ANOTHER DAY IN MADRID

Madrid
Day 31

Heard from Sam early this morning. Eagles beat Sydney by one point! Huh! What about the Dockers????

We felt good. And wondered whether David had bet a Jacks on the game! :-)

It was a nice wake up call. We also got a message saying when it´s raining in spain, don´t walk on the plane, head for the hills!!

That´s tomorrow!

But for the meantime we´re still in Madrid. Still lamenting after missing the flamenco the night before but hopefull we´ll see one in Seville when we get there, the home of flamenco, we hear.

Off to our favourite breakfast restaurante! Dermontaditos. Wé´re getting the hang of ordering our Desayuno (breakfast) and order ensalada, bolleria (pastry) and nectar de pina (pineapple juice) and panecillos tostatos (toasted buns!). ANd of course cafe - americana! (black coffee)

Today we ordered the panecillos tostatos with tomato. And as we were sitting eating and planning our course of the day...(to go to the Carmen Thyssen collection!) i looked over to see this old grey, dreadlocked woman, dressed in a grey cape, dreadlocked hair, and typical features of the homeless..walk by my side with a glass ashtray.

I thought it was weird and i thought, gee i hope she doesn´t sit by me and smoke in front of us. A fleeting thought. One that i think every time we go to a restaurante here because it seems a large part of the population smoke cigarettes or cigars in the restaurants which feels suffocating.

Next thing. A LARGE thump. What was it? I look at Greg to see him shaking his hand as he is catching his food that was flying in the air. What did he do, i thought, drop his glass? He looked at me with a shocked look and i ask, ¨What´s going on?´ He doesn´t know. I look down at the thick glass ashtray on the floor and look behind me. The woman had thrown it straight across at our table!

The man on the next table is yelling, ¨Has she just thrown that?¨

I charge out of the restaurante to see where the woman has gone. I see her steal something out of a tray a woman is holding in the street and keep walking, slowly somehow, but faster than i. I decide then, as i watched the vendor ignore the woman, that i couldn´t do anything.

I go back into the restaurante to find Greg cleaning up all the tomato paste off his jumper. He´s in shock.

I felt so angry. What did we do to deserve this? The resturante waitress came over with a cloth and offered no exclamation. The people in the restaurante are as shocked as we are.

I ran outside again. She hadn´t moved far. But again, i thought, what could i do? Shake her and ask her why.

No. I realise she resented the person that was eating and we were the targets.

But was there more? A history with tourists. A hatred of men. Who knows, i might be reading more into this. But we did feel like victims.

We left the restaurante and for the first time, felt unsafe in Madrid.

Carmen THysessen collection helped us forget that little episode. Just seeing the wondrous artists and their magnificant works made us realise this city is stooped in a long tradition and a history that we know so little about.

We saw Picasso´s bullfight. And we saw Dali´s portrait of Picasso. The latter made us laugh. We saw the first italian artists from the 13th century and realised we were people from a land so young. Australia and it´s 3 centuries compared to more than 800 years of pictorial history.

How could we even begin to understand the attitudes here?

On thing is, we´re trying.

And tonight, we go to the traditonal spanish bullfight.