Day: October 10, 2026

My feet were pretty worn out after the Reina Sofia, but I only have this one day for museums. So first there was a short break for a lunch.

On the corner across the street from the new wing, there’s Cafeteria Pando with outdoor seating. It seemed to be about half locals and half tourists. The dark sardines are oil preserved and the white ones are pickled in a vinegar brine. Very yummy!

But I still have two and a half more hours until the Museo Arqueológico Nacional closed, so I decided to squeeze in another museum visit.

And then even though I was on a roundabout with several buses, I wasn’t sure, even if I found one going to the Archaeological museum, how to pick ones heading in the right direction – because roundabout. And it was a short distance, but would require two transfers to get there by subway. So I took a taxi.

 Museo Arqueológico Nacional https://www.man.es/man/home.html

I was looking with a particular interest in a few research projects:

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Look at this bronze sculpture! Do these look like sleeves to you? Not from draping rectangles and no evidence of as assist from cords tying into place. I think they might be sleeves.

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And then after all that culture, I needed another snack!

A small salad, a sesame bagel with cream cheese, a Lebanese flatbread with honey and zaatar, and a juice concoction.

Magasand Cafe was one of the only reasonably priced restaurants in the neighborhood of the archaeological museum – a neighborhood also full of designer boutiques like the Loeve store, all of them way out of my tax bracket.

This cafe is mostly sandwiches and art magazines. So I ordered a salad! It was an excellent salad, filling and well balanced. I also took a chance and ordered a bagel since they dared to put it on the menu. It was not the platonic ideal of bagel, but way better than I was expecting. Better than most bagels I’ve tried to eat in Boston.

But the most intriguing thing was the Lebanese flatbread with honey and zaatar.

It did not taste traditional to me, but it did complement the salad very well.

I promised you a picture of where I’m staying. Here’s the lovely open space in the middle of the stairs in the middle of the house. Luckily (especially for an AirBNB), it’s only up one flight of stairs.

Went to a comfy looking cafe a block away from the place I’m staying. I had a savory 4 cheese flaky pastry with pepitos on top. There was also a thin smear of pizza sauce inside that elevated the tastiness. And then the sweet pastry was a pistachio croissant. An excellent use for the pistachio butter that is now so much more available since the Dubai Chocolate debut. These should catch on more places – it was excellent. The tea was a Darjeeling.

Then it was off to the Museo Reina Sofía to catch one of the last days of their Felix Gonzalez-Torres exhibit. I’d heard about his work, but I’d never seen it before

I’m going to list some relevant Youtube links because the embedding isn’t working right now and I’ll play with that later

Two museum guards interacting with a pile of silver candies

Okay, so the candy sculptures are all both untitled and have names. They are all an infinite supply that you can take from, but they also all have an ideal weight (or ideal height, or original weight). 

List of candy sculptures (here)

I’d been wondering how this would go because the last time I was in Madrid, I went to the contemporary art museum and saw their display for Steal This Book with a guard to tell you not to even think about stealing one of their many copies.

There were three of the candy installations in this exhibit. The blue ones had a room all to themselves right when you enter the gallery. It’s a beautiful room, well suited to making this feel significant. There are three kids arguing when I get in that you really can take the candy and then grabbing a fistful. A guard comes over – with another guard, and they are like, “Yes, you can take them, but please maybe just two per person.” But even better was that they then had a long conversation (of which I didn’t catch any) about the exhibit and the artist that looked very serious and a little intimidating to the kids.

The room with the liquorice candy was still pretty full and nearly square to the corners. I suspect that’s specifically because of the unpopularity of the flavor.

And then there was the silver wrapped candy that looked especially… huddled into the corner. But just as I was thinking that, two of the security guards went up to it and filled up their pockets. This was the only one I took from because I figured the guards must know which one was the tastiest. I was amused watching the curator’s video above talking about the trust between exhibit and curator, and I clearly do not trust very much at all. But especially not when his interactive sculptures are …semioticly complex.

There were also eight to eleven paper stacks (I didn’t count).

And several strings of lightbulbs in various configurations, including one square with a paired set of headphones with an mp3 player for partner dancing (tenets). And curtains of fabric (on windows) and beads (dividing rooms). The walls, and tucked into the corners of window niche, had newspaper / magazine clippings. And several other forms.

After that exhibit, I slipped into the museum’s garden in the interior courtyard and had a tuna pastry and a bottle of water.

The museum as a whole seemed like a good home for this temporary exhibit. They had works by Picasso and Dalí and Miro. But the works were incorporated into a framework that addressed the rise of cubism and surrealism as a political movement.