Museums

My vision is to be able to tell you of all the marvellous places I am finding and re-finding, and give their longitude and latitude, to upload pictures with real space/time coordinates (within 26 feet or so), and finally, to include the direction you should face!  Perhaps utopic, though i am just a common dreamer.

Madrid is still the encantador.  Between the de novo ambience of Cafe La Palma and the constipated woopie-cusion seats you can try shoes on from in the Camper outlet store, I am continuously amazed.

I also discovered a trick I would like to share with any of you not so hot on classical art (perhaps a ‘dirty trick’ for those of you who are) yet nonetheless fancy peeking at what all the hype is about. 

Short for time, Amanda and I swung by the Museo del Prado just to get a postcard (and as a second hint for abridged tourism: the gift shop is often a good place to start if you are unsure you want to purchase a ticket to enter a museum or not).  We learned, to my poor recollection, that the gift shop is in the center of the musem and they will let you in for 20 minutes, without a ticket, to tend to any shopping impulses on premise.

Noticing their fault in not recognizing our intentions to speed through the museum at some uncanny pace, we entered the gift shop and precariously bought the first thing that looked like it might satisfy my intended goal.  Maintaining regular breathing techniques, we purchased the postcard an quickly, not haphazardly, began our 17 minute ‘free’ tour of the museum!

In this 17 minutes, albeit a tad rushed, we enjoyed works by Goya, Velazquez and even my favorite work in the musem, The Garden of Earthly Delights, by Hieronymus Bosch.

Also, all of our museum viewing has lead me to a philisophical question--or maybe just a curator-istic one:  How do they choose what color to paint the museum walls?  Any insights into this mystery would be greatly appreciated.