Madrid

Madrid was a very arty stop for us, including a number of museums and galleries, plus awesome food!

We reached Madrid on time (early even!) and walked the 5 mins to our accommodation, an upmarket hostel next to the main train station called La Troupe. It’s also near some of the big museums and since we are leaving again by train it seemed like a good option. Our private room was on the fourth floor and had windows on three sides, giving views of the train station, traffic, and the Reine Sofia museum.

Our first afternoon we checked out a dedicated GF cafe for a sandwich snack, then went for a walk around the neighbourhood, hitting the Farmacia for some cough medicine (I’d picked up R’s cold). Later we took a taxi to the Chueca area to visit another GF tapas joint, LaLina, which had all the delightful tapas dishes I’d been missing out on. We tried the goat cheese croquettes and the cuttlefish ones, the artichokes and crispy crumbed chicken with patatas bravas. Delicious! We walked back to the hostel, passing a local bellydance school, unfortunately shut.

The next day I was pretty happy we’d picked up the cough medicine as the cold took hold! We visited a couple of the big museums – la Reine Sofia, which had a bunch of Picasso and Dali paintings that were amazing to see, and then the Prado, which is home to a lot of Bosch, Goya, Titian, Rubens, and Velasquez. No photos allowed though. I was pretty dead by this point so we had a bite to eat at a little sandwich cafe near the vertical garden and headed back to the hostel for a siesta.

Day Two was more culture, with a visit to the Museo del Trajes, the costume museum, which was a delight of historical and more recent clothing.

We then popped into an exhibition by fashion designer Ana Locking, who we knew from her judging of Drag Race Espana, but she is also a huge name in Spain for art and social criticism. The exhibition was housed in a fabulous former water tower of a building, Sala Canal de Isabel II, and had display rooms as well as hundreds of manikins in various poses around the four storeys.

We took a walk to another game shop, Goblin Trader, where I picked up some more dice, and then headed for a siesta, as we had tickets to a show with Pupi Poisson, a Drag Race Espana alum, in the evening.

Dinner was at our fave LaLina tapas bar, this time leaving just enough room to try their desserts (my pick was the lemon tart, but R adored the chocolate courant.) The drag show was just around the corner so we wandered a bit before heading there and availing ourselves of the merch for sale. Pupi was mixing with the crowd before the show and graciously allowed us a selfie and an autograph, and shouted out to the Australians a few times during the show. Luckily one of the punters nearby was generous enough to explain a few times what was going on!

It was a small venue and a relatively small crowd of maybe 50 attendees, so we were up close! I tried out my new Loop Experience earplugs to see if it helped me cope with being right next to the speakers and it was great – the only thing was that they made me talk quietly when I was trying to say something to R! The smoke machine wasn’t great for my throat though so we stuck to the back for the second half of the show.

After the show we thanked Pupi for her performance and chatted with a few superfans who had been there taking lots of photos, and then headed back to the hostel for our last night in Madrid.