El Retiro

After a breakfast we strolled over to the Retiro and joined the queue of regulars at the boating lake just as it was opening at ten, which turned out to be a good idea as the ‘Estanque Grande’ was heaving with boaters by the time we were relaxing with our con leches under the trees just an hour or so later. We visited the Crystal Palace and browsed the secondhand bookstalls before retiring ourselves to the Café El Brillante for a couple of their famed – and really quite large – calamari bocadillos to set ourselves up for an afternoon onslaught on the Museo Reina Sofia. It might seem churlish to complain about an over-abundance of art but you really have to pace yourself: we enjoyed the prints by Kathe Kollwitz and Jose Posada, went to see ‘Guernica’ and the big Calder mobile in the garden and then kind of drifted around (some of) the rest before heading off in search of more coffee. In the evening we went for a drink in the Plaza Mayor and then to the Cine Capital on the Gran Via to see ‘Alcarras’, a Catalan film about peach farmers (but far better than that description makes it sound – apparently it had been dubbed into castellano, not that I understood much of the dialogue anyway but there was still lots to enjoy about it) before eating some fish and failing to find a late bar on the way home…