Something a little less dreary

I woke up early on Saturday to explore some. In the park near my hostel there is an ancient Egyptian temple, more than twenty-two centuries old. It was presented as a gift to Spain in 1968 for Spain's assistance in rescuing other Egyptian ruins from destruction by the erosion of the riverbanks they were built on. Today it contains a museum dedicated to itself, which can be perused with a satisfying degree of comprehensiveness in about twenty minutes. What is much more remarkable than the information in the museum is the way the setting sun glows on the stones, and its reflected image in the reflection pool that completely surrounds it. I returned later in the day to experience this.

After the Temple of Debod, I meandered through central Madrid on my way to the Royal Botanical Gardens. I could smell the garden from the street, which was pretty cool. It doesn't contain much in the way of flowers, or they aren't open presently, but it does have something like 5000 other types of plants from bamboo to Sequoia from California. I saw a very small pine tree with its own security camera, which was curious. A placard explained that it was a species of Australian pine that was believed to have been extinct for the last few million years, and having been discovered in unpetrified form in 1994 is incredibly rare. Also interesting was the greenhouse along one side of the gardens, which has several enclosures of different climates: desert, subtropical, tropical, and super wet. An exhibition of bonsai trees was on display, which was naturally quite excellent. If I understood correctly, they are normal trees that are painstakingly pruned over long periods of time so that they reach mature form in extreme miniature. A fellow student here has referred me to a website that details an analogous process that can be applied to kittens. The Internet is mean to cats.

After some further aimless meandering, I met up with some friends to get some food and enjoy "La Noche en Blanco," which literally means the "night in white" but equates to pulling an all-nighter. It was some sort of cultural event in which all the museums opened for special exhibits all from 9:30 pm to 6 am on Sunday, and many other events and exhibitions and culture things all over the city happened, too. There were 117 things to do in total. We had picked a couple we were going to try out, only to discover that everyone was participating. No hyperbole: there were hundreds of thousands of people on every street, several million in all. The metro was congested to a ridiculous degree. The streets were literally full of people. It's difficult to describe. We didn't do any of the events we had planned, but we enjoyed several of the gargantuan light-art exhibits. One was a tower in which all the lights in all the windows were on and constantly changed colors to form different patterns. Another involved projecting some sort of bizarre image on a gothic castle thing, which was reminiscent of watching bacteria undergo mitosis in time-lapse photography. It was pretty awesome. So instead of the museums we were going to hit up, we just got caught up in the extreme energy of the mob and we went bar hopping, at the conclusion of which occurred the misadventure previously chronicled on this site.

I got three hours of sleep after the sun came up on Sunday, then got up to spend the afternoon in the Museo del Prado. I felt a little guilty about hitting up the bars instead of taking advantage of the cultural offerings of the city, and the national museums are free on Sundays, so it was a natural choice. Prado is full of neat art, and it is all very old. By the late afternoon I was pretty cultured-out, so I bummed some Internet at the apartment of a friend of mine and did some homework. Then I slept for a long time. It was a long and eventful weekend. Pictures forthcoming.