The Day We Spent at the Train Station, but then had a Nice Time at the Park

We spent almost an entire day at the train station. We thought it would be simple: go in, buy tickets for our trips to Toledo and Malaga, then have the rest of the day to tour the Reiner Sofia Museum of Contemporary Art and maybe take a paddle boat out in the lake. How wrong we were!
Buying train tickets in Spain requires patience, determination, and perseverance in the face of adversity.The Madrid train station is beautiful: huge, pretty windows, and a simulated tropical rainforest in the middle. Yes, really. See for yourself:I think they make the train station so pretty because they know that people will be spending a lot of time waiting there. They have two or three "Customer Service" offices, but none of them provided any sort of help with trip planning, and no customer service as far as I could see. So we decide to find an internet cafe in the neighborhood to figure it out ourselves. That worked out pretty well, so armed with information, we head back to the train station, intent on purchasing our tickets.
We sit down for a second, discussing something, and another American (or maybe Canadian, who knows?) overhears us, and starts forlornly instructing us on the ways of the train station. "You have to go in that office over there and wait in line," he says in his defeated voice, pointing to a huge hall filled with literally hundreds of people. We go in, wide-eyed. He follows us, saying that we need to take a queue ticket. He asks us when we need to travel. Tomorrow, we reply. "Oh, you'll never make it. I've been waiting for two days," Mr. Mopey informs us.
Hmmm. He is one of the most defeated-looking people I've ever seen in my life. Beaten down, hopeless, he has relegated himself to a train-station-bench existence. But I haven't. This is nonsense. Yes, things look daunting, but I'm determined to get my tickets, and get them that day. Queue ticket in pocket, Bruno and I estimate we can leave for a couple hours without missing our turn. We had back to the internet cafe for more strategizing, then to a nearby Indian restaurant for lunch.
Wait a second! Indian? Yes, Indian. And actually, it was one of the best meals we had during our trip. We sat outside, drank beer, and ate our respective tandoori chicken and curry lamb. Bruno's dish had a little invader, though:Yes, that looks like vomit on a plate, but it tasted really good. Anyway, a moth flit flit flitted around his dish, then finally landed--to its death. The little moth got mired in the curry and died almost instantly. Mmmmm, appetizing.
We head back to the train station, wait around for maybe another hour, but are finally greeted with success. Mr. Mopey is still waiting on the bench. As an example of the efficiency of the Spanish train stations, here is a photo of some ticket machines. Please note that they all appear to be held together by duct tape.By now it's pretty late--too late for museums anyway, so Bruno calls his cousin and aunt and we wander around a nearby park. It's very pretty.The building in the background is the Crystal Palace. Where we're standing in the photo above, a mute comes along, and starts writing down messages for Aldo, then Yolanda, then me. He looks like an old hippy or something, white hair, wrinkles, eccentric. At first it's kind of exciting, I'm thinking maybe he's telling our fortunes or something. He tells Aldo that he's slow, which sounds ambiguous and promising, but then what he writes down for me doesn't make any sense, and is uninteresting, so I'm disappointed. When we leave, Bruno tells me that what the mute wrote down for his aunt Yolanda is that "the name Yolanda makes him excited." Ewww. So really, he was just a weird, dirty old man, that's all.
Incidentally, I believe Bruno coined the term "artifacts" that day, referring to all of the old people walking around. He enjoyed photographing them sitting on benches, walking their dogs, drinking coffee, etc. Old people in Europe are very different from old people in the U.S: they're still mobile, they still go about their business, go out in society, just at a slower pace. In the U.S, most of the old people don't go outside, they just stay in nursing homes.