Madrid wanderings

 02 January 2021

Met up with a friend to hang out in Madrid today. The streets are mostly deserted until mid afternoon, as it's the norm here to stay up late and get up late. We had the streets mostly to ourselves until around 3:30pm, when we decided to call it a day and head home as it began to feel too crowded.

We started at Plaza del Sol, popping in at a favorite ecotienda or natural food shop, where I found what I believe to be US style cornmeal. Until now, I had only seen polenta, which is a much coarser grind, and corn flour, which is a much finer grind. Beans and cornbread, here I come!

We then decided to have brunch at Federal Café, a casual restaurant which serves full breakfast fare, including pancakes and a number of egg dishes. A typical breakfast in Spain is coffee with toast, so breakfast/brunch places tend to be popular with the expat crowd. I was hungry and didn't remember to take a photo of my plate, sorry not sorry!

Here are some sights from along the way. As those of you who have been following my blog are probably aware, I love architectural details, especially doors and manhole covers. This one, found right by the Noviciado metro station entrance, says "GAS". 

This building is currently in use as a Presbyterian church, but what fabulous Moorish style brickwork! As you can see from this photo, we had some sunshine in the morning. The difference between sun and shade feels quite stark in winter. Temperatures are dropping below freezing at night and not warming up all that much during the day, especially if there is any wind at all, so it was so nice to feel the warmth of the sun.

We passed by this bakery called "Resposteria Perruana" and we were remarking on how cute and colorfully iced the Christmas cookies were... and then I realized the whole shop is actually dog biscuits! Just goes to show that there is a market for anything.

We decided to walk there without using Google Maps, so we just followed any street that looked interesting, like this one.

At the other end of the alley was this building with great Art Deco style brickwork.

After brunch, we decided to wander around some more without a fixed destination. This facade of a (shop? restaurant? church?) is done in hand painted ceramic tiles, old and dirty but you can still see how fine they are. I hope someday they will be cleaned and restored, what a beauty.

Here is a closer view:

Another architectural feature that I saw several of today is the wooden mini facade installed directly into the portico of a stone block building. The restaurant goes back to 1983, but I suspect the woodwork is much older. Unfortunately, this photo came out very dark and does not do the details justice.

This is a closeup of the too-dark doorway on the right hand side in the above shot. Here you can see the stained glass window and the wonderful wooden carving.

There are some really cute and creative gingerbread dioramas in some of the bakeries.

This one even has a gingerbread train and railroad tracks, so cute!

This new sweet shop near Chueca called chök is tiny but exquisite.

They had a selecion of artesanal chocolate bars, candies, and truffles, including several vegan options.

They also had a fantastic array of beautifully decorated doughnuts, cupcakes, and individual size cakes, also with some vegan choices.

At Chueca, barely visible behind the station in the below photo, is a new vegan grocery store called Only Vegan. I didn't take a photo, but we went inside and their selection of vegan "meats" and "seafood" was the best I have seen here so far.

 

 

And from there, we popped into the metro and went home. A decent day of wandering, in my opinion.