Tag Archives: alternative

28th November 2024: Parallel Universes (Madrid, Spain)

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Whenever a Marvel film comes out, my parent always comments on how they used to read the comics when they were young – probably they belonged to the first generation of comic readers in this country (and I have to confess over the years I salvaged quite a few “relics” from the attic at the old house). Thus, when the exhibition Marvel: Universe of Superheroes opened, I thought I would bring them along. I booked us tickets on the 28th of November at 10:00 for the event, which was happening in the convention centre IFEMA in Madrid.

By pure chance, my parents received an invitation to Feriarte, a collectionism fair – that is what we thought at that moment. They were not particularly into it, so I asked if I could have the invitation. When I checked it out, I realised that we could visit Feriarte on the same day as Marvel: Universe of Superheroes, since the dates overlapped, and it was also at IFEMA, just a couple of pavilions down. My parent agreed after some coaxing. Finally, I offered to take them to a “fun place” for lunch, and we had a plan.

Marvel has traditionally been one of the most important comic publishing houses in the US. Its key writer / creator was Stan Lee, who came up with some of the most iconic characters in the medium – Spiderman, Thor, Iron Man… It is true that the first superheroes to succeed on the big screen belonged to Marvel’s competition, DC – Christopher Reeve’s Superman in the 1970s and Michael Keaton’s Batman the following decade. However, Marvel kicked off a golden age of cinema superheroes. While DC festered in the darkest, more depressed Batman, Marvel released Iron Man, which took superhero films in a new direction – they turned from fun-for-fans to funny-for-all (of course, purists would never be satisfied, but what are you going to do?). Robert Downing Jr. had a lot to do with this boom, dominating the scene whether the film carried the name of his character – Iron Man – or not. For about a decade, Marvel dominated the blockbuster season, with explosions, one-liners and good-triumphs-over-evil plots. Eventually the bubble burst, as they always do, and things went downhill. However, companies are still willing to milk out any cash cow, and as long as Marvel makes money, it will be producing stuff.

Less known than the film boom is the fact that with the launching of Marvel Studios, the parent company also became a transmedia master. The idea of transmedia is not new, and refers to tying stories in different publishing methods (Hasbro was doing this with GI Joe back in the 80s already). However, Marvel has it down to an art. Samuel L. Jackson was cast as Nick Fury because a comic artist based the revamped character on him, so now Nick Fury statuettes look like Samuel L. Jackson. Since Disney acquired Marvel Studios, the so-called MCU (Marvel Cinematic Universe) is so interwoven with the Disney+ shows that neither can be followed on its own. Funnily enough, this has not washed over to the comics that much, save for the special Alligator Loki that I kept looking for in London earlier in 2024.

Well, one of the many facets of Marvel’s outreach octopus is organising exhibitions. I suspect that they are all the same under different names though. The one which took place in the IFEMA convention centre in Madrid was Marvel: Universe of Superheroes. The exhibition runs through the history of Marvel from its beginning, hailing the works of Stan Lee and running through the influence of the Comics Code Authority (CCA), which censored the content of the media – and made the evolution of American and European comics diverge forever. The pages from that time are mostly lost, so elements like the first issue of a Marvel comic ever, or original Spiderman and Fantastic Four dating back from the 60s are kind of amazing – and belong to private collectors who have lent (or rented out, one guesses) them to the organisers. Most of the exhibition, however, focuses on the MCU, with quite a few costumes and items from the films and Disney+ series. There were life-sized statues, too – or at least to scale for characters like The Thing or Hulk. There was an interactive game where an on-screen you would wear Iron Man’s suit and practice-shoot with it.

We hilariously ran into a preschool day trip, with the teacher completely made things up as she went and kept trying to keep a bunch of rowdy kids in line – without much success.

The first area ran through the history of American comics and Marvel itself, purely as a comic publisher. Then, it moved into the film area, starting with Black Panther, revindicating his status as the first black superhero. Then there was a room on Spiderman, one of the most beloved characters, even if he was almost not made because editors thought a spider-related superhero would not sell. This was probably the last room focusing heavily on comics. Hulk got a small room to share with She-Hulk. Afterwards, the MCU took over, with film memorabilia of Iron Man, Thor and Captain America. The following area was a bit of a mix, with Wandavision, X-Men, Daredevil, Luke Cage, Moon Knight, Ghost Rider… which ended in a very psychedelic room for Doctor Strange. The final room was “Marvel in Space”, with The Marvels (Captain Marvel, Monica Rambeau and Ms. Marvel) and Guardians of the Galaxy. Considering the huge hit that Agatha All Along was, I was surprised not to find any references to it, but then I realised that the exhibition predates the series.

Marvel Universe of Superheroes

Marvel Universe of Superheroes: Black Panther, Spiderman, Iron Man

Marvel Universe of Superheroes: Doctor Strange, Mighty Thor, Groot

I would have wanted a memento, but none of the items in the shop appealed to me. Besides, everything was too expensive, I thought. I had no idea. We left the exhibit and marched into the inner pavilion where Feriarte took place. Feriarte is way more than the collectionism event I had originally thought – it is an antiques and art fair, with items that range from archaeological artefacts to the most modern pieces. Our minds were blown. There were 64 art galleries and archaeology specialists from all over the world carrying prehistoric items, Egyptian mortuary artefacts (including a whole sarcophagus), Grecian sculptures and vases, Japanese samurai armours and weapons, paintings, contemporary art (Miró, Dalí, Chillida, Sorolla…), furniture, jewellery and watches, reproductions of Medieval manuscripts… And I thought that the Marvel shop was expensive! I could have afforded… a tiny Egyptian scarab smaller than the nail on my little finger. I was shocked when I saw the first three paintings by Miró (a surrealist painter from the beginning of the 20th century), but it turns out they sell like doughnuts among the collectors…

There was a “collectionism for beginners” area, with tips to “start collecting with pieces under 5,000 €”. When thinking about private collections, I’ve often gone with Indiana Jones’ line “it belongs in a museum”, but lately, with the attacks on art by climate activists, and the fact that most of Marvel’s memorabilia was recovered from private collectors… I’m not so sure. I might have started changing my mind. Then again, not really, because when the original fossil of Tyrannosaurus rex Stan was auctioned and I was sad it would end up in private hands and I would never seen it – good news, it was sold to a museum, though I’m not sure I’ll ever make it to the soon-to-open Natural History Museum Abu Dhabi. Needless to say, we left Feriarte empty-handed, and very amused that you go through security and X-ray when you go out, not when you go in. A couple of days after, I read that an organised gang had stolen jewels and watches worth 390,000 €…

Feriarte 2024

Feriarte 2024

We retrieved the car, and got lost trying to get to the shopping centre La Vaguada to have lunch at Runni In Market, the first of the Running Sushi franchise I visited (and got lost trying to get there too, so… maybe it’s just difficult). My parent loved the concept. However, I was peeved that the table before us kept getting all the lychee and mochi when the time came for dessert. Mean!

Runni Sushi In Market

We left afterwards to head home, having caught a glimpse of the secret life of superheroes and what kind of décor rich people have in their houses. Parallel universes indeed…

30th June 2024: Engines, illusions, history and tea (Madrid, Spain)

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Since finding about my tea time outings, my sibling had been wanting to tag along to one. I was asked to organise something for the weekend that involved either Chinese hotpot or afternoon tea in Madrid. The hotpot place was booked out both days, but I found an afternoon tea opening on Sunday the 30th. I am too lazy to move out just for tea, so I organised a bit of a day out.

After an uneventful train ride, our first stop was at noon: Nave de Motores de Pacífico, the former energy centre that fed electricity to the original underground lines. Today, it is not in use and it has become part of the network of museums Museos Metro de Madrid. The warehouse was built by Antonio Palacios between 1922 and 1923 to home the diesel engines, transformers and fuel that single-handedly powered the underground system before the Spanish Civil War. The system was actually in place until 1972.

Warehouse containing the old underground engines

The building was erected in red brick, with white tiles inside, decorated with Palacio’s typical metallic green. The floors are ceramic tiles, and the engines are three monstrous vessel-powering pieces of engineering. These diesel engines created electricity, which then entered the transformers, and was sent to the power lines to feed the trains. At night, the excess was sold to the local street-light network.

Since we were going for afternoon tea to El Jardín de Orfila, where I have been before, I knew lunch was out of the question. However, we needed a snack. I planned that at Yatai Market, an… Asian food court of sorts. A number of stands come together to offer different cuisines and snacks, even full-sized meals. We tried a Chinese bao each and a couple of dim sums. I ordered a hoisin duck bao which was extremely yummy. I will definitely come back to try other stuff.

HotBao Yatai Market Cortezo

Afterwards, we headed off to the so-called Museum of Illusions. This museum is a compendium of optical illusion and installations designed to fool the brain into believing things that are either wrong or just not there: a distorted room so you look big in one corner but small in the other (Ames room), a vortex where you seem unable to walk straight, a rotated room, a room full of mirrors – there were a lot of illusions with mirrors actually – stereograms with hidden images, turntables, holograms…

We had a reservation for 14:00, and I was surprised at how chaotic entry was. I mean, they’ve been running the thing for a while now, someone should have figured out how to do crowd management, but no. Then, there were kids running and screeching all around, but it calmed down after a while. I had really hoped that the museum would be calm and half-empty at lunch time, but it was not so, not by a long shot. It was interesting though, and pretty fun.

Museum of Illusions Madrid

However, the experience was shorter than I had calculated, so I had to improvise an extra stop. Thus, we entered the local history museum Museo de Historia de Madrid, which tells the city’s history since Madrid became the capital of Spain. There are paintings, models, typical costumes, plans, maps, and Playmobil sets depicting of the uprising against the French in 1808. The museum is hosted in a former palace-like building which was actually built as a hospice. To the side stands the original Baroque chapel. It also has a lovely garden with a monumental fountain, which was relocated from its original place for conservation.

Museo de Madrid exhibits

Museo de Madrid - chapel and fountain

We spent some time there and then headed off to the building that now holds the office of the Copyright Owners’ association, a manor known as Palacio de Longoria. It was designed by José Grases Riera and built between 1902 and 1904. It is one of the few actual Art Nouveau buildings in Madrid, possibly the most important one. The façades were made in artificial stone, with sculptures and shapes resembling vegetation. I’ve wanted to visit it for a long time, but it is only open when there is an exhibition, and the stars had never aligned – until this time. There was an exhibition about urban music, and I was not going to let go of the chance to see the monumental staircase and the skylight.

Longoria Palace

We finally set off for afternoon tea at El Jardín de Orfila. Out of the several places I’ve tried afternoon tea in Madrid, this has been my favourite to date. The outside garden is lovely, but mostly, their scones are the best around.

We ordered green tea, and the snacks were finger sandwiches – smoked salmon and cheese cream, classic cucumber and cheese, pastrami – pastries – carrot cake, macarons, lemon curd – and the scones. This time round, I decided to eat the scones after the sandwiches in order not to be full when it was their time. The afternoon was pleasant, but we shared the terrace with another table, and later a loud lady who wanted a smoke. That broke the magic a little, but the tea was fantastic and the scones were great.

El Jardínde Orfila: tea serving for two

Afterwards, we just headed for the train station to get back to our places. Of course we missed the correct one since they run whenever they like. What else is new? But the fun part was being able to pull a fun day out from my sleeve, and it was not stupidly expensive either, so good fun, all in all!

28th May 2024: Architecture and a niche restaurant (Madrid, Spain)

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I was talking to an acquaintance whose child likes superheroes – so does the acquaintance, actually – about Comic Planet. After exchanging experiences, they mentioned that their spouse also enjoyed another thematic restaurant, and I decided that it could be a fun thing to do – and since they don’t take reservations for one, I roped my sibling into tagging along. And of course, since we were braving the horribly-working trains, I felt we should fill the day out. We could not leave early in the morning as I would have liked because I had this stupid bureaucracy appointment I had to get out of the way first.

We arrived in Madrid around 12:30, and our first stop was the Casa de Correos, an iconic building in the middle of the square Puerta del Sol. I did not even know you could just visit that building, nor that they ran exhibitions. It was a cool opportunity to check it out. Furthermore, the exhibition was actually something that I was quite keen on – the architect Antonio Palacios, commemorating the 150th anniversary of his birth. The exhibition, called “the Metro architect” Antonio Palacios, el arquitecto de Metro, is part of the network of museums managed by the underground company Metro. It consists mostly of photographs, a few of them by photographer Luis Lladó, an original model of Palacio’s project to renovate Puerta del Sol, and a modern model of a now-lost station, including lifts. It was a bit underwhelming, but still worth it – and free, so it was good either way.

Exhibition Antonio Palacios El Arquitecto de Metro

Afterwards, we headed out to the restaurant for our 13:30 reservation. The place is called Los Secretos de Lola (Lola’s Secrets ). It used to be just another bistro-grill in a street full of them, but some time after the pandemic, it reinvented itself. The restaurant has slowly turned into a Mecca of childhood mementos – Disney princesses, teddy bears, Harry Potter, Funko Pops… and crazy fun references like a Möet&Chandon spray to clean the tables. A lot of the food comes in a special piece of dishware – most of it Disney, but I can’t tell whether it’s actually licenced or a bunch of knock-offs. It was hilarious anyway. Though I am not much of a Disney person (my sibling is), my favourite film of theirs would be Mulan, and I just about lost it laughing when I checked the menu beforehand – I saw that they served gyoza in a Mushu-like dish, and decided we needed to order that. I was open to negotiation about anything else, really, but not the gyoza. The pasta in the Lady and the Tramp dish was also hysterical, but I could do without.

We reached the restaurant on point, and the owner directed us inside. We got a really cute Stitch table, but my sibling was not comfortable on high chairs, so we were accommodated at a Harry Potter one. We shared the non-negotiable teriyaki prawn-and-vegetable gyoza with wakame and bean sprouts, served on a Mushu-plate: Gyozas de gambas y vegetables al teriyaki, a plate of cheese Tabla de quesos variados (Blue cheese, Havarti, Mimolette, Emmental, Basilio, butter and breadsticks, on a Ratatouille’s Remy plate, which I had also found adorable) and a bluefin tuna tartar Tartar De Atún Rojo (on a little boat – I asked for no mango, and it was honoured; this was probably the weakest dish though). Finally, I tricked my sibling into a dessert called “Snowhite magic apple” Manzana Encantada Blanca Nieves: red chocolate capsule with white Kinder and a heart of caramel sauce, which came in an adorable “present box”.

Decoration: Los Secretos de Lola

Food Los Secretos de Lola

The food was good, and I really like themed restaurants, I guess, even if they are not “my” theme. We did not stay for the two hours, I think we were on our way after an hour and a half – and when we asked for the check, it came in a Frozen music box. Then, we left towards Palacio de Cibeles, the old “communication palace” of Madrid, designed by Antonio Palacios and Joaquín Otamendi, and erected between 1907 and 1919. It is considered one of the first and most important Modernist buildings in Spain, constructed in biocalcarenite, with three stained-glass skylights, catwalks on the third floor, and a magnificent lookout on the rooftop. Part of the building is being used by the town hall, the other by the public entity CentroCentro, which runs cultural activities in the open spaces – mostly conferences and exhibitions.

Palacio de Cibeles

We arrived a bit before 16:00. Since we had a ticket for one of the exhibitions at 17:30, we checked whether we could find a ticket for the rooftop. We found available slots at 16:30, which was great. Before the viewpoint access, we had time to wander around. Most of the free exhibitions were of modern art, and not that interesting, and I was more focused on the building itself. There is one dedicated to the World Heritage site Paisaje de la Luz, explaining why the area deserves its UNESCO place.

We found the staircase to one of the towers and we used it to move it through the different floors. It is a spiral staircase around the lift, with Palacios’ typical green tiles similar to the ones he used at Maudes hospital and Chamberí station. The catwalks were paved with glass tiles, and it was quite impressive above all. I loved the building, but after all, Palacios is one of my favourite architects, so it was to be expected.

Inside Palacio de Cibeles

Then, we went up to the rooftop, where we could have a view of all of Madrid around us, most interestingly one of the main arteries of the city – Gran Vía. The weather was great, maybe a bit too bright. The turns were 30 minutes, but we were done in about half the time, after taking two walks around the middle tower.

Lookout on the rooftop of Palacio Cibeles

We went down and sat for a little before we headed down to the basement to see “Notre-Dame of Paris: The Augmented Exhibition” Notre-Dame de Paris: l’Exposition Augmentée. It was only 3€, so I was not expecting much, but it actually blew my mind.

The experience was created by the company Histovery, which specialises in “virtual exhibitions” through an interactive tablet called “HistoPad”. The Public Entity in Charge of the Conservation and Restoration of Notre-Dame de Paris cooperates with the event, and the beauty company l’Oreal is a sponsor. The exhibition (which is simultaneously running in several parts of the world) follows the history of the Parisian cathedral Notre-Dame de Paris – it starts with the 2019 fire, which is a bit heart-wrenching, and then it covers a few key moments in the history of the cathedral, using a mixture of written information, videographs and a “treasure hunt” where you have to find pieces of a puzzle hidden within the virtual information. This is done using the tablet to scan 21 “time portals” that take you to a particular point in history.

Around 1160. The Dream of a Builder. At that time, Bishop Maurice de Sully came up with the idea to build a new, better, cathedral in Paris. The previous one was a smaller, Romanesque building, but the goal was a larger, architecturally impressive building. In this room (the second, actually, but the first chronologically), you find out about the “treasure hunt” – you need to find a number of hidden “light spots” to build a “stained glass window”.

Around 1180. The Gothic choir. This makes a small overview of the kinds of workers that helped in the construction, the kinds of stones, building materials – quarries, forests. I was extremely disappointed at this point when I came across a dog in the virtual quarry, but the program did not let you pet it.

1241. The Holy Relics: Louis IX, the future Saint Louis, bought the Crown of Thrones in Jerusalem and brought it to Paris. There was a great procession into Notre-Dame, where the relics were to be kept. Here there’s a spectacular recreation of the gates with the original polychrome sculptures and decoration.

1645. The Royal Promise: Widowed Queen of France explained to her son, future Louis XIV, that he was to renovate the choir of the cathedral and build a new altar, dedicated to the virgin Mary. This was the original splendour of Notre-Dame, before the French revolution broke out – the church was one of the targets of the revolutionaries, and a lot of the art was damaged and / or destroyed.

1804. The Imperial Coronation. After the French Revolution, Napoleon crowned himself “Emperor”, but a very “equal and revolutionary” Emperor. He held a ceremony for himself in Notre-Dame, with the presence of the Pope and everyone who was anyone in the totally equal new society.

1857. The Spire. Enter Viollet-Le-Duc, a major architect and restorer in France’s 19th century, whose theories influenced countless others. He revalorised gothic style in the country, managing to turn it into a “national style”. The man had the goal to restore and create buildings in “the gothic style that would have been if the Medieval workers had had the technology he had access to”. Historians have not been kind to him, accusing him of “inventing” stuff instead of “restoring” but kudos to him, he managed to make a lot of buildings survive to our time. In Notre-Dame, he is responsible for putting back a lot of the sculptures that were destroyed during the French Revolution. He also built the spire that famously collapsed in the 2019 fire.

2019-2021 (first and last rooms). A description of the restoration works that have been happening in and outside the cathedral since the fire, with special attention to the Paris firefighters who worked the incident. There is a very interesting part about safely removing debris and the original scaffolding, and the fact that there was a lot of lead in the cathedral that the workers had to be safe around. They also homage the “vertical workers” who had to remove collapsed pieces from the ground… hanging from ropes.

Notre-Dame the Augmented Exhibition

We completed the stained-glass window and signed up to get a diploma. The fun part is that most of the exhibition was not really… even physical. There were a few posters, a reproduction of one of the chimaeras, some small models… Nevertheless, it was extremely interesting – possibly the best “virtual exhibition” I’ve seen to date. The length of the experience is said to be 60-90 minutes… we stayed from 17:30 to 19:45, much longer than I had anticipated! Thus, we had to forfeit the last plan of the day to go back to the train system – which of course was experimenting delays. It took forever to get home. Because what else is new?

Time-traveller diploma after completing the treasure hunt in Notre-Dame the Augmented Exhibition

14th May 2024: Three Museums and Tea, Madrid (Spain)

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On a whim, I put together a plan for Tuesday, as it is currently my free day. I was too lazy to drive, so I decided to catch a train to Madrid. There was a temporary exhibition I wanted to check out, and it was close to several museums and eateries.

My first idea – breakfast at a French crêperie – went bust, because the place was still closed when I arrived in town – I swear, this is like the fourth time I try to have something there, and it just won’t work. Instead, I ended up at a Starbucks for breakfast, before heading out to my first destination – the exhibition The Art of Manga, held in the Architecture Bar Association building Colegio Oficial de Arquitectos de Madrid, COAM. The Art of Manga is a small exhibit that runs through the history of manga – Japanese comics – with a few snippets of what it was and what it has become, especially in Spain.

The entrance was a sort of tunnel with manga sheets hanging from the ceiling. It ended at a traditional scroll with animals acting like people – Chōjū-jinbutsu-giga 鳥獣人物戯画, which translates to “Animal-person Caricatures”. Some people consider that this is the origin of manga (note the “ga” at the end), though if there is one thing that the exhibition makes clear, it’s that nobody knows when manga actually started. Thus, it just runs through all the possible theories and important names. From the Edo Period, there were a few wood prints (ukiyo-e) – which are claimed to be original – among them two by Katsushika Hokusai [葛飾 北斎], The Great Wave off Kanagawa [神奈川沖浪裏, Kanagawa oki nami-ura] and Fine Wind, Clear Morning [凱風快晴, Gaifū kaisei]. Hokusai is another of the supposed starts (“the father”) of manga. There were also a few toba-e [鳥羽絵], similar to the first scrolls – for the first time in the evolution of drawings, there was text alongside the art. Then came the books, where texts dominated – though there were still drawings – and they became extremely popular during the period.

With the end of the isolation of Japan, Western influences – mainly comics – influenced local artists, and “speech bubbles” appeared. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Kitazawa Rakuten [北澤 楽天]’s works were published in newspapers. He is (also) considered the father of modern manga, and several of his works are displayed. There are also early 20th-century scrolls, painted in a style similar to toba-e depicting the Tokaido Road, which separated Edo (old Tokyo) and Kyoto, and its checkpoints. There were also kamishibai [紙芝居] cards – kamishibai is a traditional form of theatre involving telling a story using a narrator and different “postcards” with images drawn on it.

In the middle, the exhibit had a rock garden, and a torii gate with a lot of lanterns gave way to the second part – modern manga. Here there were pieces and mementos from famous artists and works – Osamu Tezuka [手塚 治虫], known as “The god of manga”, and one of the driving forces of anime. According to the exhibition, they were showing all of his works. There was a bit about Shigeru Mizuki [水木 しげる], and big international hits like Sailor Moon, Naruto, Dragon Ball and One Piece. After a screen showing a video about a cosplayer – which I did not care much about – there was a section on manga magazines, some of the early manga published in Spain, and a stand where you could get some stamps.

Snaps from The Art of Manga Madrid

Finally, there was a bit on merchandising and figurines. The shop did not even have a catalogue, which I would have bought. All in all, it was all right, smaller than I had expected.

Then, I went to the nearby museum of the Romantic period, where I got a national museums card – I’ve been wanting one for a while, but unfortunately you still have to queue to use it. I had hoped you could just walk into museums with it, but I guess crowd control is a thing since Covid. Anyway. The Romanticism museum, Museo del Romanticismo is a small palatial residence which tries to recreate the ambience and atmosphere of the dwellings of the bourgeois families at the time. It had a lot of nice furniture, similar to the one in Riofrío, but I found it lacked on the landscape paintings I like. The museum is currently exhibiting an early painting by painter Francisco de Goya, a Pietà.

Museo del Romanticismo Madrid

Afterwards, I headed out to line for the Sorolla Museum Museo Sorolla. I had to queue for nearly 40 minutes, but I was finally admitted in. Joaquín Sorolla (1863 – 1923) was a generally-impresionist painter (impressionist, post-impressionist and luminist) from Valencia. The museum was built in the artist’s own house, completed with some of his iconic artworks, including Paseo a orillas del mar, Walk on the Beach, and El baño del caballo, The Horse’s Bath. Sorolla excelled in portraits and landscapes, especially the sea side, and social criticism. He was a master depicting light, water, and the combination of both. He became one of the most important Spanish artists of his time – and probably the most famous. He participated in the Paris Universal Exposition of 1900, and was invited to exhibit his art in New York City.

Furthermore, there was a current exhibition called Sorolla in 100 objetos – Sorolla in one hundred objects – which had just opened to the public. It included personal items the artist collected, – some a bit bizarre–, photographies, his passport, the last painting he worked on, the medal he received from the US president, a photograph of his studio in Italy…

Snaps from Museo Sorolla

I then went off towards the archaeological museum Museo Arqueológico Nacional. I used to love this museum – when they remodelled it and they made it all modern and aseptic, it lost most of its allure. Of course, I still enjoy it, as the important items are the exhibits, and the museum has a lot of important items from the Celtiberian cultures – Celts and Iberians inhabited Spain before the Roman conquest, which started in the 2nd century BCE. Iberians were prevalent in the east and south of Spain before their arrival. The north and west were populated by the Celts, and there was a vague area in-between whose people have been called Celtiberian. the Talaiotic culture flourished in the Balearic Islands, and it has recently been declared World Heritage. These cultures were eventually assimilate by Romans, but Celts lived on elsewhere. Iberian and Talaiotic cultures, however, diffused with time. Today, there is little known about it, and most is just interpretation from archaeologists, even less about the more ancient tribes that lived in the areas during the Bronze Age.

Among the objects from pre-Roman Spain, there are mysterious steles from the late Prehistory. However, it is the Iberian funerary art which stands out the most – such as the bust called the Lady of Elche, La Dama de Elche, found in the town of the same name, and the full sculpture named the Lady of Baza La Dama de Baza. Both are fantastic, to the point that it was thought they were Hellenic for some time. Other items include bulls – both metal cattle heads with wide eyes, and vaguely-shaped stone sculptures, verracos. I remember going to the museum when I was little, and the importance of these bulls, called “Bulls from Guisando” Toros de Guisando was drilled into my head, to the point that I thought that the ones exhibited there were the only ones – it also made me sad that they were in the museum and not in the field where they had been found. I was petrified when I learnt, years later, that there are a bunch more…

The museum also hosts a nice collection of Moorish art, and what apparently is a special Egyptian exhibit, as Spain worked with Egypt during the 20th century, and got a lot of objects from that excavation from the Egyptians “in the split of the new discoveries”. I am not sure whether that’s accurate, or the story has a lot of make-up on. I had to leave around 16:15, but as this museum is also covered by the national museums card, I can come back any time within the year for free. I skipped most of the Medieval period.

Museo Arqueologico Nacional Madrid

I had a reservation for afternoon tea a few minutes away from the museum, at 16:30 – I might be doing a bit of a rally around all the places in Madrid which have it. This time around, I went to El Jardín de Orfila – and good thing I had decided to only have breakfast and skip lunch and go straight from breakfast to tea. I was seated in a lovely outward area and I chose a delicious green tea with cherry. The food was plenty – finger sandwiches: pastrami, salmon and cucumber and cheese cream; macarons, carrot cake, meringue, and scones, along with clotted cream and berries jam. It has probably been the best afternoon tea I’ve had in Madrid up to date. The scones were a bit under-baked though.

Afternoon tea at El Jardín de Orfila

I was alone in the outer area for most of the experience, the waiter checked on me once after bringing my tea. It was actually so calm and quiet that I had a visitor – a little house sparrow (Passer domesticus) was very interested on the remains of my scone, so I shared with her. She was happy after two crumbs, and left – or maybe it was because another couple walked into the area.

Sparrow hopping towards a scone crumb

I left a bit before the two-hour timeslot was up so I could catch a timely train home – and because the couple came in, talking loudly, and kind of broke the spell.

20th March 2024: Mundo Pixar (Madrid, Spain)

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Due to some kind of weird… extended family thing, we ended up with some vouchers for Pixar World Spain Mundo Pixar, happening in IFEMA in Madrid. It would have been a pity to waste all of the tickets, so there we went, on a Wednesday morning, to at least redeem a couple of them. This immersive exhibit comprises several rooms with life-sized scenarios and characters based on Pixar films.

Mundo Pixar Madrid - outside

Pixar is an American animation studio which started off as part of the Lucasfilm computer division back in 1979. For over a decade, the group collaborated with graphic design and CGIas a third-party, until it was properly founded as an independent company in 1986. Pixar collaborated with Disney creating computer animations, and kept developing the technology, until it was finally able to pitch its first feature film to Disney – Toy Story, which was also the first-ever completely computer-animated film. Released for the 1995 Christmas season, it was a world-wide hit. Pixar became part of Disney in 2006.

The studio’s films have received 23 Academy Awards, eleven times for Best Animated Feature (a category added in 2001). One of the characteristics of Pixar films is their layering – though they are marketed as children’s entertainment, they tend to have a deeper, more adult-oriented subtext that… kids don’t even grasp. Something weird is that despite its successes, Pixar always seems on the brink of bankruptcy…

We had tickets for 11:00, and thought we had plenty of time until we got caught in a huge traffic jam due to a fair in another part of IFEMA. We had over 45 minutes of leeway, and ended up taking half an hour just to be able to get into the parking lot from the roundabout 650 metres away. That was wild.

We finally got into the queue around 10:50, and it took a while to get in. Mundo Pixar is organised in a U-shaped circuit, so that you can get round to the shop before or after seeing the exhibit. For a weekday, it was packed – not only by families, a bunch of random friend groups and tourists, too. Interesting.

We accessed through a tunnel to the first space, which is a bit of a self-promotion video mixed with the rules of the game – mostly, the one that people seemed unable to follow: do not touch. The immersive experience takes you to recreated scenarios from several films by the studio, to the slightest detail. The rooms are supposed to have different smells, but we only perceived a few. And of course, people kept touching.

Rooms 1 & 2: Up. This films tells the story of an old widower who goes on a last “adventure” to Paradise Falls, where his late wife would have loved to live. To do this he… floats his house away with thousands of balloons. He meets kid Russel and dog Dug. The rooms include a view of the whole house, and one of the interior. The living room is a perfect reconstruction of the one in the film, down to the pictures and the armchairs where Ellie and Carl sit, and the device Carl builds to steer the house while it flies.

Room 3: Monsters Inc.. This is a take on a widespread childhood obsession, the monster in the closet. In another dimension, energy is powered by the screams of frightened children from our world – thus, monsters sneak into kids’ rooms using magic doors to their wardrobes. Sully and Mike are the top-scary team until they run into a toddler who turns their lives upside down. The room has different bits from the film, including the scream factory doors and the two main characters waving awkwardly, recreating a scene where Mike and Sully are made to pose for a picture – I kinda expected them to move.

Pixar World Spain: Entrance, Up, Monster Inc.

Room 4: Toy Story. A bunch of toys which / who become sentient when they are not being played with get a new companion, who does not know he’s actually a toy. Enter a house-move, a bully neighbour, and a nasty dog. Chaos (and a trio of sequels) ensues. The fun part of this room is that it’s built so you see the room from one of the toys’ perspective, everything is high up, and the toys themselves are scaled.

Room 5: Elemental. This is a coming-of-age romantic comedy which focuses on overcoming differences. You walk into a train car with the two characters – a water element and a fire element, awkwardly sitting next to each other.

Room 6: Inside Out. In this coming-of-age comedy-drama, every person (and cat) has five basic feelings: Joy, Sadness, Anger, Disgust and Fear. They control a person’s life using a big console, and they collect “core memories” to help with their job. A young girl’s Joy and Sadness must learn to work together to overcome moving to another city. The room shows a perfect life-size reproduction of Sadness and Joy at the console and all the core memories.

Room 7: Ratatouille. This films follows the adventures and misadventures of the rat Remy, struggling to become a chef – to do this he hides in the hat of a young man and “guides” his cooking. The title is a pun between the word rat and a French recipe. The room is a huge kitchen, and you see Remy cooking inside a huge chef hat.

Pixar World Spain: Toy Story, Elemental, Inside Out, Ratatouille

Room 8 & 9: Coco. Set around Mexico’s Day of the Dead (Día de los Muertos), this film sees a young boy, Miguel, explore his family roots and his love of music. The first room shows Miguel and his grandmother, and the second area holds skeleton Héctor, a dead musician who accompanies Miguel in his adventures.

Room 10: Luca. This film tells the story of two sea-monster children (Luca and Alberto) and a human child (Giulia), and deals with friendship and acceptance in the Italian Riviera in 1959. The room hosts the size-appropriate children, with Giulia – and her cat – getting the most prominent set.

Room 11: Cars. The film is set in a world populated only by anthropomorphic vehicles. Arrogant young racing car Lightning McQueen learns about humility, sportsmanship and friendship. There was a nice staff member taking pictures of visitors in this room, with the film’s main character.

Pixar World Spain: Coco, Luca and Cars

Room 12: Finding Nemo. Nemo is a little clownfish, the only survivor from a barracuda attack in which his overprotective father, Marlin, lost his wife and all their other fertilised eggs. When Nemo gets “fished”, Marlin embarks on a crazy journey to find him, meeting amnesic surgeon fish Dory, wannabe-vegetarian shark Bruce, and surfer turtle Crush. To be honest, finding Nemo in this room was easy. He was in the middle of it, surrounded by marine mist, with jellyfish and the rest of the characters on a screen behind him. I was severely disappointed there was no Bruce whatsoever in the room.

This was the last room; afterwards there was the shop, and a small photocall with a giant Luxo (a yellow bouncing ball with a blue band and a red star), back at the beginning. I am not sure this area actually counted as a room, because we were told there were thirteen rooms? No clue.

Pixar World Spain: Finding Nemo, photocall, Pixar ball

Fortunately, when we left, the traffic jam had dissipated. Unfortunately, I had to go work in the evening, which did not feel great. I obviously enjoyed the rooms dedicated of films I had watched (and liked) more than the others – I personally find the first ten minutes of Up heart-wrenching, but Finding Nemo was my favourite (both as a film and a room). I still uphold my protests about shark discrimination though!

3rd December 2023: Sushi, I“k”ons, Goddesses and Light Bugs (Madrid, Spain)

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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.

Running Sushi Akihabara

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.

IKONO Madrid highlights

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 Divine to the Demonic: Greece and Mesopotamia

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.

Theatre masks and Indian Goddess Kali

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.

Egyptian Sekhmet and Chinese Guaiying

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.

Art piece fromthe exhibition Horizonte y Límite: Visiones del Paisaje

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?

Naturaleza Encendida Insectos figures

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…

7th November 2023: A Jurassic amount of Lego (Madrid, Spain)

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The fact that I like dinosaurs would come to no one’s surprise by now. To be honest, the older I turn, the more I think of them in the mind frame of the xkcd comic “Grownups”. Dinosaurs are silly fun, and it’s not like I’ve got a few million dollars lying around to buy a whole T-Rex skeleton anyway. What I do have is a silly knack to find things to do that are related to them – selective perception, if you wish. On this occasion, I heard that Madrid would be hosting the European Premiere of Jurassic World Exhibition by Brickman.

It is widely known that Jurassic Park and Jurassic World are part of a widely successful franchise. However, what or who is Brickman? In order to answer that question, we need to find out what a LEGO Certified Professional is: a person whose business model is working with LEGO blocks, making stuff for publicity, for example, and they are so good at it that they actually become LEGO-affiliates. The Brickman is a team of people who are led by Australian LPC Ryan ‘The Brickman’ McNaught – basically, they get paid to play with LEGO all day, and are commissioned things to build (which I think is awesome, in case you had any doubt). The Brickman Team have under their collective belt six exhibitions touring the world, and some of the largest and more detailed LEGO models ever built.

I came across the Jurassic World LEGO exhibition by pure chance, but once I knew about it, I worked on timing. The exhibition kicked off on the 30th of September and it will be there until the 14th of January – and it turned out that Tuesdays are cheaper. I bought a ticket for the opening timeslot at 11:00, and planned my day. I had to go to Madrid’s IFEMA Espacio 5.1, where I had already seen The Dino World Expo. It took 25 minutes to drive there and 35 to find a parking spot at the end of the world, then walk to the venue. Only when I was right by IFEMA, I saw that the paid parking lot was open – it is usually not when I am at IFEMA. Since it was a schoolday, I hoped to see the exhibition without many people – and kids – around so I could have fun with pictures.

As the name hints, the whole exhibition is based around LEGO-built Jurassic World items and scenes. Most of the rooms have brick buckets for you to put together whatever you want, freely or with instructions / missions. I did not build anything, but I had a lot of fun, once I managed to get in. When I arrived at 11:05, the ticket reader was not working, but the person at the door let people in anyway. He even offered to take your picture with the doors to Isla Nublar, which are already made from LEGO and actually really open. They recreate the gates shown in the first Jurassic Park films, but they read “Jurassic World” instead. Once inside, I asked a staff member if they had any stamps for the LEGO passport, and she had absolutely no clue what I was talking about – I think she thought I was weird, but oh well. The first room has “smaller” exhibits in comparison with others. There is a working monorail, a few aircraft and a life-sized 3D map of the island. It was weird to hear the Spanish dub from the films when a lot of the screens were still in English.

Jurassic World by Brickman entrance

The second room has a DNA strand and an amber collection site, and a shelf with lots of “hybrid” creatures. Some of them were cool, others just made me giggle – you were encouraged to build your own hybrid. The third room was “baby dinosaurs” under a huge brachiosaurus (171,150 bricks; apparently is one of the largest models in the world). There were some hatching eggs, too. In this room there were bigger LEGO bricks for the youngest kids to play and build stuff with.

Jurassic World by Brickman - LEGO baby dinosaurs

Then came a sort of control room – where visitors can track the escaped dinosaurs while some flying reptiles lurk from the ceiling, somehow recreating the alert in the first Jurassic World instalment. After that, there is a set up of the JW velociraptors, Blue and Delta having escaped and Echo and Charlie still in their pens. I had seen a LEGO Blue before, for the Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom promotion in the Natural History Museum in London, but this one was much cooler, and scaled 1:1 to the film – 58,227 bricks.

Jurassic World by Brickman - LEGO Velociraptors

Despite all the promotion and toys she gets, Blue is probably not the fan-favourite dinosaur from the films. She is not mine for sure – that would be Rexy, the T-Rex. And after a mural of the mosasaur (number two on my list) hunting down a great white shark, Rexy finally comes into view, in one of her most glorious scenes from the original Jurassic Park: chasing the Jeep after Dr Sattler and Muldoon have just rescued Ian Malcolm. The Jeep was built using 227,098 bricks (which makes it even more complex than the brachiosaurus), and Rexy 128,763. One thing I noticed was that they had changed the jeep’s number, from 10 to 18, I’m guessing there is some inside joke there. They even recreated her reflection on the rear-view mirrors, which was pretty neat.

Jurassic World by Brickman - LEGO jeep being chased by the T-rex

The exhibit was fun for the discounted price, but the shop was crazy expensive. When I finished, I walked back to the parking spot. I had to walk through part of the park Parque Juan Carlos I. In the middle of the so-called Southern Pond Estanque Sur there is a hideous sculpture made of wrought iron, which is called “Walk between two trees” Paseo entre dos árboles by sculptor Jorge Castillo . As I was staring at it trying to figure out what it meant (and even after reading up on the symbolism, I don’t get it), I approached the edge of the water. A flock of mallard ducks swam over to see if I had any food, and I noticed something that was neither a duck nor a goose – a great cormorant (Phalacrocorax carbo). I had never seen cormorants in Madrid before. Seagulls, yes, but not cormorants, and I actually saw three of them.

Juan Carlos I Park, Southern Pond

I headed off for lunch at La Vaguada, a shopping centre not far away from IFEMA, though the Sat-Nav went weird and I took forever. I actually had a couple of things to do in that area, not least of all drop by the LEGO Store La Vaguada to actually get a small stamp – or three – for the rally. I mean, I had already been to the exhibition, I was going to be there, I had taken the LEGO passport just in case…

La Vaguada LEGO shop

Serious things taken care of, I looked for the restaurant Running Sushi In Market, a call-back to a kaizensushi – small-plates of sushi on a conveyor belt – in an all-you-can-eat business model part of a franchise. It is more of an “Asian” place than a sushi restaurant and you have a range of recipes, from actual sushi to baos, skewers, noodles, dumplings, sausages… You are given a table for one hour to eat as much as you want, and pay a fixed rate plus drinks. It was not bad at all, though for the cheap price, tuna was too much to ask for. The decoration is extremely kitsch, but they had absolutely no problem giving me a five-people table for myself, and I stayed about 25 minutes, plus some pictures. But I forgot to sign up for the loyalty program…

Running Sushi In Market restaurant

The shopping centre has a ticketless parking lot that you can use for free for two hours, and when you are going to pay you just have to type your licence plate. I was there for 1 hour and 58 minutes in the end, so I did not have to pay anything, which was great. Then, unfortunately, I ran into a huge traffic jam, as it was get-out-of-work time, and there had been an accident on the motorway. Even though, I made it home before tea-time. However, I did not eat anything else that day. I might have overdone it with the last small dish of lichee fruit…

23rd October 2023: Happiness Museum and a former hospital, Madrid (Spain)

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At the beginning of the year, I found out about an old hospital building turned office building that looked pretty interesting to visit in Madrid had opened up. It is a governmental office, so the visits are guided and supervised. Unfortunately, I was working an afternoon shift and they only run the visits on Mondays at 16:00. I signed up for the waiting list hoping for a summer visit, but they don’t run them in July and August. The September and early October visits did not work out either because I was in London. I finally managed a spot for the visit on the 16th of October, which was rescheduled for the 23rd. It’s not hardcore work season yet, so I was easy to rearrange meetings to have the day off.

Of course, it was a Monday, and Mondays are not Madrid’s best day, especially when the weather is not nice – most things are closed, and even though there are many neat parks, they usually close in the event of storms or winds. However, I almost accidentally discovered something potentially-fun and open, and I made plans with my sibling and nibling, who had a free morning.

I took a train with an hour’s berth of time, but then, because what else is new, there were train issues, and we were all delayed. I was stuck on my line for almost 40 minutes, and decided to walk instead of taking the connection, and they were waiting at their station for almost 30. If you are wondering why I keep taking the train, it is because during 2023 I can get a four-month unlimited pass for 10€, which beats any other transportation mode.

In the end, we luckily made it on time to a new photo-op place, which calls itself the Museum of Happiness Museo de la Felicidad MüF, with a little happy face on the u. It is a two-storey… silly-fun kind of place. Out of all the “instagrammable” places I’ve visited, I think this has been the weakest, as there were actually few things to actually do (too many touchscreens), and it kind of looked a bit… plain. Probably because it was Monday morning and there was no animation. I mean, it was fun, don’t get me wrong.

The first thing you see when you come in are two individual trampolines and a slide that ends in a ball pit. As I can’t jump, I skipped the trampoline. There is a small exhibition on lucky symbols, and another on things that make people happy. There is a small soundproof capsule where you are coached on how to laugh – weird – and a “team good people” that you can stand behind for a picture (the message being “kindness brings happiness”). As I was taking a photograph of my nibling, someone – who had just seen me show my ticket – decided I was the official museum photographer. I turned her down as nicely as I could. It was a day with a lot of comments about my camera.

The MüF has some screens and a VR experience, a “magic” trick on a screen, a big heart made of blocks and a hugging machine – apparently made to comfort autistic kids who benefit from deep pressure, but can’t deal with actual people hugging them. To go down from the second floor back to the first one, you can use the slide into the ball pit or the plain old stairs. That slide is steeper than it looks…

The basement has a few more things that you can touch, a ward with headphones and uppy songs, and the abrazadores (huggers), big plushies that are apparently designed to simulate hugs and grow people’s confidence. They were fuzzy and warm, but I am not sure how they can improve your mental health… There are a few confidence boosters, and a “five-senses happiness booth” where you get to eat chocolate, which is always good. In the end there were lots of silly giggling, because in the end that is why you go to places like that. There is also a “closet of truth” which you should not spoil for other people and helps you discover who is the most important person in your life.

Happiness Museum Madrid

After the museum we headed off for an early lunch. Despite being 300 km from the nearest port in the Mediterranean Sea, one of Madrid’s most famous meals is the calamari sandwich – bocadillo de calamares. A lot has been speculated about how this came to happen, though no one is really sure how the sandwich made its way into the local gastronomy throughout the 20th century. The squid is cut in rings, battered, and served within a small loaf of rustic bread similar to a baguette (pan de barra), an interesting combination at the very least.

The most famous joint to eat a calamari sandwich is Bar El Brillante. It might not be the best, and it quite surely is not the friendliest, but it is the iconic place for it, which actually makes it a tourist spot. The bar was established in the 1950s and it is a family company, the current owner being the third generation. They do not care much about customer loyalty as their business is based on the “novelty” and the “being a must do in Madrid” since the 90s – or maybe they’re just nice to regulars? I for one I’m open to try thebocadillo de calamares again, but not the place. The staff was unhelpful and took forever to clear the tables, which led to a lot of… hm… “birdwatching” as pigeons and sparrows helped themselves to leftovers.

Calamari Sandwich at El Brillante

We separated after lunch and ice-cream, and I continued alone towards the Chamberí district, which at the beginning of the 20th century was the outskirts of Madrid. There, philanthropist Dolores Romero Arano commissioned architect Antonio Palacios to build a hospital for labourers: Hospital de Jornaleros, known today as Hospital de Maudes. During that time, it was typical that a hospital had a “target patient”. In this case, it was male workers from the newly industrialised city who were not infectious or incurable – sort of a trauma unit, early-20th-century style. They took in labourers that could be cured, nursed them back to health, and released in “perfect working conditions”. Considering, of course, that the hospital opened in 1916.

For the building, Antonio Palacios chose a cross layout with a hall on one side and a church on the opposite one and two smaller buildings to complete the symmetry. He used Francisco Zuloaga’s ceramics for decoration until money ran out, and aimed for lots of light and open spaces. There are two types of decorative ceramics on the outside: water drops which imitate waves, and broken tile mosaics (Trencadís, a technique favoured by Antoni Gaudí). Palacios even built lifts of sorts to take patients to the roofs of the wards. The hospital worked for its intended purpose until the Civil War broke out and it became a military one. It was eventually abandoned and derelict during the following years until it was bought and restored by the local government in the late 20th century.

All this was explained to us during a 45 minute talk for an hour-and-a-half visit, as we stood in the hallway – which is actually in the basement floor. I arrived about 15:50 for the 16:00 visit, gave my name and ID and sat to wait. We had to go through metal detector and X-ray before the visit started – there is a volunteer guide from a retiree association and an actual worker to chaperone (governmental workers do not work afternoons in summer, which explained then why there had not been visits during that period as I had hoped for). Once the “introduction” was over, we finally got to see what I wanted to see – the building itself. Unfortunately, as the guide prattled on and on inside, it had started raining, so we could not go out to the patio, nor barely see the outside. That was disappointing – I mean, I’m all in for introductions and historical contexts but this is my problem with guided visits, it is just too much talking and too little visiting.

As we walked into the inside of the building, we were pointed out to the ceramics on the walls. Then, the tunnel that connected the hospital with the morgue – which was one of the outer minor buildings. We went up using one of the decorative stairs and we finally arrived at the ground floor of the crossing point of the wards. The centre of the structure is the octagonal patio with the fountain in the middle. As people saw me taking photographs with the camera – I had asked for permission beforehand – they decided I was either a journalist or the official photographer. It got annoying at the fourth or fifth time I was asked or someone made a comment / joke about me photographing them. Which I was very careful not to, even if they keep walking into my field of view.

Maudes Laborers Hospital exterior

The main material of the building is white limestone, which both contributes to the building’s luminosity and it’s common in Palacio’s design. His likings are also shown in the green colour of the interior tiles, which are very similar to the ones in the ghost station of Chamberí. The tiles all along the corridors are decorated and some of them feature heraldic symbols. We got to snoop around the cafeteria, one of the few areas that still features the original floor, since most of the flooring was too damaged to be restored.

The central area surrounding the patio is also octagonal, full of ground-to-ceiling windows. From one side of the corridor to the other and through the patio you can even seethe main staircase that we used to access the second floor behind the windows. Once on the second floor, we crossed the metal bridge that separates the main building from one of the accessory constructions, where the external consultation rooms used to be. Finally, we went downstairs again, walked around the patio and crossed over to the former operating theatres (the above-ground area of the morgue), which are now being transformed into an exhibition room.

Maudes Laborers Hospital interior

By the time the visit was over, it was raining heavily, but I still had the time to visit the in-hospital church Santa María del Silencio, Our Lady of Silence, which is the parish of the Madrid deaf and hard-of-hearing community. Lots of the architecture details are Modernist in style, including the iron fence and coloured glass ceiling.

Altarpiece in Our Lady of Silence

It was still raining cats and dogs when I left, so I forsook the idea of walking around the building to take pictures of the main hospital entrance, I just crossed the street to head to the train station. After aquaplaning on the square to get in, I had to wait about 50 minutes for a train, as the morning breakdown was still causing delays. And of course, when the train came it had already stopped raining.

Maudes Laborers Hospital and Our Lady of Silence from the outside

It was a nice day out, with great company and lots of laughs. Food was okay, the hospital building was amazing, the guide not so much. And the weather… very… autumn-ly.

5th August 2023: Prints, Sharks, Mice and Neon (Madrid, Spain)

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I won’t say that the Southern Italy trip was a bad one, but due to the planning blunder, the heatwave and the general not-so-relaxing atmosphere, I kind of needed a low-stakes day out. And what can be lower-stakes than a silly giant shark film? I got myself a ticket to watch Meg 2: The Trench at noon – I’ve found out that my non-dubbed cinema has started doing matinée shows at a reduced price – and planned my day in Madrid around that.

I took the train and arrived in Madrid on time for my ideal connection. Unfortunately the local public transport is chaotic this summer, with both the train system and the underground going through construction, outages and closed stations. As fortunately the city was between heat waves, I decided to walk for 20 minutes instead of waiting for 17 for a train that might or might not come to take me to where I wanted to go.

My first stop was Imprenta Municipal – Artes del Libro, a local free museum dedicated to the history of book printing and binding. The exhibition is hosted in a dedicated building with two levels. The ground floor focuses on the invention and development of the print, both for text and images, and the art of binding and decorating books. There are printing “machines” from the 16th century on, for copying books and texts, and the whole thing gives off a retro feeling – a video actually shows how the machines work even today.

Collage Imprenta Municipal Artes del Libro

The second floor held an exhibition about “Asian Writings” Trazos de Oriente: imágenes, objetos y caligrafías de Asia. It hosts Arabic documents, Mongolian drawings, Chinese writing instruments and Myanma and Hindu praying books, along with items like ex libris and schoolbooks. All very cool.

Exhibition about writing in Asia

I had a little bit of time before the film, so I got a snack, then headed to the nearby Yelmo Cines Ideal to watch my film. Something I’ve learnt is that matinées attract a weird crowd – when I went to watch Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, I sat next to someone who narrated the whole film, and this time there was a lady who would tut whenever any of the sharks was on screen. I read the Meg: a novel of deep terror by Steve Alten a lifetime ago, and I enjoyed its albeit-very-liberal adaptation to film, especially because it did have a self-parody tone. It was fun because it was implausible, and it knew it was so. The second and current film, Meg 2: The Trench, has tried to become more of an action-like blockbuster and it takes itself way too seriously in my opinion. But there are three giant prehistoric sharks on screen at times, and I’m simple in that regard. Bigger and more teeth, I’m all for that.

The film finished around 14:00. I was not hungry, so I just grabbed myself a drink at Starbucks. I had a ticket at 15:00 at the Nomad Museo Inmersivo (and it was bad timing I guess, because just a couple of days later they opened a new exhibit). When I first read about it, the idea reminded me of Mori TeamLab Museum, since the art is all digital. The museum is staged in two floors. The lower one hosts the immersive projection ward and the shop. The upper one hosts the entrance and the “activities”. I thought that I’d ask if I could come in early, and they had absolutely no problem with that, so I entered around 14:35.

As you climb down the stairs, you have a very cool corridor with mirrors and lights that lead to the projection area. I had a ticket with entrance and “iris picture”, so an employee took me to get that one (I guess because the photographer was about to go on a break). We had to try a couple of times as it was hard to force my eyelid open under the bright light of the flash. The photographer was very patient with me and we were done in a few minutes.

Interactive Museum Nomad access corridor

I found my way back to the beginning – the museum is surprisingly small. The immersive projection is shown on the four walls and the floor. The projection I watched was called Utopia 1.0, where millions of digital blocks work as a tridimensional Lego set that sort of “build” a surreal world with dragons, deer, sculptures, whales, high rises, dinosaurs… The whole thing takes around 20 minutes and you can watch sprawled on the floor, or sitting up on a pouf – I chose this last option as it allowed me to turn around.

Interative Museum Nomad: Utopia projection

Following the projection, I went upstairs to do the activities. There’s a virtual reality experience where you get to travel the cosmos and see a lot of “space cetaceans”. I wonder why digital artists are so keen on whales… Another of the activities consists on “painting” planets with a giant brush as they float on a wall, and when you colour them all, you get to see penguins on a rocket or something… I did not catch it well because a bunch of kids burst in and took over. On another wall, there is a bunch of neons that you can play with using an app that you download on your phone, and blast music so they pulsate with that. Finally, the nice attendant is at the ready to take your picture at some stairs photo call (I think it is the glorified emergency exit), and you can go back down using a spiral slide.

There is finally a last corridor with lights and you end up at the shop, where you can start all over again, as there is no limit about how long you can stay in the museum. I really liked the first corridor, so I went back there for a while. Then I walked into the projection area again just in time to watch the dinosaurs roam once more. A fun detail is that even the toilets are “in character” with neon and messages.

Interactive Museum Nomad exhibits

On my way out, I bought myself a shark glass at the shop. There was also a very fun pufferfish cocktail glass, but I thought it would be awful to clean after use – not that the shark one is going to be much easier though… I left and headed off to a place I’ve always tangentially felt curious about, even if I’m not really the target public for it – it’s called Casita-Museo del Ratón Pérez.

Ratón Pérez or Mouse Pérez (also called Ratoncito Pérez, Little Mouse Pérez) is the equivalent of the Tooth Fairy in Spanish-speaking tradition. In 1894, writer Luis Coloma was commissioned with writing a tale for the future King Alfonso XIII, who had lost his first tooth. This tale penned the folklore mouse into print. According to the story, Mouse Pérez lived in central Madrid, in a biscuit box in the patisserie Prast, situated in number 8 of Madrid’s Calle Arenal. The town hall installed a plaque to commemorate the place and when the shopping centre in that building became almost empty, someone came up with the idea of building a “museum-house” dedicated to the mouse.

Museum-House of Mouse Pérez

The kids had a blast for sure, the visit is a forty-minute activity 100% dedicated to them . The guide has them running round looking for stuff and going into small doors. I snooped around and found it an interesting business model – though it falters when you pay a bit of attention to detail: books like 1984 or anatomy guides may very well be interesting, but a bit out of place in a children’s museum. At the end of the visit, the guided asked me what I was doing there and I told him I… wanted to see what the fuss was about, what kind of things they did in such “alternative” museums. We chatted away for a bit before I left.

To end the day, I did some shopping and I headed back home – the trains were delayed, but I eventually made it home and had a pizza dinner, because I suck at staying fed on day trips. Truth be told, I wanted to step by a famous bar to eat a calamari sandwich, but it… was complicated, with lots of signage on where to stand and wait to be seated, but there was nobody around, so in the end I decided I did not care enough for the calamari. Some other day – I’ve been saying that for months now though…

11th July 2023: Museum of Dreamers in Madrid (Spain)

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After I had so much fun in the Balloon Museum, I decided that I also wanted to see the Museum of Dreamers, which is something similar. Furthermore, it Madrid exhibit will close down at the end of July, too.

After I finished French school in Madrid, I headed headed off to the Japanese fusion restaurant Nomo Braganza, part of the Nomo Group. Nomo was established in 2007 under the culinary direction of Japanese chef Naoyuki Haginoya. I have to say that I don’t really trust the Spanish-Japanese fusion too much, but in this case, it really panned out. I met my sibling for a late lunch, because I was curious about the chef’s menu, what in Japanese would be called omakase [お任せ], which means leaving the choice of food to the chef. The menu was was a whooping 12 small-sized courses for 50€ – drinks not included, and considering it was 39 ºC outside, we ended up ordering a few rounds of water.

The menu, which changes periodically, comprised in July 2023:

  • Age Edamame Truffle – fermented edamame beans fried with white truffle scent. I personally prefer my edamame boiled, but the truffle scent was a nice touch.
  • Sukiyaki Croquette – oxtail croquette breaded with panko breadcrumbs. This was surprisingly good – and the actual flavour was strong.
  • Maguro Taco – mini taco of tuna tartar with wasabi and shiso (the “taco” was weirdly… not taco-shaped, more like cracker-shaped). The tuna was really good, albeit the base was a bit strange.
  • Gyu Niku Gyoza – aged beef dumplings with caramelised onion and yuzu, two of them per person. It was all right.
  • Ebi Chili – spicy king prawns and fried egg on kataifi noodles, mixed at the table. When we are talking spicy, it means… really spicy. The prawn bits were sizeable, but this was really something I would not miss should it disappear from the menu.
  • Toro Tartar No Temaki – tuna tartar prepared at the table: raw tuna belly mixed with Japanese onion, turnip, egg yolk, chilli pepper and wasabi on a bed of nori and rice so you can roll it yourself (spoiler: you really can’t). This was probably one of my favourite items – but I guess that after all I am a raw tuna fan.
  • Brie Nigiri – flamed Brie cheese nigiri with honey and walnuts. This was probably the weakest sushi bite, but it was still good.
  • Butter Fish Nigiri – butterfish nigiri with kimchi and chilli peppers. Butterfish is only good raw anyway.
  • Aburi Salmon Nigiri – flamed Norwegian salmon nigiri, with Japanese mayonnaise, salmon roe and onion. I still prefer raw salmon, but the flame was light so it was barely perceptible.
  • Maguro Tataki No Nigiri Trufa Nose – tuna tataki nigiri with soy and black truffle sauce. This was also really good.
  • Gyu Niku No Tataki – aged beef tataki with caramelised mushrooms and miso sauce. The combination of meat and the mushroom was strange, but when taken separately it was all good.
  • Caramel dorayaki – two halves of a dorayaki filled with salty caramel paste. Unexpected, because the menu listed something else, but it is not as if it was bad at all!

Chef's choice menu at Nomo Madrid

My sibling ordered some green tea out of the menu, and in the end, the drinks did not add as much to the price as I expected. Also, I have to give a shout-out to the pickled ginger we got. Really good.

After having lunch, we took a train towards the Museum of Dreamers, which is stands in Espacio Ibercaja Delicias, a place that seems to always look somewhat abandoned, even when it is stupidly hot and sunny. The exhibit was designed by sisters Elena and Giulia Sella, founders of Postology, an agency specialised in “phygigal” experiences. This concept merges the words “physical” and “digital”, allowing for a number of immersive and surreal experiences. The Museum of Dreamers is one of those things that you have to see with an open mind to have some fun. It comprises sixteen interactive installations which are basically photo-ops – after all, the word instagrammable has been officially accepted on dictionaries. I guess it is a new niche that can be exploited, and to be honest, I can get behind that, because some of these activities are hilarious.

Entry is timed, but they do not hold a very strict waiting policy – at least not on a Tuesday at 17:00 and 39 ºC. There were no timed exhibits or performances either. The first installation is a dark room with a starry sky of sorts, designed maybe to isolate the rest of the exhibition from the outside, maybe as a metaphor (100 Dreamers). Then you get to a semi open space that opens to the smaller installations that allow for fun pictures. All through the space there are motivational sentences and “rules” for safety in the different installation.

There is some kind of cosmic tube with mirror that was dizzying to walk into (Free your power), a tunnel made of hearts with an encouraging message at the end (Do what you love), an upside down room (Change perspective), an downside down bedroom with a giant plush and fun bed covers (Never stop dreaming), one full of disco lamps (Sparkle more), and a neon staircase flanked by colourful palm trees (Step by Step).

Museum of Dreamers exhibits

Afterwards, there is a ball pit – you know, it’s not like I had ever stepped into one before Friday, and now that’s twice in one week – with a “relaxing island” in the middle (Enjoy Today). In front of that, a tunnel made of fake pink flowers with a long table, set for a tea party (Believe in Magic). That managed to make you think of Alice in Wonderland imprint on your brain. Thus, you are in the right mindset for the following room, full of giant mushrooms and flowers that open up at will – theirs, for sure, not the visitors – whole giant butterflies hang around with their wings made out of lights (Wonder).

Museum of Dreamers exhibits

The final part of the exhibit consists on a second row of booths – a colour wheel, a door that opens to a fantasy scenery, a VR experience (Choose your Way), a stage (The stage is yours), some pink telephones (Your Dreams are Calling you), bright lights commanding you to DREAM (Be Bright)… There were two more rooms, one with a sky background and swings (Sky is not the limit), and the other with punching bags reading FEAR, STRESS, ANXIETY and so on (Never Give Up). I can’t punch, but I can strangle, so I choked the hell out of these last two.

Museum of Dreamers exhibits

That was the end of the escapade. It was a fun half-day out.

7th July 2023: Balloon Museum “Pop Air” in Madrid (Spain)

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Part of this summer’s plans involved a three-week French course-and-stay in Montpellier, but I ended up changing my mind – too many hidden costs on top of the already-steep price, and a generalised bad feeling that I could not really define. I decided to take a course in Madrid and use up the evenings to do some exploring in town.

After class, I booked a table at the Chueca shop of the Japanese restaurant chain Sibuya Sushi Bar, which claims to offer a new concept of sushi. Most of what they offer felt pretty normal to me, except some random baos and the desserts. I browsed the website before booking, so when I arrived I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted. Somehow, the waiter did not expect that and was thrown off track. I ordered some ebi furai and a sashimi mix – I have to admit that the size of the sashimi portion did surprise me a little, as I did not expect such a generous serving. Luckily, I had hold on ordering dessert, because the two dishes were more than enough.

Lunch at Sibuya Madrid

There were two temporary exhibits I wanted to check out, and I chose the one that closed down earlier. I checked as I had lunch, and there were tickets available online. I decided to take the underground and buy the tickets in person instead of stressing about making it on time for a particular timeslot. I reached the Balloon Museum on time for the 15:45 entry. The exhibition Pop Air runs from March to July 2023 in the Escenario Puerta del Ángel in Madrid’s Casa de Campo.

Still considered a noon slot, the exhibition was not too crowded at the time I entered, I even had a couple of rooms for myself before I reached a point in which you had to be admitted because the performance was timed. The Ballon Museum‘s Pop Air exhibit is a collection of art pieces that use air and light as their main vehicle.

Artworks:

  • The Goof by Filthy Luker (2021). They are a bunch of “friendly monsters” that observer the world feeding off surprise and happiness. They look… just adorable, as if they were made of giant inflated latex gloves in different colours with huge eyes.
  • Aria, The Breath Immersive Experience by Pepper’s Ghost (2022). A room full of mirrors and digitally-created colourful spheres that spreads to infinite and beyond.
  • Airship Orchestra by Eness (2020). More adorable creatures made out of air, some resembling Japanese peaches, other bunnies, or cacti.

    • Ballon Museum exhibits. The Goof, Aria, Airship orchestra

  • Hypercosmo by Hyperstudio (2021), which is basically a huge ball pit with a show of music and lights.
  • A Quiet Storm by Quiet Ensemble (2022). A dark room where cannons shoot bubbles.
  • Silenus by Max Streicher (2002). A giant, breathing… person… sleeping. It’s a bit creepy, to be honest.
  • Knot by Cyril Lancelin (2017). It is an inflatable… knot, literally a 3D knot made out of a tube.

    • Balloon Museum exhibits: Hypercosmo, A quiet storm, Silenis, Knot

  • Polyheadra by Karina Smigla-Bobinski (2022). It is a room full of balloons with small magnets which you can stick to the wall and the ceiling, and even to each other.
  • Never Ending Story by Motorefisico (2021). Music: Gentle Music by Plume (Netlabel). A lot of decorative balls in a small room full of mirrors and light.
  • Tholos by Plastique Fantastique (2022). A giant black ball surrounded by a plastic structure that imitates the archaeological tholos tombs.
  • Canopy by Pneuhaus & Bike Powered Events (2019). Four palm-tree-like structures that open up and glow if you bike them into life.

    • Balloon Museum Exhibits. Polyheadra, Never ending story, Tholos, Canopy

  • Cloud Swing by Lindsay Glatz with Curious Form (2019). Cute swings held by colourful “clouds” of light.
  • The GINJOS by Rub Kandy (2022). They’re blobs of air with eyes. When I saw them my first impression was “they’re squishy and unstable. I have found my people”. I also found the song hilarious, especially the reference that “GINJOS are not Barbapapa”.
  • Into the Rainbow by Ultravioletto. A VR experience out of which one cannot really take pictures. A white sphere travels through the colours of the rainbow and its symbols – orange candy, yellow rubber duckies, green trees, blue whales, purple… cows(?) and amethyst crystals
  • A number of cute photo booths for picture opportunities, without credit to any particular artist.
  • Parcobaleno by Stefano Rossetti (2020), is a large “inflatable park” for “all the family” (i.e. for kids), which was empty as it was way too hot for any playing.

Ballon Museum exhibits. The swings, the Ginjos, Parcobaleno

All in all, it was a really silly but fun experience. I headed back home afterwards, because even if exploring Casa de Campo is on my list, it was way too hot and I did not have any cold drinks on me. I made an amazing underground-train connection though, which was great because the Casa de Campo stop is pretty far away by public transport – and rather horrible to drive to.

15th April 2023: Madrid for Sweet Space Museum (Spain)

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My friend D****e and I met for a fast day packed with activities. We reached Madrid at 10:40 and had tickets to visit an interactive museum called Sweet Space. It markets itself as a “colourful experience which mixes sweets and modern art”. I just thought it would be a fun thing to do with a friend that would give into quirky pictures and a couple of hours of giggles. It actually fulfilled both. If you take the place seriously, it’s plainly not worth the visit – modern art in general is questionable at best, and this could be seen like a bit on the childish side – and regular tickets are 18 €. The place’s best-selling point is “get cool pics for your social media”, and we had decided to just be silly about it and enjoy ourselves.

The “museum”, located in the ABC Serrano shopping centre, gives the vibes of an oversized (maybe overpriced) playground, and just like Monasterio de Piedra, the number of people you encounter weighs a hugely in your experience. Although we had an 11:30 ticket, we were lucky enough to be admitted at 11:15 with a family that lost us on the third room, so we had quite a lot of time on our own, until the group that came afterwards caught up. We did take a lot of pictures, to be honest, and missed no opportunity to fool around – which was the mindset we had.

Since the museum’s flagship idea is mixing sweets and modern art, when you enter some of the rooms you are given a treat – a gummy or a piece of chocolate or a tiny bit of ice-cream. You cannot backtrack, so the route gets a bit weird at points – you go up to the second floor on stairs, but down using a slide… The museum has nine different rooms and a few of them are refurbished over time. Unfortunately, I forgot to track down the artists because it was stupidly fun – I mean, at one point I got to ride a carousel-style flamingo. Back in the day in the day, I would have never dared do such a thing, but I guess I’ve changed a little in the last ten years.

  • Room 1: Palm trees with marshmallow trunks (Antonyo Marest). This was a fun way to start the whole thing and set the mood. It is literally a room with tree trunks that look like colourful marshmallows, with leaves on top.
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  • Room 2 (corridor): Flowers in the dark – a dark room with bright plastic flowers. It was pretty, but probably the less surprising room.
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  • Room 3: Mirrors and hanging pink balloons, inspired by Tokyo’s TeamLab. It was hard to take a good picture that did not catch anyone’s reflection!
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  • Room 4 (corridor): Mirrors and neon graffiti (Álvaro Linares) with Star Wars inspired references. This was one of the coolest areas (though I’m not sure how… legal that Darth Vader painting would be). One of the sides had a throne-like chair you could sit on and feel like an evil mastermind.

Collage. Sweet Space museum. Palm trees whose trunks resemble marshmellows, neon-coloured flowers and grafitti, pink balloon-like lamps hanging in a mirror-wall room

  • Room 5: Ice-cream parlour “Töto Ice Cream”, including little kart and refrigerator you can step into, giving off a strong 1950’s aura. A lot of pink, I’d say – I did not dare walk into the fridge (for some reason it gave me the creeps), but D****e did; I “drove” the little kart instead. We took silly pictures there with the installed iPad camera, just for the hell of it.
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  • Room 6: Fairytale landscape (Christian Escribá and Patricia Schmidt), a-la Hansel and Gretel or Alice in Wonderland (though it was officially inspired by Wizard of Oz), with a swing and flamingo that you can ride. When I saw that one online, I really, really hoped that it was not only one of those things that only influencers get to do. I got to ride the flamingo. I don’t know why it drew me so much, maybe it was the pure surrealism of it all, but it made me giddy. The rest of the room was fun too – oversized mushrooms, teddy-bears, and colourful decoration.
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  • Room 7 (upstairs): Sky with clouds (Agatha Ruiz de la Prada) painted and carved into sliding doors, a starry rocket (Ivanna Gautier), a bouncing area, a mural where you could take a 3D video for TikTok, and a “planetarium”, with tiny lamp-robots and tons of stars made from light dots. I liked this last one a lot, too. In order to leave the floor and go back to the lower floor, you have to go down a spiral slide, which I was not a fan of – it was difficult to get into it without putting weight on my bad wrist. However, I managed to go down unscathed.
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  • Room 8 (Misterpiro): It held a ball pit with a “staircase to heaven” (or to nowhere). We did not go into the pit, but we climbed the stairs for pictures too.

Collage - fantasy worlds from Sweet Space museum. Overgrown mushrooms, a flamingo, a cloud, a universe made out of green neon dots with a little robot peering out, a cartoonish rocket in front of a starry background, a colourful ballpit full of white balls.

Finally, we reached the shop, where we purchased the pictures we had taken at the ice parlour (8 € for two magnets with four photographs, the downloadable version, and a gif). We were supposed to get a sweet in each room, and we ended up with three or four gummies, a chocolate, and a tiny scoop of ice cream. My favourite was the skull-shaped sweet&sour gummy we got upstairs, but they did not have it at the shop (though it is advertised online). The whole experience was a bit on the expensive side, but I had a discount that helped knock 10 € off the official price. The recommended time I had seen recommended for the museum was an hour and a half, but even if we took a long time, we were done in about an hour.

I had reserved lunch at 14:30 based on the time I expected us to be in the museum (and the availability of the restaurant), so we had some time to kill. We walked by the open-air museum of modern sculpture Museo de Escultura al Aire Libre de La Castellana, but it did not catch our fancy. Too much modern art in one day?

The place we would invest most of that extra time was the museum of Natural History Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales to see some dinosaurs and the gabinete de curiosidades, the 18th and 19th century collection of taxidermy specimens. I’d been there before, and it mostly has replicas (and holy molly, prices have gone up). This time there was an exhibit on the Moon landing, and the gardens had been open. The taxidermy collection is not as good as other museums, but at least it got us out of the heat.

Collage. Dinosaur fossil casts and reconstructions, both carnivores and long-neck herbivores. A flying reptile with some mammooth fossils in the background. Rocks. The old collection dating from the 19th century - a number of glass cases with people looking at them and a painting of king Carlos III overlooking the place.

We left the museum and headed for lunch at one of the franchised establishments of New York Burger, which markets itself as a “gourmet burger” place. It was all right, and the servings were huge. After lunch, we hung around the area known as Nuevos Ministerios, a complex originally designed by Secundino Zuazo Ugalde around 1930. We hung out under the eastern archway for a while.

The archway in Nuevos Ministerios, built in reddish brick and white plaster

Afterwards, we took the train to Alcalá de Henares. We stopped at one of the shopping centres just outside town, Quadernillos, where the comic event Krunch! 2023 was taking place. We did not stay for long as most stands sold bootleg and plagiarised stuff, and I did not find any legit shop, but we had ice cream and D****e did take the chance to do some shopping in the mall before we headed home for the evening.

20th November 2022: Naturaleza Encendida – Origen (Real Jardín Botánico, Madrid, Spain)

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It seems that the Madrid exhibits in the month of December are not being the most successful ones – this time, the weather did not help. After ten day’s worth of rain, it cleared out, but then, on Tuesday, the skies opened yet again. It was raining like there was no tomorrow by the time my train got to Madrid. Boo.

Just after sunset, my sibling and I went to the botanical garden Real Jardín Botánico to see the light show Naturaleza Encendida: Origen (Lit-up Nature: Origins). There had been some issues about the promoter cancelling the activity due to rain with little advance notice, so they decided not to close it. They instead resorted to close parts of the exhibit at random, and herding all the visitors in the same corridors, despite the puddles forming on the uneven ground. After two weeks of rain, something should have been done about it. Moreover, a few of the exhibits were turned off – not sure if just off or high wired. I wish I had some good boots, because I ended up pretty soaked, despite the raincoat and the umbrella. At least I did not ended up in a random puddle.

In 2021, the topic was sea life, and in 2022 the topic is… mushrooms. So there were spores, moulds and… mushrooms. Big mushrooms with lights, or made with small lights, or… just blown with hot air. Lots of mushrooms. The music was a bit creepy though, even if the mushrooms lit up and down with the beat. There is also an exhibit about moulds, with huge screens showing pictures of spores and microorganisms under the microscope.

Most people were antsy and cranky in the rain, and everybody wanted you to move out of the way – in different directions at the same time. A really good thing about it was the cup of hot chocolate that we had booked with the ticket. It was really nice to get in the middle of the cold and rain because it was warm and sweet. We drank it on our way out to the train, and just as we stepped out of the botanical garden… it just stopped raining.

Light display collage: on the upper left, giant red spores; on the lower left a wavy line of lights. On the right, a giant bunch mushrooms illuminated in green from inside the umbrella

Collage of lights display. A mushroom made of little yellow and white lights; a bunch of name mushrooms in red; a hanging mould-like string of lights between two dark trees

All in all, I was not too impressed. I really think that the organisers should have figured out something about the cancellations and the pathways, since they obviously could not do anything about the weather. My favourite display were the “Baymax mushrooms”, even if most of them had lost their illumination, which was actually kind of the point…

A blow-up mushroom made from plastic, looking like it's floating. The lights inside make it glow green and pink. In the background there is a building gate in red, and a pond between the two.

6th December 2022: Tim Burton’s Labyrinth (Madrid, Spain)

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Despite having decided that immersive exhibits were not for me and the fact that I’m not a Tim Burton fan, here I found myself in Madrid to see this one: Tim Burton’s Labyrinth El Laberinto de Tim Burton. Truth be told, I was only there because my sibling asked me to accompany them. I did not find premium tickets for any of the dates either of us was available, but the 6th of December is a national holiday in Spain, and I calculated that if we were there at opening times it might not be too busy, and we would not come across too many kids.

Tim Burton is an American film-maker born in 1958. His first “hit” may have been Stalk of the Celery Monster, which he wrote, directed and animated when he was a student in the California Institute of Arts, in 1979. It presumably earned him a good grade, but more importantly, an animator’s apprenticeship at Disney Animation Studios. With time, he developed a shrill eerie style, with lots of colours and creepy designs that have increased as years have passed, sometimes defined as “gothic fantasy” – I would refer to it as strident and macabre at times, to be honest. His greatest or most famous works include Beetlejuice, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Edward Scissorhands, The Nightmare before Christmas, and the first two Batman films.

The exhibition is hosted in a weird place in Madrid, Espacio Ibercaja Delicias, which might look less… abandoned… when it hasn’t been raining for days, I guess. The space consists on a big tent – where we were not going, it might be designed for circuses or so, some kind of bar / cafeteria, and the monster-like building that hosts the exhibit. It is called a labyrinth because out of the thirty-ish wards, you have to go around choosing doors to see different rooms of the exhibit, insomuch that you would need four rounds to see the complete thing. In the end, you choose 15 rooms to see, out of which some are common, and you reach them from whichever previous place you were in. Others are “less common” and you can reach them through several doors, but not all. You enter the labyrinth through a toothy monster’s mouth, then there’s a big button that “decides” on the first room for you.

Collage: exterior of the Labyrinth, which looks like a one-eyed tentacle monster, and the inner entrance monster whose mouth is the curtain you have to cross to enter the different rooms.

In the rooms there are sculptures that represent the characters, some of them with the original clothes that were designed for them (if the film is a live-action), the plain clothes, and on the walls sketches and animations, some original, some “inspired”, and some made specifically for the exhibit. Some rooms are small and rather empty, others are decorated like the movie sets. There are tricks with lights, and some mirrors, but nothing “immersive” about it, and way too many people around considering the size of some rooms.

The idea of a labyrinth is interesting, but I don’t think the price warrants just seeing half of the exhibit, especially considering the big “misses” of not seeing all the The Nightmare before Christmas. We took about 40 – 45 minutes to go through the 15 rooms.

What I am aware we saw included:

  • Beetlejuice
  • Edward Scissorhands
  • Batman and Batman returns
  • Mars attacks!
  • Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
  • Alice in Wonderland or Alice Through the Looking Glass
  • Corpse Bride
  • Frankenweenie
  • Jack from The Nightmare before Christmas

Collage of Tim Burton's characters: Batman's Pengun, Edward Scissorhands, Emily from Corpse Bride

Collage of Tim Burton's characters: Alien from Mars Attack; the clothing from the Chocolatier (I think) in Charlie and the Chocolate factory, surrounded by twirling candy canes; Beetlejuice

Collage of Tim Burton's characters: Jack from The Nightmare before Christmas; The Mad Hatter from Alice in Wonderland, with some giant mushrooms behind; the boy and the dog of Frankenweenie

I think this is an exhibit for die-hard fans that are willing to pay for the premium ticket and see the whole thing twice. What it’s not, and that’s for sure, is for kids.

On both ways, we had some train trouble – delays and technical problems, but nothing too dramatic, and I was home before sunset – but after buying a stack of Christmas candy canes! And my sibling enjoyed, which was the goal anyway.

30th November 2021: Naturaleza Encendida – Explorium. Royal Botanical Garden in Madrid (Spain)

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After being in semi-lock down last year, my sibling, who loves Christmas lights, asked me to accompany them to the Real Jardín Botánico, the botanical garden in Madrid. The Botanical garden was founded in 1755, adjacent to the planned museum of Natural Science, which would later become the art gallery Prado Museum. Today, it is a research centre. The garden is divided into four terraces, a main building (Edificio Villanueva), and a back terrace, and it serves as museum of live plants of sorts.

For the last few years (at least three that I’m aware), the botanical garden has spiced up its winter downtime with light shows and displays. This year, the display is called “Lit Nature: Explorium”: Naturaleza Encendida: Explorium by the company Let’s go. The topic is ocean explorers and exploration, spread throughout the three main terraces and an extra exhibit in the building.

In order to have flexibility, I got us Premium tickets in case we needed to cancel last minute, which had the extra advantage that spared us from any queues, as we had full-access between 18:00 and 19:00. We also got to see the extra exhibit without paying extra. I drove up to a mid-way train station that allowed me better schedule flexibility – and my sibling lives close-by so it gave us the option to have dinner afterwards. I took the first train and we met at the botanical garden station at 17:30. We wandered around for a little while we waited until twilight faded, and we got in, avoiding all the lines – I did a bit of astronomy maths when planning this, regarding latest sunset and shortest twilight.

The exhibit is organised so you are free to wander around each terrace, but you can only cross from the lower to the upper terraces upwards, you cannot backtrack, in order to control capacity and people in each area. It only felt a bit crowded at a couple of points, mostly around the checkpoints, as it was very difficult to hear the staff.

The whole display has thousands of little blue LEDs to get you on the ‘ocean’ scenery. The first terrace sets the mood – there are Christmas-tree looking build-ups and different types of colour-changing sculptures: turtles, pufferfish, and sea horses. The second focuses on laser and smoke, and reflection displays, and some serious-looking grouper. On the third, where the building stands, there is a little pond from where a few gigantic tentacles rise, and jellyfish hanging from the trees. The exhibit in the building itself is similar to the projections done by Team Lab.

Collage. A garden lit up at night, with different shapes: pufferfish, seahorses, a turtle... The trees and bushes are decorated with thousands of tiny blue leds

Collage. Light flashes in a dark garden, along with a colour gouper fish

Collage. Huge tentacles coming out of a pond, illuminated in red and blue; and blue jellyfish lamps hanging from trees

Collage. Light effects repeating the same patterns: a pineapple, a thisle, a khaki

We wandered around for a couple of hours, and believe me or not… the lights went out at some point! This was like climbing up (rope-way-ing up, to be honest) aaall the way up to see Nagasaki’s lights from Inasayama and getting caught in the clouds, but fortunately shorter (≧▽≦).

We left the botanical garden and took a train back. There were a few places to grab a bite around the station, so we ended up at a cosy Italian place and shared some stuff – too much to then grab some dessert though. When we left it was so cold that my car gave me the first heart attack of the winter by bleeping and showing me an orange alarm in the dashboard that means “the roads might be frosty” but scares me to death whenever I see it for the first time in the winter season. I drove off home, had a shower, went straight into work at 23:00 because how was I going to manage a free Tuesday evening without consequences?

Final waking distance: 8.50 km (though I really think that the wristband confuses my stress-driving with activity.