On Madrid wanderings.

I know it’s strange, but I think of all of the things that I’ve enjoyed and hated and wrestled with and been struck by and have utterly fell in love with during my time in Spain, (which ended yesterday with my flight into Paris) the most bizarre cultural difference occurred to me once on the street in Madrid. I subconsciously realized quickly while in Bilbao but it didn’t really strike me until well into my time in Madrid that I couldn’t just stop and pause for a minute at the side of a street here. Reason being that if I paused for the tiniest moment at the edge of a road, practically any road, a driver would think that I desired to cross it and would STOP DRIVING and invite me to pass with a courteous wrist flick. I was so fascinated by this discovery that I started experimenting. It didn’t much matter whether I was at an officially sanctioned cross-walk or at an intersection or if the road had a light or not (I don’t think I saw a single stop sign though, come to think of it), or how many cars were behind them or what time of day or whether they were late for their siesta or whether I looked grumpy or smiley or even who the driver was… almost always, if I looked like I wanted to cross the street, they just stopped and let me go. I realize that this might seem a little bit out of proportion to be my most weird thing about Spain, but you’ve got to understand… after two years living the perilous tightrope-walk that is the life of a pedestrian in New York City, this was by far the most jaw-droppingly WEIRD thing I have seen to date on my trek, possibly during any traveling I have ever done.

One day I was sitting in a café eating this:



When I noticed two elderly Spanish women walking in opposite directions on opposite sides of the street. Somehow they got each other’s attention, apparently old friends, and met each other in the middle of the street just by my table. Without muttering a word they approached one another, kissed each other rhythmically three times, cheek to cheek to cheek, and just kept right along walking again, still without a word. I realized then that there are a lot of things about life I don’t understand.

After a few days in Madrid I thought to myself how much more I enjoyed being in the metro stations here than at home, and then it hit me that the difference was that the Spaniards had taken to the to pipe classical music into every corner of every one of their subway stations. On my first full day here I was checking my email in the lobby of my hotel in Bilbao and I overheard an exchange between a man asking to speak to the manager and the receptionist. “I’m sorry” she said, “he’s out to lunch.” “Well what time will he be back?” asked the British man. “Four.” “Well when did he leave?” “Eleven, of course.” She replied, as if that answer should’ve been so obvious that he had taken precious minutes off of her life span to deal with his stupidity. Obviously everyone knows that a lunch break in Spain is five hours long. And what’s more, while in New York we dump thousands of sweaty tourists in the terminals of Penn Station and call it a train station, THIS is where I waited in Madrid before my trek to Barcelona:


All of this to say that I’ve concluded after almost two weeks here that Americans just fundamentally miss something about how to live. We get a lot of other things. Obviously the fact that there are cars at all to stop for me or that there are trains to have a station for or electricity to run them or internet to write this to you or so many other wonderful and silly things is purely owed to the fact that America is what it is… but I’ve gotta say, when it comes to this whole LIVING business, we’re really missing something.

My last few days in Madrid were practically flawless, except for periodic cloying and horrendous bits of loneliness and one or two embarrassingly long sessions of self pity. One of the highlights of that week was a surprise visit with three of my lovelies, girls I had lived with during my internship in DC before college. Seeing them was like visiting pieces of my heart I had forgotten were missing. Here are some of my favorite bits of our time together:






And here are a few more reasons why I fell in love with this jumbled, chaotic, grandfather of a city: