Arriving in Madrid at Atocha at 11:30p.m. we headed to la Reina Sofía first, where they were lighting a bunch of candles on the steps to the museum. We sat en terraza at a bar in the plaza, and after some time what appeared to be a nude man stood in the middle of the candles, motionless. As we approached, we discovered that people were pouring hot wax from the candles on him (and that he wasn't completely naked, he had a small jock strap on). La Reina Sofía is the museum of modern art here, and some girl gave a speech explaining her little piece of art.
We headed down El Paseo del Prado, which is normally like Lake Shore Dr in Chicago but was completely devoid of cars and full of people. First "exhibit" we ran into was a guy up on a platform in the middle of the street playing a violin. It was a beautiful song. Then he decided to whip out a saw. Yeah, like those wobbly ones you use to cut trees. He pulled out a saw and started playing it, quite awkwardly, but still very amusing.
Further down el Paseo, right outside the Velazquez entrance to El Prado was two vaudevillian men blowing gigantic bubbles over the crowd to the tune of classical music. It was cool but nothing to hold our interest too long.
And then near la Plaza del Neptuno, one of my favorite exhibitions of the night. We approached, and I was not enthused about this guy singing some song in English with these weird, new age instrumentals. I'm like "What the heck, I'm in Madrid, where's the Spanish music?" He finished the song then said "Creo que vas a gustar esto." And I did. I forgot there are certain songs that are universal. The Beatles happen to have a whole catalogue full of them. He had four microphones and in each one he made a different vocal "track," if you will, to which he then started to loop these background vocals to make up the instrumentals of the song. Then he proceeded to sing, in perfect English, Strawberry Fields Forever. I was so enamored that at first I was just standing there in awe, it was so beautiful. Then I remembered I can take video with my camera, so I have a portion of the song captured on video, which I will post later.
We moved on, in the fountain of la Plaza de Neptuno (or Neptune, if you couldn't figure that out (or Poseidon)) were oversized rubber ducks. Just floating around.
Did I mention there were hundreds of thousands of people there? The streets were jam packed with people (and coincidentally, trash). Los madrileños were smart and brought large bottles of booze and plenty of beer so they didn't have to go to bars to get drunk. Throngs of people were just walking around with booze all night then tossing it wherever they were when they were done. The streets were literally trashed by 3am.
This is the old post office building. Hard to tell, but those are lips that are "kissing" the building. They made loud puckering sounds and would kiss different parts of the building constantly. I have video that I will try to get up later. Crazy art students.
We headed to la Puerta de Alcalá. This was the first time I had seen it, after hearing that song all the time in Profe's class. It was illuminated intermittently and there was a huge line to walk underneath it. We decided not to wait to walk under an arch (though I don't think you can do that normally, so maybe we should have...) and instead headed to a bar to get some pinchos and drinks. El Espejo, the bar, was a nice terraza bar in the middle of the street that reminded me of the images I've seen of old Parisian bars. We had a plate of jamón ibérico and queso and bread, and I a copa of vino tinto. This was one of the other highlights of the night for me. The jamón was the best yet I've had in Spain (not saying much given what I had at the "Italian" restaurant). The cheese, which normally I can't stand Spanish cheese, was actually really good, especially with the jamón and bread. The wine was delicious as well. We were sitting in the middle of the street freezing in the wind but I was having a terrific time. Need to go back there.
From there the mission was Gran Vía, as there was plenty of be had there (or so we thought). By this time there were already cleaning crews outside leaf blowing and spraying the streets with water (why? I don't know). Didn't seem to be as many people out on Gran Vía at this time (was about 3am) so we headed into Zahara café for some wake me up caffeine. We sat around there, half asleep, half ready for the rest of the night, until the place closed at 4am. Down Gran Vía, we passed la Plaza de España and el Palacio Real on our way to "Máximo silencio," probably the best piece of art of the whole night. It was quite a walk through streets and parks full of the discarded bottles of alcohol and mixers from earlier botellones. We lost ourselves a bit in a dark street by el Puente de Segovia and a river. Ended up atop a hill looking at the most spectacular and sobering exhibition in Madrid. Ten thousand multicolored lights filled a field on the west side of Madrid. Alternating colors, below the full moon, the perfect night cap to la noche en blanco. It's really hard to describe just what it was like to be there, how it felt and the impact it had on me. Even the photos and videos I have don't really do it justice. Just trust me that it was something special and that I almost hate mentioning it because I'm sad that you all could not take part in it. However, I did manage to get some photos that try to give you a sense of what it was like, as well as some videos that I will try to get up later (along with the Strawberry Fields Forever video).
Head here for the whole photo set.
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