Madrid Day 3

 I typically try to avoid anything that involves actual learning on these trips, but Martha seemed interested in doing more than just walking around aimlessly making fun of awkward English translations of things, so I indulged her and we had a highly intellectual day, which included a walking tour of Madrid and hours (yes, hours) in art museums. And to my surprise, it turns out that learning something once in a while isn´t so bad including, for example:

1. Firemen have a sense of humor. In the old days, Madrid had a fire department but you had to pay a special fee if you wanted your house to be covered. If you paid, you would get a plaque like this on your house and if a fire started, the fire department would come and put it out. If you didn’t have a plaque, they would swing by and have a picnic while watching your house burn down. Ha ha, just kidding. They actually wouldn’t come at all.

2. People from Madrid a long time ago also had a sense of humor. When the king came to town he would sleep at the palace, but also he had an entourage of several hundred people who needed places to stay. So the “advance team” would come to Madrid first and find all the two-story houses (which had people above and animals below) and tell the people they had to move in with their animals on the bottom floor while the king’s staff took over the top floor. So . .  . the Madrileños started building fake windows halfway between the floors (as shown in this wall) so that it wasn’t clear whether there was one floor, two floors or one and a half floors. This so thoroughly confused the event staff (granted, they probably weren’t executive material) that they passed over those houses.

3. Nuns are both pious and practical. Even if you live in a monastery and are totally cut off from all aspects of civilization, you sometimes still have to order things from Amazon. In which case some guy with a cart comes and knocks on the monastery door to deliver them.

4. If you’re a Spanish artist, go big or go home. Goya entered this in an art competition and didn’t win anything, but he did get an honorable mention. Tough crowd.

5. Eat local. At the end of the day, we found a bar very close to our apartment that had fantastic food. Is that what eating local means?