Spain, Part Two

Madrid feels like a very big city into which a fairly manageable touristy MadridLand has been plopped into the middle. You feel there’s a straightforward boundary to where you will be, and while it’s not a small amount of turf, it’s circumscribed enough that you know it pretty well after a couple of days. To the west, there’s the palace, which, I gather, is still occasionally used as such. There’s also a rather new cathedral over there, and the opera house. I guess you could visit any or all of these, but the timing of their open hours did not agree with the timings of our rambling over there. To the east, there’s a large park and a bunch of museums, including the Prado, and we were much more inclined to head in that direction. In the middle there is the old city, and a number of squares, one in particular (the Plaza Mayor) which seems to be the main people magnet, filled with restaurant tables and street performers and in the middle, an open-air theater. The Spanish have a sort of operetta called Zarzuela. One night we were strolling around the plaza and at the crack of 10:00, the program began, with orchestra and lights and the people standing behind me singing along, much as I would have if it had been Gilbert & Sullivan. This serendipitous free performance is the sort of thing that endears one to a place. Free music on a warm spring night. What’s not to like?

To suggest, however, that there is only one people magnet in Madrid does not do the city justice. In that middle of the old city there are a number of squares, any and all of which are especially packed in the early evening, the time of strolling around. One night, May 15, was some sort of local festival where everyone dresses up in native attire and no one stays home, which meant that at one point, every street in the area was almost impassable. This flood of quirkily dressed humanity is swirling around you at Force 10, and there’s not much you can do but hang on and hope. For the record, little kids look very cute in old-fashioned Spanish clothes. Older people, on the other hand, make you wonder what you would do if we had a similar tradition in the US. Would I dress up in my native attire once a year and go parading down the boulevards? If so, what would be my native attire? One spends so much time in our parochial academic world disentangling from stereotypes and prejudgments that it’s hard to get one’s mind around people who embrace, if not stereotypes and prejudgments, at least a core essence of their history and whatever that entangles so that, say, if you photographed them, ninety-nine people out of a hundred would respond, Oh, look, Spanish people.

Because Madrid is a big city, it was the least affected by the shutdown between two and five o’clock in the afternoons. While there were certainly some charming little shops all about, there weren’t whole neighborhoods of them, with tourists pounding the spider-web pavement staring into the windows (which was true of Barcelona). It was more like main shopping streets in the middle with rather large stores (one of which had the most fantastic collection of Meccano toys, which if you are not familiar with them are building sets for kids who like to build things like working miniature nuclear power plants and the like; these are not for pikers like me who like to randomly assemble Legos). To the sides, smaller shops indeed, but not in what seems like totally medieval streets closed to traffic. For that matter, traffic seemed to be everywhere, no matter how unlikely the streets on which it was passing. This was especially true in some of the smaller towns we visited, where every truck that passed us by, usually scraping off a layer of skin in the process, caused us to once again comment on whatever possessed these drivers not to just give up and drive a mule. This sort of narrow street leads to a vast population of motorbikers, even more in Barcelona than Madrid, all of them weaving in and out and generally challenging death every moment of their lives. They were not as bad as Italian bikers, however, who insouciantly challenge your life every moment if you attempt to cross the street, or French bikers, who insouciantly challenge your life every moment by ignoring la difference between street and sidewalk and driving anywhere that happens to be in the direction they wish to be going.

Of all the European cities we’ve been in, I would have to say that Madrid is the least welcoming. Which doesn’t really capture what I mean to express. It’s not that they are unfriendly or rude, or that some other people are wildly friendly by comparison. A better word might be a-friendly, or dis-friendly. Even the tourist venues don’t seem to get particularly excited about foreign visitors. Given that EU tourists travel all over Europe all the time (it costs about 8 euros to fly anywhere it seems nowadays), the idea of menus in multiple languages tends to be fairly common, but not in Madrid, where menus were as often as not in Spanish, and there you were. I’m not insisting on English, mind you. I know the names of what I want to eat in French and in Italian (and now, in Spanish), but I wasn’t given much of a choice. I don't really believe that if you wake a Spaniard up in the middle of the night, he automatically speaks English (this is, on the other hand, true of the French), and I don't mean to sound like a xenophobe, but I guess I'm used to a certain touristy norm in which Madrid does not participate. As I said, I don’t offer this as a value judgment, but more of a curiosity. I’m not sure why it would be. I only say that it is.

As with any trip, it pays to learn a little history first. Key things to know about Spain would be the Moors (their influence is stronger in the south of the country, but its seen at least as far north as Madrid) and the Jews (kicked out in 1492, if I remember correctly), which meant that finally the Spanish could drink alcohol and eat pork with abandon. (You will never see so much pork anywhere in the world. Iberian ham—the best—is fed on acorns. One menu listed, precisely:
Iberian acorn-fed ham
Iberian acorn-fed chicken
Iberian acorn-fed lettuce
So you have to wonder, do they force-feed the lettuce? I'm not making this up.) You need to know about all these really inbred royal people that Velasquez painted whose mouths appear anatomically incorrect but they all look the same, and since the non-royals V painted don’t look like that, you figure it’s maybe what happens when the Austro-Hungarian empire ventures too far east. Queen Isabella might ring a bell; there’s a pivotal statue of Chris Colon (as he is known to the locals) in Barcelona. One should also remember the husband of Mary Tudor, and then 1588, if one wants to take an Anglo viewpoint. Nappy, of course, came through these parts. And then, of course, the Civil War of the 1930s, and Franco’s rule, and finally the restoration of the Bourbons (yes, those Bourbons, I gather) not all that long ago after Franco's death. It helps you understand what you’re looking at if you know where it’s been. The Civil War especially keeps coming up, because it wasn’t that long ago. Nor was Franco.

I have to admit that I got completely lost in trying to piece together which King Philip/Charles/Whatever was which, and who married whom, and when exactly they were part of what, especially faced with all those look-alike Velasquez paintings. Fortunately when you travel there is seldom a quiz at any point, and you absorb what you absorb, and you’re that much the better for it. I try to absorb what I can, and I do read up on things. But I do admit that my perspective on Spain is American. I can rattle off all your explorers, where they went, what they wanted, what happened where they were. But the Spanish back in Spain are something else again. But I know more now than I did when I started out. That has to count for something.