La Noche en Blanco

“The White Night” is an art and cultural event that takes place all over Europe, though this is only the second time Madrid has participated. All of the museums open up free from 9pm through the entire night and there are art and cultural events spread throughout the entire city. We visited El Museo de la Reina Sofia, which is the gigantic modern art museum in Madrid. Around 10:00pm we got into the museum (they stay up late in Madrid). I have never seen so many people in a museum before. We squeezed ourselves through the crowd looking at paintings by Picasso and Dali. I loved being able to see the details of Dali’s paintings up close.

After we were tired, so we sat in La Plaza Mayor and watched the crowds of people talking by. All of Madrid was out, not just young people, but little kids and grandparents too. Later, as we walked around, we saw a giant stage set up in a plaza where people were doing karoke in front of a crowd. In another part of the city words were projected onto El Palacio de Comunicaciones while poetry was read aloud on a loud speaker. Many of the streets were closed ddown and endless crowds of people replaced the traffic of cars all over. It wasn’t till around 4:00am that people seemed to slowly make their way home.