Madrid

Madrid airport is very new, and magnificent, and the passport lines for entry rivalled those at LAX; and the amount of travel within the airport rivalled Heathrow.  However - once through all of that, I was, within five minutes, talking to a taxi driver who opined that Donald Trump is like Fidel Castro.  

I can't really claim I've never been to Madrid before: I was here for an evening, forty five years ago, when I took a bus from London to Nerja - anyone remember the Magic Bus company?  I think it was one of theirs, which went on a strange route over the Pyrenees where we stopped for an age at a mountain restaurant and ate a spicy stew for lunch, and then in Madrid, at a bar to have late night drinks and tapas, and the whole experience was so exhausting I booked a cheap flight back - I guess from Malaga?  Anyway, I only saw Madrid in the dark, and so was unprepared for how elegant and clean and fun it seems.  

I headed off in the late afternoon for a walk in the Parque del Retiro - built in the first part of the C17th, and full of statues and fountains and buildings, although since it had a bad time under the destructive hands, feet and hooves of Napoleonic troops in the early C19th, most of it dates from the later C19th and beyond.  It was good to be greeted by a fine Californian sequoia.

There's a huge boating lake, 

and facing that the Monument to King Alfonso XII, which is quite one of the best bits of late C19th/early C20th excess ever ...

And there are many other C19th buildings scattered around, like the Velasquez Palace, which was actually built between 1881-83 for the National Mining Exhibition;

and the Crystal Palace, built in 1887 for the Philippine Islands General Exhibition.  I knew that it was undergoing restoration: coming back when it's finished will be a good excuse to return...

After that excess of C19th architecture and exhibition culture, I was very pleased to find that big fat white asparagus is in season.