Spain

This is my reserve month, so I am usually given last minute assignments. Sometimes you get really great trips and sometime you get really crappy trips (usually the latter). Well, Sunday, I was in the right place at the right time. I was called about two hours before sign in for a trip to Madrid, Spain. I think this is the best reserve assignment I have ever been given and it was all luck. I was the first Spanish speaker to go for a three day and the assigned flight attendant must have called out at the last minute and they were one of the flight's designated speakers. What made this even more great is the fact that the airline just started this new Madrid service on May 1, so ten days into it, and I am working it.

I first went to Spain in 1997 to study abroad and lived in Salamanca. Since then, I have been back a few times, but my last visit was in 2000 when my dad and I went on a tour of southern Spain.

Since this was a new route for my base, this first month, the trips are all going pretty senior. Everyone on the trip had at least 20 years on top of my 11 years of seniority. Fortunately, the crew was pretty cool and I knew we were going to have a great time. Our flight over was pretty smooth. We had about 60 kids from the Coast Guard Academy (I should say young adults) who were traveling in economy and on their way to Rota, Spain, where they were going to sail a Coast Guard vessel to Bermuda later this month. I was working in Business class and everyone was pretty cool with the exception of a nutty couple on my side (of course) who just could not seem to find any thing positive about the flight, life, etc. etc.

One of the gals on the trip was my friend Pam, who I used to fly with on domestic. She was one of the few very senior people (she has 41 years with the airline) to come over to international this month when a few slots opened up to support this new route to Madrid. Her late husband was an art dealer, and she was really wanting to go to one of the art museums and see some work by the many famous Spanish artists. We decided we were going to go to the Reina Sofia, the Spanish art museum that houses the works by well known 20th century artists.

We landed right on time and got to the hotel around 11am. The outbound crew was waiting for pick up, and my friend Sandy happened to be down in the lobby so we visited briefly while we were waiting for our keys and they were waiting to get their bags loaded for the trip to the airport.

Once we got to our rooms, we decided we would meet up in the lobby at 4pm and make our way to the museum. Two other flight attendants decided to go with us, and the others were going to go out and shop. When I lived in Spain, there was a restaurant I used to visit called Casa Mingo, and so the crew decided we would all meet up there at 9pm for dinner (Spaniards eat dinner very late.... 9pm by their standards is still quite early). I made sure they all had directions (it is easily accessible by metro).

We took the bus from outside our hotel south to the part of Madrid where all the museums are located. I was hoping to visit the Prado as well, but it is actually closed on Mondays. We ended up getting off at the Prado and walking down to the Reina Sofia. It was a beautiful day with highs in the low 70s.

We passed a bank that didn't seem to have a bottom to it, so that was the first photograph that I snapped.



We got to the Reina Sofia and began our self guided tour. Unfortunately, a lot of the exhibits were closed due to building renovations, but we were still able to see a great deal of the permanent exhibits. You are not permitted to take pictures inside, so you will have to take my word for it, but we saw some great pieces by Picasso, Dali and Miro... the three most famous Spanish artists of the 20th century.

The highlight was Guernica. It is the painting Picasso created to represent the bombing of the Basque town by the same name by the fascist regime (Franco) during the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guernica_(painting). It is 11 feet tall and 25 feet wide. It is so impressive. Pam, my co-worker, commented that she got goosebumps when we walked into the room housing the painting. There is such detail and specifics in this very dark painting that you have to look at it from different ends of the room just to notice everything.

I was a little disappointed to see that the Alexander Calder exhibit was closed. He was the artist famous for trippy sculptures and mobiles (he even designed a livery for a Braniff Airlines plane back in the 1970's called Flying Colors), but they did have one of his mobiles out in the courtyard of the center of the museum.

After leaving the Reina Sofia, we made our way over to Atocha Train Station. It is one of three major train stations serving Madrid, and the most famous. It was built in the 1850's and one of the designers was Gustave Eiffel (he did some sort of tower thingy in Paris you might have heard of). One of the highlights of the station is the 4000 square meters of tropical gardens in the center of the station. It is also one of the stations that was bombed in the 2004 Al-Qaeda attack on the Spanish rail system.

Our next stop was a Tapas Bar near the train station for some beer and snacks. I actually had a Clara, which is a combination of beer and club soda (it's a bit lighter and more refreshing IMO). We enjoyed some calamari and Spanish bread as well.

We took Calle Atocha up towards the Plaza Mayor (which was uphill quite a ways and something I was not expecting). We stopped at various shops along the way, including a supermarket where the girls could get some olive oil and Ramiro got a six pack of beer.

We made our way up to the Plaza and did some souvenir shopping. Each Spanish city has a main square or Plaza Mayor. Salamanca, where I lived, has the most famous Plaza, but the one in Madrid is a close second. There was a extremely overweight man dressed as Spiderman in the center of the Plaza and I wanted to take his picture, but the girls said I would only be rewarding bad behavior. (Look in the very bottom right corner of the picture below and you will see him).

I bought a fridge magnet and some other souvenirs and then we made our way to Opera metro station to catch the train to Principe Pio, the metro stop near the restaurant. On the subway, I managed first to break Ramiro's camera and then fix it, but I felt pretty bad about it.

Casa Mingo is a tavern style restaurant serving Asturian style food (Asturias is a region in Spain). They are most famous for bottling their own Sidra (Hard Cider) and their rotisserie style chicken.

We ordered three chickens, two bottles of cider, two tortillas (Spanish potato pies) and Tarta de Santiago (almond cake) and it ended up coming out to about 70 Euros or 10 per person, which is a great deal. I love this restaurant and the rest of the crew really enjoyed it, so it was certainly a nice way to wrap up the evening.

We strolled back to the metro and ended up getting back to the hotel around 11:30pm or so. Having just had a few hours of sleep that afternoon, I had no trouble going to bed, and got a good seven hours or so of shut eye. I got up early enough to go work out in the morning and go to the supermarket (I got a tortilla to take home and a box of Spanish table wine for the equivalent of less than a dollar).

The flight home was long (we blocked in at just under 11 hours gate to gate), but this was a phenomenal trip. Even being a Spanish speaker, Madrid is not a trip I think I will get that often, so it was a nice treat, especially just 10 days into the new route.