This weekend was an exercise in being flexible. We planned to take the train to the town of Segovia for some hard-core sight-seeing. We got up early and made it to the train station, only to find that all the information we’d found online was wrong and that the train schedule was such that we wouldn’t get enough time there to make the trip worthwhile. The computer kiosk allowed us to buy a ticket for next week, but it only accepted exact change. WTF? Generating change for cash automatically is a solved problem. Two round-trip tickets were 21.40 euros. We had 21.*50* and ended up having to buy pastries at a pastry shop and beg for our change in 20-cent coins. At least the pastries were very good.

So we hit the Royal Palace on Saturday afternoon.

The Palacio Real Plaza

The Royal Palace was sort of like touring the White House — a lot of the rooms are still in use for state functions. Most of the decorating, though far more extreme than anything you’d find in the White House, dated from 1790 and later. But the highlight was the armory, which contained an absolutely amazing collection of armor and weaponry mostly dating from 1490-1590. A lot of it was mocked up on horse and human models so that you could better see how it was used. Most of it was ceremonial or jousting armor, since I don’t think there was much warfare going on with that sort of stuff in the 16th century.

View from above the armory

A second highlight for me was in the Queen’s collection, where they have on display the only surviving matched Stradivarius string quartet in the world.  I saw my first Strad viola!  Be still my beating heart.  We asked a roving tour guide if they ever get played, and she said they have a concert at least once a year.  Sigh.

And of course, they wouldn’t let me take any pictures :-p.

EDIT: So, our friend Tanner was able to get pictures of the Strads when HE was there.  I’m posting HIS.  Notice how intricately they’re decorated.  I’ve never seen that that either.

Stradivarius cello

Stradivarious violin

Sunday was the Thyssen art museum, which was the most fun I’ve ever had in an art museum except that they’d closed an entire wing of modern artists for renovation that I’d been looking forward to seeing all day. So, no Dali and Surrealists for me. Why is it that art museums are so rude about stuff like that? Terran relates that he hit an art museum in France while on vacation where the entire collection he’d gone there to see was traveling. It seems like common courtesy to post something when you enter the museum, “We’re sorry for the inconvenience, but Blah wing, containing artists Foo, Bar, and the entire Stupidist Movement is currently closed for renovation.” That way, if you were coming to the museum primarily to see this stuff, you know before you buy a ticket. And at the very least, you’re spared the disappointment when you go to see it.
[Stupidism, btw, is Studentbane's term for Dadaists and Postmodernists pushed the boundaries of "What is art" so far that they ended up hanging toilets on the wall or painting entire canvasses one color and calling it art. He's building a whole Monty Python-style routine: "Here you see a prime example of the Stupidist Movement. The can of Campbell's soup signifies the painters lust for food...." This will make you fall on the floor laughing after four hours looking at paintings.]

At any rate, the Thyssen museum is a formerly private art collection assembled by some powerful family (duh, the Thyssens) over a couple of hundred years. The museum is arranged to take you through the art movements approximately chronologically. A lot of the art by well-known modern artists like the Impressionists, Post-Impressionists, Cubists, etc. are stuff that hasn’t been snatched up by museums before now. So most art by household-name artists were the kind that was NOT representative of their famous works. A half-dozen Pissaro, none of which were Pointilist. Landscapes by Renoir. Almost a room filled with beautiful Impressionist paintings by Gauguin (Gauguin visited Haiti at some point in his career and devoted the rest of his life to painting misshapen Haitians — until seeing this stuff, I thought I hated everything he’d ever done).

Next weekend, we really will go to Segovia, barring any more mishaps with the train.