When I was in Greece, earlier this month, I decided to do something new: Nothing.
I tried a 'normal' beach vacation for a day, at a (reasonably) nice vacation resort. Sunbathing at the beach, reading a book, maybe go into the water for a bit.
When attempting that, I got bored much more quickly than I expected to do. And then tried to fill the rest of the day doing something. Anything at all. In an area that I had specifically selected to offer nothing exciting to do.
Learning from that, I made sure that I had some activity booked for Madrid. Actually, I did the booking while still being in Greece.
The activity I booked was a Via Ferrata tour.
I did try a Via Ferrata the previous year in Italy. I liked the experience, but the 'going up and up and up' bit of that caused me problems.
After a short search, I found a Via Ferrata in Spain that was mostly a horizontal traverse.
All the excitement of doing a Via Ferrata, without all the effort of climbing up mountains.
Seemed perfect to me.
And on a Sunday morning, I found myself all geared up, close to an old hydroelectric station in Cuenca.
The Via Ferrata followed a small river, which went through a gorge between two rock faces.
According to the guide, the gorge was there first (due to some geological shifting) and the river took advantage of that. It wasn't like the Grand Canyon, where the canyon was created due to erosion by the river.
As I had hoped, the Via Ferrata was nice and easy.
Most of it was well 'stapled'.
And the parts that didn't have staples usually had obvious rock ledges to stand on.
We had arrived at the Via Ferrata at a good time.
There was a medium-sized group ahead of us. And, as groups do, they didn't move fast.
Which meant that we could take it nice and slow. And I, as a beginner, didn't feel the need to hurry up in order not to hold anyone back. (And the next group came about a quarter of an hour after us, so we had a comfortable gap behind us.)
It also meant I could do the (short) zipline.
As the guide explained, most groups can't do the zipline, as it takes a lot of time.
Obviously, not the ziplining itself. But the activity can only be done by one person at a time. And you need to change your 'climbing set-up', put the 'rollers' on the zipline, attach the harness properly. And then, at the end, change it all back (without dropping anything). Which might take three minutes to five minutes per person. If you're with a dozen people, you might block the zipline for an hour and everyone gets half an exciting minute on the zipline. And an hour standing/hanging around, waiting.
The group ahead of us bypassed the zipline, which meant we could use it.
Ziplines are always fun. And this had an unusual configuration.
There were two cables, side by side. One, the actual zipline, for the rollers. And the second one for clipping in a short web sling. Partly to keep you from turning (you want to arrive at the end of the line with your legs pointing forward), but also to control your speed. Pull on the sling, increase the friction, slow down.
After the zipline, we followed the 'climbing sections' of the Via Ferrata again.
For most of it, we weren't more than maybe 20 or 30 meters above the river, which made parts of it unusually interesting, as there sometimes was the need to pay attention to vegetation (on the Via Ferrata in Italy, the trees were far below and didn't bother you...)
As already mentioned, there were also bits that didn't have 'staples' for your feet and you needed to use the bare rock instead.
Then it was back to 'normal' Via Ferrata 'steps'.
And back to bare rock.
The picture makes it look a bit like I was only two meters above the river. That's misleading...
While the next one looks slightly like I am holding on to the rock with half of my left toe. (In fact, I am standing on one of the staples, but my feet happen to be positioned in a way that hides it.)
A few steps down, a few steps up, the track continues.
A short while later, we came to a corner and had to stop.
The group ahead of us was moving slowly and there was a bit of a 'traffic jam'.
I asked the guide whether it meant that a difficult section was ahead. And whether that was the reason for the slow progress.
But that wasn't the case.
The gorge opened up after that point and there was a great view with waterfalls and cascades ahead.
So everyone was stopping for a picture.
We waited until everyone was done. And then went around the corner and did what they had done.
Another short section along a rocky ledge.
Then we reached the decision point.
A small wooden platform marked the spot where there were two paths to continue.
One was going upwards, ultimately ending at the top of the cliff, about 70 meters above.
The other was continuing mostly horizontally for maybe another hundred meters, before reaching a walking path through a tunnel, back to the starting point.
While the path to the top of the cliff wasn't straightforward 'climb 70 meters up a ladder', but consisted of a few 15-20 meter straight uphill parts, with two cable bridges and some vertical parts in between, it still meant a fair bit of uphill. (In the end, it's like climbing up a 20 story building on a fire ladder. Can be done, but isn't fun.) And the difficulty level would be one rating higher than the other path. And, so far, we were mostly moving in the shadow. Higher up, we would be fully in the sunshine.
In short, I was having fun, had a great day and liked the Via Ferrata a lot (the way it was done as much as the location).
Hence, I decided not to spoil it by being over-ambitious and turning fun into self-torture.
We went on, no up.
The rest of the Via Ferrata turned out to be as enjoyable as the early sections.
But it didn't take long to see the safety cable heading down towards a regular hiking path below.
Literally, the end of the line.
A few more steps and it's time to unclip.
Walking back to the starting point through the tunnel was pleasantly cool.
(The Via Ferrata industry there isn't quite rich enough to be able to provide tunnels as a convenient way for climbers to get back to their cars. The tunnel was part of the electric power plant. In times where they had excess energy from other sources, they pumped water through pipes into a reservoir on top of the cliffs. And the tunnels were for the water pipes.
A good day out and much better than being at the beach and relaxing. (Which isn't much of an option in Madrid in any case.)
It seems that Madrid has a reasonably interesting aircraft museum. And an museum of science and technology as well.
But all 'official' museums in Spain (i.e., all museums run by some national agency) are closed on Mondays.
The only museums that are open are those that are run for profit.
They are often fun, as they need to offer interesting experiences to attract a large enough number of visitors to make the endeavor profitable.
And they can't afford to turn potential customers away, so they tend to be open on Mondays as well.
I went and visited some of these. Including places that I usually wouldn't go to, as I had nothing else to do.
The first stop was the Museo De La Luz.
It has a number of rooms with light installations and (partly) set the theme for the day: LEDs and mirrors.
There were other light installations as well, some of them interactive (like a room where you could 'direct' a bunch of lasers).
A number of robot controlled LED light sticks.
Or some 'shadow play' using a low-resolution pixel screen.
There were also spotlights moving in sync and looking like a reminiscence to rock concert lighting from the early 80s.
In the end, however, most of it came down to LEDs and mirrors.
A museum that was mostly "same, but different", was the Museum of Illusions.
It's essentially a museum franchise, with more than 50 Museum of Illusions worldwide.
I had visited one in Thessaloniki two years earlier and was curious how much of it was a direct copy and how much of it was either site specific or an improved or outdated version of a similar illusion.
And, of course, the visit to the museum started with a room with mirrors on all sides. And LEDs.
Followed by a giant kaleidoscope (less LEDs, though).
Some of the big showcase effects were the same as the ones in Thessaloniki.
The revolving tunnel, the 'falling down a pipe', the large-small room, the head-on-a-table or the one where you play cards with mirrored versions of yourself - they were indistinguishable from the Thessaloniki versions.
I am not that sure about the tilted room - I don't recall one from Thessaloniki
There was one illusion I had never seen before. At all.
It was nothing more than a plastic half-dome with a couple of cube edges sticking out.
On a rotating platform.
Technically, it was a simple strobe light animation.
Usually, on a zoetrope, you have slightly different objects on a rotating platform and a strobe light that syncs with the rotation.
Every time the next object is in the same position as the previous one, the strobe flashes and the object looks animated (as you look at the next object on the platform, while your brain assumes it is the same one, with the exchange happening between the strobe flashes).
I have never seen it to create an 'impossible object intersection' illusion.
Here, they used a solid object which looks slightly different from (I guess) twelve sides.
Various 'cubes' are farther out or in.
And when rotated and strobed a the right speed, it looks like a solid object, without any seams, that can changes shape, with boxes pushing in and out.
Hard to explain, but amazing to look at.
I was impressed, as it used an old trick (strobe light and rotating platform) to create something I have never seen before.
A room in Madrid that was based on the same illusion as one in Thessaloniki, but handled differently, was the upside-down room.
In Thessaloniki, it was an upside-down subway compartment.
In Madrid they had a room with a shelf, a potted plant and a ladder.
I slightly prefer the Madrid version, as it looks a bit more like a 'regular' environment and there are more things to interact with.
Although, to me, the pictures from Thessaloniki (like this one) look better and more convincing than the ones from Madrid.
And that's a bit of an issue.
In Thessaloniki, there were always guides around, willing to take a picture.
In Madrid, if you are travelling alone, you are on your own as far as pictures are concerned.
As a result, there's no picture of my head on a table, no picture of the large-small room illusion, no picture of the card table of the 'impossible chair'.
I didn't expect someone to be available all the time for taking pictures, but it would have been nice to put at least some clamps or smartphone holders in convenient spots.
Still, Museums of Illusions are nice to visit. And if you've seen one, you haven't seen them all.
But there's not enough variety that makes it worth visiting all of them.
The next stop along the way was not a museum.
By the time I left the Museum of Illusions, it was past noon and I was looking for something to eat.
There was a cafe on the other side of the street, so I went there.
For a cafe, it was unusual colourful. And kind of cute.
Which was already hinted at by the name, "Kawaii Café", as "kawaii" is the Japanese equivalent of "cute".
They had a couple of interesting looking cakes, like one with rainbow colour layers and a very 'plush' looking red velvet cake, but I went for a sandwich, which was pretty much the same you would get in other bistros. It wasn't cut into Totoro shape, didn't include artificial colours and wasn't covered with candy sprinkles. (The coffee, on the other hand, had a cute cacao image of a manga cat on top of the foam.)
Not a big tourist attraction, essentially a regular cafe with Sanrio-inspired design, but fun to visit, as they don't overdo it. (It's neither a maid cafe, nor is it purely kids-oriented, so you can go in and order without feeling too silly when doing it.)
After lunch, I went to another place that's not on my usual list of things to see.
A football museum.
I do not care much about football.
But I had visited a museum about Marathon running in Marathon three weeks earlier.
That museum turned out to be surprisingly interesting. And I don't care about Marathon running either.
I was willing to give the football museum a try. (And it was on the way to the next museum I really wanted to see.) Maybe it would at least be marginally interesting.
It wasn't.
Mostly because it wasn't a museum. It fulfilled more the purpose of a shrine.
And in the same way that, for example, the Shroud of Turin is a piece of dirty linen, unless you are already convinced that it is a meaningful artefact, you need to be a devoted football fan to appreciate the collection at the football museum.
What they have are, essentially, football jerseys.
Lots of them.
Room after room, after room.
As a collection, it is, without doubt, impressive.
For example, they have a floor dedicated to world championships.
And they have at least one original jersey each from the two finalists, worn during that championship. (Not always a jersey worn in the final - it might have been from an earlier round.)
Usually there were also a few jerseys from that championship, worn by other teams.
And that for every single championship.
For other events, like the Champions League or the UEFA Europa League, they had similar collections.
So, yes, it's impressive. They got an exhaustive collection of original jerseys from all kinds of important football events. And there is also a section that is dedicated to players, where you can find shirts worn by Pelé, Maradona, Messi or Ronaldo.
Fine.
But that is, essentially, all of it.
There are a few shoes, footballs and replicas of trophies around, but, ultimately, it is a vast collection of football shirts.
If you are a fan of a specific player, then it is surely impressive to be close to a shirt that was worn by that player at some big event.
It's probably not a coincidence that they don't call the shirts 'exhibits', but 'match worn relics'.
But if you aren't excited of being in the vicinity of items used by the 'heroes' of the sport and you, at best, recognize a dozen of the names, then it's only a bunch of boring shirts behind glass, with nothing to get you excited about them.
There were still two things I learned at the museum.
First, that, for big events, jerseys are used only once.
I had assumed that players would have a set of team jerseys that they would use during the season. But most jerseys of big events don't simply have the event name on it, but usually the date of the game and the team pairing as well, so they are only suitable for one single game and are then thrown away (or sold to a museum, auctioned of for charity or given as prizes to fans).
And the second thing was how cheaply shirts used to be made, even for high profile events.
The next one is a German national team shirt (not sure from when, possibly the 1954 world championship). And the way the patch is applied and the stitching around the chest area make it look like someones mom did sew the shirt from a sewing pattern the day before the tournament...
There is also an 'immersive experience' in the basement.
This, for some reason, consisted of a couple of mirrors reflecting video projections.
Lights and mirrors again.
It might have been more exciting if it had been in any way interactive, but its sole purpose was to provide a background for selfies.
As did the other 'exhibit' in the basement - a pair of neon angel/demon wings.
There wasn't any plausible link to football. They did try to force the football theme onto it by putting a neon football in front of the wings, but that was more than a bit tenuous.
(They also failed to consider solo travelers, as there were no places to put a camera or phone at a good position for a picture. As the illusion of 'angels coming from the back' only works well from straight ahead, having a few benches to the side does not help much.)
While the football museum failed to excite me, I was looking forward to the next one.
The OXO Video Game Museum.
And it was fantastic.
Partly, of course, because I like video games more than football.
But also because they had a big variety of stuff and things to do. And even the areas of computer gaming that I had mostly ignored (such as the NES era, the Nintendo 64 or the Play Station (which had a special exhibition as it recently became 30 years old)) were interestingly presented.
The biggest attraction was how much of it was playable. (And on the original machines, not on emulators.)
It has been ages since I've seen a working Vectrex system. And even longer since I played on one.
And I had never used a Nintendo Virtual Boy, which, despite its odd name, was the first VR game developed for gamers at home.
There were also early Pong consoles and a playable Magnavox Odyssey.
Not everything was playable, of course. There isn't enough space to set up everything.
Many machines were for display only. The same applied even more to games, as there were, obviously, more games than computers and they can't run everything at the same time.
Some weren't really game machines, but associated with gaming due to other reasons.
The IMSAI 8080 was never really a gaming computer, but featured in "War Games" as the computer offering to 'play' global thermonuclear war.
There weren't only home computers and consoles to play on, but also arcade cabinets with classic games such as Space Invaders, Frogger, Street Fighter II or Galaga. All playable for free. (At least, the arcade cabinets were, unlike early home consoles and computers, built to withstand a log of abuse).
They also had a number of maimai arcade machines, which I had never seen before. They look a bit like washing machines from a launderette.
All of them are rhythm games.
Some patterns spread out from the screen in the middle and you need to hit the rim when they reach it. On some machine, there are dedicated buttons to hit, but other have a touchscreen and a 'touch sensitive rim' and you wipe your hands over them.
In addition, they also had a temporary exhibition for the 30th anniversary of the PlayStation release.
There were also lifesize sculptures of various video game characters. (Although it is debateable what 'lifesize' means for Sonic.)
Of course, there also needed to be opportunities for selfies at the museum.
In addition to all of that, they also had a VR activity on a motion platform, a very simple one-dimensional game where your 'character' moved along a line of LEDs and had to fight some differently coloured lines. (Sounds ridiculous, but was fun to play.)
Given that all the museums so far (except for the football museum) had promised interactive and reactive environments (well, the football museum also promised some sort of interactive experience, but that was out of order when I was there), it was surprising that the most interesting 'abstract' interactive experience was at the Oxo gaming museum.
Of course, the games were interactive. That was to be expected. That what makes them games.
But they also had an interactive art installation on one wall, called "Quantum Jungle".
It consisted of a number of springs, surrounded by twelve LEDs each, mounted as an irregular hexagon (with two edges longer than the others).
If you touched the springs, patterns emerged. And if you touched multiple springs, the patterns interacted.
I didn't manage to spot any particular ways the patterns involved and interacted. Supposedly they are based on "the movement of a quantum particle" and shows "concepts such as superposition, interference, wave-particle duality, and quantum waveform collapse".
Or maybe not.
Somewhere else it states "some of it has scientific meaning and some is for aesthetic reasons". So it might be little more than an artistic statement and someone saying "Yeah, it's quantum somehow". (Given that there is also the statement "the springs and lights correspond directly to the particle-wave duality of quantum particle", which is, essentially, mostly meaningless and akin to saying "apples and pears directly correspond to the particle-wave duality, as they are different things, but both go into a fruit salad", it is likely that the correspondence to quantum interactions is vage at best.)
But even if it is (presumably) not a scientifically accurate (or even meaningful) representation of quantum interactions (beyond having a top, a bottom, possessing a certain charm and looking strange), it is fun to interact with.
The springs are an unusual interface. Regular buttons or motion sensors would have been dull, but the springs are just the right combination of physical object and lack of obvious technical input device.
All in all, I enjoyed playing with the Quantum Jungle a lot and spent an unexpectedly long time with it.
It's like a wall sized equivalent of playing with bubble wrap...
There was one more thing that would (probably) have been fun to play around with.
Their cafeteria was Pac Man themed.
And in there was a spherical Pac Man game.
As in Pac Man the left and right sides of a level connect (leave to the left and re-enter from the right), it kind of makes sense to put the level on the surface of a sphere.
But the cafeteria was closed, so I could not get close to it.
Although, even without the Pac Man sphere, there were many things to do and interact with at the Oxo computer games museum. By far the most interesting museum of the day.
After all that interaction, the last museum I visited was more geared towards passive contemplation.
The Nomad museum in Madrid is, at its core, one big room. Which is used for immersive video projections (on all walls and the floor).
As the videos last around 30-40 minutes and tend to have a (vague) narrative element, by following the paintings of an artist through his life, some visitors don't want to 'jump in' at the middle.
The purpose of the rest of the museum is, essentially, to give visitors something to do until the next movie starts.
At the entrance and the exit are corridors with mirrored walls and LEDs under the floor: Yes, LEDs and mirrors again.
There's also a smaller room upstairs where you can go on a VR journey through a Van Gogh painting and can also colour in a monochrome picture, projected to a wall, with oversized paint brushes.
I didn't take picture there, but it was well done, as the brushes didn't force a specific colour. As a result, it wasn't quite like drawing in a colouring book or using the 'fill' function in a paint program. The different coloured brushes mostly selected a colour scheme and basic hue. The painting still looked properly painted (and not like some kids were playing around with crayons), but visitors also had a fair amount of control regarding the overall look.
Going back down to the main room could, obviously, be done by going back down the stairs.
It's more fun, however, using the highly colourful slide.
When I arrived at the main room, a Van Gogh video was about to end. A short time late, a Klimt video started, using elements from Klimt paintings to create environments with different moods, depending on the artistic period.
The pictures do not really do the experience justice, but that is (kind of) the point.
The room and the projections create an environment and experiences that are different from regular video presentations.
And also different from 'proper' 360° presentations. The room is (I presume intentionally) not circular or has continuous walls. There are various pillars, panels, mirrors and broken surfaces, making it less a clean video projection, but more a picture based environment to be in. It helps that the furniture is also moveable. You can change your point of view (at least technically, not necessarily metaphorically) easily.
And that was the end of my 'museum tour' in Madrid.
