What? Did you think I was through talking about Madrid?
No, no, I’m not done. I’m still there, actually, in my heart.
No matter what the time of day or night you find yourself out on the streets of Madrid, you will not be alone. It’s difficult to photograph landmarks in Madrid because in addition to composing the landscape, you have to take into account the timing of all the people passing by. They stroll the alleyways, murmur in the cafes around the perimeter of the plaza, and argue on the monument steps. It is a pleasure to find yourself among them.
The Spanish are notoriusly late diners — the restaurant scene in Madrid begins around 9:00, is in full swing between 10 and 11:00, and by midnight, everyone’s stumbling out for after-dinner clubbing, drinks or churros y chocolat.
I can’t speak to the nightlife in terms of clubs — even without three kids in tow that’s not really my thing — but Madrid is a gloriously lively late-night city. Last year, while I was pregnant with Baybish, GoodLooking and I ditched the chickens with Grandma & Grandaddy and took a pre-baby vacation to Spain. Alone. We had some lovely nights there, and one I will not soon forget was the night we strolled Plaza Oriente and took photographs of Palacio Real after midnight. It was a pivotal night in my photographic life, the night I first began to see how I could lost in trying to capture an image. I remember balancing my point-and-shoot Olympus on the back of a bench, trying to keep it still and catch the lights of the Palace behind the rearing stallion (Spain has many rearing stone stallions).
But this time we had the children with us, so we were drawn to Madrid’s Plazas for different reasons: letting them run around without driving us crazy and bothering everybody else. They:
played ring-around-the-lamppost in Plaza Mayor,
ran through the “mazes” of Plaza Oriente,
played screaming chase across the plaza inside Palacio Real,
and danced to the drummers in Monumento Alfonso XII.
[audio http://texasgurl.fileave.com/mto-alfonso-drums.mp3]
It was a fantastically easy way to enjoy the city and its people. The afternoon we spent at Mto. Alfonso we each struck up conversations with different people around us. The chickens kicked the futbol with a kid about Boyish’s age, while GoodLooking talked premier league man-talk with the boy’s father. There were old ladies feeding cats and pigeons, and I talked for a long time to a painter named Julian. The sun shone off the white pavement until it didn’t anymore, and so we packed up the buggy and began the long walk back to our hotel. The kids were exhausted and we kept thinking the Metro would be faster, but instead we just kept walking; walking, watching the people, marveling at the lights, totally under the spell of the magical streets of Madrid.
