I had evening plans in Madrid with my sibling, and they wanted to have lunch in town and make a day trip out of it. Since I had previously ascertained that the Running Sushi franchise was all right and fun, I proposed to check out another of the locations. They agreed and I had booked a 13:00 slot at Running Sushi in Akihabara, near Plaza de España. It was even more fun than the one I had checked out before, with Godzilla, Taito Station signs, Pacman, neon, anime graffiti in the toilets, and Japanese music playing. From the outside, the restaurant is shaped like a train carriage, and the sliding doors relay the same message they do when Tokyo JR stops at the station at Akihabara. In general, Running Sushi Akihabara offered the same food as the In Market restaurant, but this time there was tuna. I don’t know if it is because of the location, or because it was a weekend – and thus more expensive. Reservation was a great idea, because though I had no problem booking for 13:00, there were plenty other people with and without bookings, and when 14:00 – standard Spain lunch time – approached, the place became almost crowded. We stayed for the whole hour since we had a late start due to missing chopsticks and napkins, and I own up that the last takoyaki might have been excessive. This time, I remembered to ask for the membership card – you get a reward if you visit all the restaurants in the holding, something I’m considering to aim for.

After lunch, we had a 14:50 ticket for a place called IKONO. I have to say I’m warming up more and more to these Instagrammable places – I’ve recently read one of them described as a “fun house” and I think it’s a more than accurate idea. I like them because they’re silly places for, quite literally, kicks and giggles. According to themselves, IKONO was born as a leisure option alternative to “restaurants, shopping and clubbing” for young people – I disagree with the “young people” take though. Out of the permanent establishments of its kind in Madrid, it is probably my favourite.

The IKONO mood kicks off even before you go in, with a peacock-like armchair just outside the main entrance. Spread over three floors, the venue has 15 different experiences / things to do. Once your tickets have been checked, the first “door” you go through is a thick wall of foil fringe curtains in a gradient of shiny colours,which felt like going through the Stargate! (I know, I know, niche comment). All through the place, there is bouncy music playing.

Once you have crossed the curtain – I somehow ended up in a weird inner space instead of where I was supposed to reach, but that’s just me – the first room is a ball pit, and a deep one at that. It was quite hard to move there. There are quite fewer rules than in other ball pits too – you can jump in, and throw balls up. Once you manage to drag yourself out of the ball pit, you get to go upstairs, what I’ve mentally named the “paper floor”. It has three rooms – the landing one has a pretty origami tree and some wings for you to take pictures with. There is a “psychedelic” ward with black-and-white décor and a blue-and-pink confetti cannon. The third one is a dark “jungle scenery” with glow-in-the dark colourings and paintings that I really loved – the frogs were adorable, and the serpent god quite impressive.

Back on the ground floor, the following room is a Japanese-style bamboo forest with wooden lanterns and a torii [鳥居], the traditional entryway to a Shinto shrine. As you may imagine, this was my favourite area. The room walls are covered in mirror, so it looks like a long path, that ends in the following room, a “bamboo forest” which a felt a little underwhelming in comparison. According to the website, the idea of IKONO cemented while visiting the Japanese Arashiyama bamboo grove, and these two rooms are a homage to that place.

Then we walked downstairs, to the “lights area”, with a few more rooms, including some hanging bellflower-shaped lamps, and another with lights made with marbles that went on and off to the music, some modern art inspired by The Last Supper, and a cube of infinite light dots. Back upstairs, there were a couple more panels for photo-ops, and a small souvenir shop. The staff offered a small present if we left a Google review, so we did. Oh, and they had a cloak option for coats, which was amazing.

We walked outside towards our following spot Caixa Forum Madrid, where there are two exhibitions at the moment. The one I really wanted to see was Veneradas y Temidas: el poder femenino en el arte y las creencias, “Worshipped and Feared: Feminine power in art and beliefs”, an exhibit on the female presence in the religion and spirituality of different cultures. The other one was Horizonte y Límite: Visiones del Paisaje. Colección de Arte contemporáneo, “Horizon and Limits: Views / visions of Landscape. Collection of Contemporary Art”, which I had not read about beforehand – because I am biased.

Veneradas y Temidas: el poder femenino en el arte y las creencias is a British Museum’s touring exhibition, Feminine power: the divine to the demonic (which I feel is a more appropriate name, but that’s just me and my problem with translations). It is a collection of artefacts (most of them not exhibited anywhere else) originating from different cultures, trying to convey the “female spiritual power”, though it also has snippets of erotism and homosexuality. One of the most important and impressive pieces include a copy of the Campo Iemini Venus, a “modest Venus”, halfway though covering herself – a copy of the Capitoline Venus, it was found in an Italian Roman villa in 1792. Aphrodite / Venus was the Greek / Roman goddess of Goddess of beauty, love, lust, passion, pleasure, and sexuality. Other Ancient Greece and Rome pieces include Hecate / Trivia (goddess of boundaries, crossroads, ghosts, magic, necromancy, transitions, and the New Moon), Athena / Minerva (Goddess of handicraft, warfare, and wisdom) or Eros / Cupid (God of desire, love, lust, and sex). There are several pieces of pottery, both red and black, depicting different scenes of various… degrees of erotism.

Halfway between Athena and Aphrodite, the goddess Ishtar, Queen of Heaven, and goddess of love and sexuality was worshipped in Mesopotamia (modern Iraq). Though according to the mythology, she had many lovers and was responsible for creation, she was not considered a “mother goddess”, and one of her advocations is the goddess of war.

The first thing we saw from Asia were three masks. There was Taraka [Tāṭakā], a Hindu spirit, whose rage upon the murder of her husband turned her turned into a man-eating ogre (ogress?). From Bali, there was Rangda, the demon queen, antagonist of the forces of good, leader of an army of evil witches, and child-eater. From Japan there was a hannya [般若], the jealous vengeful spirit of a scorned woman.

Also from Hinduism, there is a creepily fantastic (or fantastically creepy?) devotional icon (murti [मूर्ति]) of Kali [काली], goddess of death, doomsday and time. The sculpture is the advocation Dakshina Kali – depicted with four arms, a scimitar, a collar made of heads of her slain enemies, and Shiva at her feet. The murti represents a passage in which Kali goes on a rampage after fighting demons, having lost control, and her consort Shiva throws himself at her feet hoping to calm her down.

Among the Egyptian representations, there was Sekhmet, the warrior goddess, represented as a lioness, who was also the goddess of medicine and one of the sun deities. There were also Bastet, who started off similar to Sekhmet but became more of a protector figure, represented as a cat. There were also references to the cosmic goddess Nut, who symbolises the sky, stars, astronomy, the universe, and mothers.

From China, there was a gorgeous Guanyin [觀音] as the Goddess of Compassion, a very different style from the one I had seen in either the British Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum. There was also a Shiva porcelain which was astonishing.

From Meso- and South America, there was a beautiful sandstone of Toci, the “mother of the gods” who is depicted with bare breasts and her hands on her belly. There was also a statue of a Mexican cihuateotl. The cihuateteo were spirits of women who died in childbirth, and received the same honours as the warriors who died in combat. There were other references, such as the Hawai’ian goddess of the sea Na-maka-o-Kaha’i, talismans of sex and love (because the Victorians were a bunch of perverts), references to the Mesopotamian demon Lamashtu, Egyptian protection sculptures, funerary steles… and some modern art kind of thing, like a lady sitting down with a ball python slithering on her because… yeah? I really enjoyed the exhibition, though I have to admit I ignored the interactive art a little, to focus on the mythological aspect.

Afterwards, we visited the contemporary art exhibition Horizonte y Límite, which focuses on different… I’m not sure because I know squat about contemporary art (see above comment about the lady and the snake). There were paintings, imaginary photographs, a piece made from different geological cores representing a fault, a panel with postcards, a glass box filled with smoke to represent climate change… Pleasant, but not really my thing. Except the geology cores, they were cool.

After seeing both exhibitions, we headed off towards our next stop. We took a break and sat down for a while to have a great banana-and-strawberry smoothie of all things. Then we walked towards the park Parque Enrique Tierno Galván, where we had tickets for the light show Naturaleza Encendida: Insectos “Lit-up nature: Insects”. The Naturaleza Encendida show used to take place in the Botanical Garden, which is smaller. This year, it has been relocated this year for “reasons unknown” and it feels a bit too long and almost unconnected. All that without taking into account that the idea of a larger-than-me butterfly and giant spiders is a bit creepy to be honest. We had premium tickets which gave us access to the enclosure at any time between 18:00 and 19:00 without queueing, and decided to arrive there around 18:30 as it would already be dark. We had also ordered a cute “magic lantern” – a bunch of sparkling LED filaments – for the giggles.

After an entrance of archways and carpets of light, there is a swarm of dragonflies as a centrepiece. You walk around it, and enter the zig-zagging path. Along the route, you encounter butterflies of different kinds, a line of hard-working ants, bees, grasshoppers, more bees, mosquitoes and flies, more bees, eggs, more grasshoppers, disco balls, larvae (I think? If I had to hazard a guess I’d call them anemones), beetles, ladybugs, spiders and a row of differently-coloured Christmas trees. There were “light corridors” in-between, hive-like hexagons projected onto the trees, and lots of artificial smoke. There are supposed to be some praying mantises somewhere but… I did not see those?

All in all, Naturaleza Encendida: Insectos felt too spread out, as if trying to justify the bigger space. Though we had a premium ticket, there was no special premium-only area, and the only benefit was having an hour to go in, without having to queue – which is already enough in my books. I think you really have to be into the topic – we came across a lady who was very freaked out and mostly running so she could get away from the bugs. I have been to three editions of Naturaleza Encendida, and the only one I really enjoyed was the sea-creatures one, Explorium. I thought that the bad weather last year had damped the experience – literally – but I’m going to stop holding my hopes high.

Finally, we headed back to the train station. My morning train had had a five-minute delay, which by the early evening had progressed to the upper 40s. Joy. I’m hoping that when free ticketing is over, service will improve, but I’m not holding my hopes too high…