Madrid!!!!

Entirely failed on the blogging front recently.  Mostly cause I was either half cut on cheap Spanish Rosado (3 Euros a litre, tastes like the £9 a bottle crap they have over here) or internet deprived.  Rest of my time in La Bisbal was lovely, spent saturday having drinks with some Spanish fancies.  Apparently La Bisbal is quite the place to have a country house if you are a Barcelona fancy.  There was a woman at the party who lived in one of those Gaudi houses in Barcelona, why did she live their?  Cause she commissioned it.  Like I said, fancy (side note: she was amazing and looked like a photo from an Art History book of one of those eccentric millionaires who spent the entire 1930s hanging with Picasso and commissioning great works of art).  Also present at the party was a spanish/american lesbian who presents the weather on CNN, she was also amazing.  But for different reasons.

Whole weekend came to a crashing end with the overnight train from Girona to Madrid.  The fast train takes 3 hours, the slow train 11.  11!!!!!  AAAAHHHHHHHHH.  I can vouch for it as well because I was awake for every one of them ... lying on a metal plank in a room the size of a lift with 5 middle aged Spanish men snoring, farting and pespiring their way through the night.  I lay hugging my rucksack through fear of theft on a 'bed' a foot too short for me drifting in and out of 'sleep'.  Wish I'd been a bit more British about it and just marched up and down the corridor of the train in my nightie and dressing gown swilling gin and demanding a shower.  WWSLD (What Would Shaunagh Latymer DO?  My new inspiration for life).

Worth it though ... Madrid is amazing, has everything London has without the tedious 45 minute journeys between it all.  Drury summed it up the best: 'I'm not sure I like it here: I look at my sister's life in Denver and she goes hiking and biking, throws dinner parties and has a nice time with her friends and thats what I want.  All everybody does here is smoke, drink and party'.  I think I've found home.  One word of warning ... if you go see the Thyssen-Bornemisza collection (http://www.museothyssen.org/thyssen_ing/home.html) then once they've scanned your ticket go immediately left to the end of the exhibition and see the good art.  Save yourself an hour of tedium and miss out the top two floors.  You'll miss a couple of great paintings but you'll also miss a billion terrible ones.  That woman wouldn't know a good painting if you beat her with one.  Although to be fair I guess it would be quite hard to appreciate a painting if someone was beating you about the head with it.  Some of the art was so ugly I swung wildly between laughter and terror.  The gallery itself is also HIDEOUS.  HIDEOUS.  I was trying to illustrate this with one of the ugly pictures from the collection but for SOME reason they're not on the website so I went for one of the more impressive ones.  If you're a billionaire and a Sergent is one of the most impressive paintings in your collection then you done wrong.  Back in London now, thank God.  Yes the world is an exciting and diverse place of wonder and excitement but its wasted on me.  Give me London any day.  Its good to be back.