation. We had two sirloins, one pork dish, and a bowl with fried fish, fried baby squid (chipurrones, a lot like calamari), a small salad (kind of), and croquettes with crab.

For our evening paseo, we went to Plaza Cibeles to go see the building itself, which is sometimes lit up various colors throughout the night. For us, it was just normally lit up but was still really cool to go see – it’s near the Metropolis building and looks pretty at night!

Left: Metropolis Building

Right: The Circulo de Bellas Artes building, where we ate lunch after the Thyssen.

Plaza de Cibeles at nighttime.

Actual dialogue: “Amy, pose in a sisterly way… No, not like that!” -Nick

We closed out our last night in Spain with some ice cream from Haagen Daas in Puerta del Sol, where I used my Spanish to get Nick and I two conos with a bola each of ice cream.

Our flight home was safe (we left Friday morning at 8 AM Spain time and got back at 9 PM Colorado time) and it's good to be back. I'll be posting my favorites from the trip soon!

QOTD: “We’ve been here so long I’ve started to use Celsius instead of Fahrenheit” -Nick, who’s ready to go home after this trip.

¡Hasta luego España!

Amy