On today’s agenda: The Museum
of the Americas, highly recommended by a curator and friend at the Denver Art
Museum (DAM).
Our centrally located Airbnb flat
in Lavapiés has allowed us to thus far skip the subway. We’ve walked to every
major Madrid museum. But today, we make to bravely travel farther afield
(splitting infinitives as we go), beginning by venturing onto the Metro. We
enter the underground system at our local entrance — Lavapiés. We buy tickets, paying
for three of us, although the mega-gates for luggage and wheelchairs open following
one swipe of my ticket. Good thing that we’re honest people, and pay for us
all, eh?
Descending into the subway, we
take the yellow line six stops to Moncloa. We find Madrid’s subway to be very
nice, clean and brightly colored, by far outshining Barcelona’s. The trains
don’t run as often, though. Here the train appears every six minutes while in
Barcelona one stops by every three.
Leaving the subway, we cross
a busy street, walk through a college campus and eventually see our quarry up
on a hill. Gazing ahead, we find The Museum of the Americas not in the best of
shape, looking as though it could use some exterior renovation. Bricks and
mortar have worn thin, and the grounds are unkempt; to enter, we circle past
many barred and shuttered doors to the only open one. We convince Bear he’s
foraging.
Entering, we discover, as
foretold, a unidirectional museum with displays entirely in Spanish. We begin with
Columbus discovering the New World. I stick with Bloodroot this time so that he
can help me with my translations. The small museum has significantly less stuff
than the DAM. We find this wonderful and considerably less overwhelming. Numerous
small statures refreshingly depict sex as a normal part of our existence. Some
of the sculptures depict people copulating, at times, men with men.
Unfortunately, we find no artwork showing women with women. Bet the Church
didn’t like this. Have fun on earth? Heaven forbid!
For the grand finale, the
museum displays their most prized possession, one of the three surviving Maya
codices. I see a comic book-esque series of pictures with boxed-in captions in ancient
Mayan, written on deer skin and involving lots of dragons. Can I make heads or
tails out of it? No, but I’m excited that Diego de Landa, the Hitleresque
Spanish bishop who tortured the Maya, didn’t burn everything. Ironically, de
Landa preserved much Maya knowledge we have today as he fluently spoke the
language and wrote about the Maya world in Spanish, before embarking upon his
orgy of destruction. (For more on de Landa, copy and paste into your browser: http://theunion4ever.com/1000-centuries-of-death/diego-de-landa/)
Returning to the Metro, we
travel two stops toward home on the yellow line again, exiting the subway at Ventura
Rodriguez. Leaving the station, we head over to the Temple of Debod; Egypt gave
Franco an actual Egyptian Temple to reciprocate for Spain’s assistance in moving
the Egyptian Abu Simbel temple imperiled by the construction of the Aswan dam. Bloodroot
enters the Temple and checks it out, finding it pretty cool. Unfortunately for Bear
and me, everywhere we look we find stairs, small rooms and tiny doors. Bird
says no way! Bear enters the Temple, looking for access for me. He returns,
declaring it impossible.
While we’re waiting for Bloodroot
the clouds begin to sprinkle. Perhaps moved by his goat-like instincts,
Bloodroot senses now as the time to quit the temple and rejoins us. We return
to the metro and head home. We put on our raincoats to get to the subway, a
good move. Unfortunately, when we exit
at Lavapiés we eschew raincoats, deciding we can make it home. This turns out
to be a tactical error.
But was our DAM curator Donna
right? Was the museum and codex worth the soaking we received? Absolutely! Although
I could be drier!
Returning to our flat, we dry
off and hang our clothes to dry. (Spain has no clothes dryers.) The boys fix a
nice meal. Warm, full and dry, we turn in for the night.
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