A great day out visiting a couple of museums. We started the morning with a coffee in a nearby cafe, then headed to the Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum. This is a fabulous collection of paintings, accumulated over a century by the Thyssen family, originally German industrialists. We've been to the Prado several times before, and have little interest in ghoulish religious paintings, or gigantic fantasy scenes from otherwise-forgotten myths, so wanted to try somewhere new. The T-B collection is a little different. Much of it is more recent, and the scale of the collection is a bit more manageable.
We arrived as the doors opened at 10, got our tickets and started off. The first room was of Dutch or Flemish painters, fascinating in their depiction of everyday life from the 17th century in the Netherlands and elsewhere. The paintings were almost all sparkling clean, and the detail was clear. We found it absorbing. From there we headed round the floors, heading up and up. It was very well laid-out, with rooms themed, for example a room of portraits, then a room of country scenes. It made for engrossing viewing.
Because the T-B family were very active from the late 19th century onwards, it has a great collection of art from that era, and we found we were able to follow the changes from old-style depiction of scenes to the brighter colours of the impressionists, then from the cubists to abstract and modern. We enjoyed it as much as any art museum we've visited, and ended up spending 2.5 hours working our way round.
 |
| Renoir |
 |
| Pisarro |
It was tricky getting out. There were very few sets of stairs, and we ended up going round and round. We noticed that the numbers which had been very sparse when we arrived had really built up, and began to think that people were constantly arriving, but nobody could find their way out!
Lunch was relatively early for here, at 1pm. We found a nice little place where we had beef cheeks and pulpo de gallega - Galician-style octopus with potatoes. Both were delicious, the latter one of the best dishes we've had for years.
 |
| Pulpo a la gallega |
We had found out that another art museum, the Museum of Decorative Arts, was free for the last hour of its day, from 2pm to 3pm, and so we thought we'd have a look, and go back another day if an hour proved too short. As it turned out, the museum was quite small and an hour was perfect. Our tour began with a beautiful replica of a Valencian kitchen with astonishing tiles.
There were rooms of tiles, glass, furniture, some superb Asian cabinets and a couple of lovely room settings.
The final floor was dedicated to a small but very well-chosen collection of 20th-century objects and furniture. The Art Nouveau glassware that they displayed was of superb quality, and there was a great set of some of the best-ever 20th-century chairs, by such greats as Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies van der Rohe, Marcel breuer, Gerrit Rietveld, Le Corbusier and so on. Lovely to see.
As we were walking back about 3pm it was clearly the time Madrilenos go out for a drink with friends. The bars were packed, inside and out. The drink of choice is beer, even for women. Amazing to see a group of women on the street in the cold, drinking beers and yabbering 90 to the dozen.
 |
| Tapas and sangria |
Putting on our coats again we ventured out to a nearby neighbourhood and stumbled across some fabulous plazas, all chokka with people out having a drink, nibbles, socialising and generally having a good time. The open spaces here are often very generous and allow wonderful connected areas for people to gather or stroll through. Some of the tapas bars are highly decorated with ceramic tiles on their frontages and look amazing.
 |
| The front door to our accommodation looks very like a prison cell door! |
