Churros and La Reina Sofia

We started the the day off by visiting a restaurant called ‘Churreria y Chocoloteria.’ As you may have inferred from their name, they serve churros and chocolate, which is a typical breakfast item in Spain. The chocolate comes in the form of hot fudge, which combined with a suger-filled churro makes for a tasty, if not unhealthy, breakfast.

A typical Madrid breakfast of churros and thick, hot chocolate.

Afterwards, we made our way to the Reina Sofia, part of the Art Museum Triangle in Madrid, which also includes Del Prado and the Thyssen Museums. The Reina Sofia is best known for its many Picassos and Dalis. After entering the museum, we went straight to the most famous painting there: Picasso’s Guernica. Guernica depicts a bombing during the Spanish Civil War. Its specific symbolism is disputed among art critics, but it most certainly depicts the brutality and oppression of warfare.

The front of the Reina Sofia, home to many paintings from Picasso and Dali.

We also explored other parts of the vast museum. The museum contains so many works of art that it would certainly take multiple days to see them all. My cousin Sabina and I enjoyed one modern artist’s work in particular. Ignasi Aballi, a spanish artist, had an exhibit entitled ‘sin precipio / sin final,’ which roughly translates to ‘without beginning / without end.’ In one of his works, Aballi cut out every mention of every country from one Spanish newspaper. At the end of each year, he would place all the names of each country together. This created a visualiation of how much each country made an impact around the world. The United States was mentioned a particularly high number of times.

The view from the top of the Reina Sofia, an art museum.

With Modern Art, there is always a work or a concept that I do not completely understand. In the Reina Sofia, this came at the exhibit ‘Duty-Free Art,’ which included a room that was completely painted blue, in addition to a blank canvas with a few yellow dots on it. At the gift shop, there was a sign for sale that said “Modern Art = I could do that + But you don’t.” Maybe I should consider that when looking at certain pieces of artwork. Overall, the Reina Sofia was a historic building with new and old works of art that stood out.
For dinner, we decided to go to a typical Spanish, specifically Andalusian, restaurant. We started with an appetizer of fried balls of mashed potatoes and ham, which were surprisingly good. For the main course, some people ordered scrambled eggs (not a typical dinner item!), while I had calamari with a garlic sauce. When everybody had finished eating, the waitress brought out a free cocktail, ice cream, and two types of liquor! We did not want to stay up too late, though, because the next day we were going to Barcelona!