Madrid






There was a story I heard once about a farmer who is hitch-hiking and gets picked up by a motorcyclist. The biker goes faster and faster until the farmer, a bit concerned, says "Aren't you afraid you'll overheat your engine?" The biker says, "Oh no, on the contrary, it's air-cooled, so the faster I go, the cooler it gets." The farmer thinks about this and when he gets home he immediately jumps on his horse and starts trotting then cantering then galloping hard. Suddenly the horse drops dead. The farmer picks himself up and says, "Poor bastard must have froze to death."

I was reminded of this story in my first hour in Madrid. My intuition was that people in a major European capital would be able to speak English, more or less. This was not generally true. Moreover, every fumbling word I uttered in Spanish, including 'the' and 'and' spurred them on to speak faster until they were babbling at full throttle. I imagine that after I ran out of the place screaming, with my hands covering my ears, they said to themselves, "Poor bastard. If only I could have spoken faster, he might have understood."

I guess 'babbling' sounds derogatory - To be fair- you are more than justified in speaking your own language in your own country. Still, if I were a waiter (wait a sec, you're a waiter and a software engineer? It doesn't ring true.) Well I would mime information when I didn't share a common language. I don't want to harp on this point but the colloquy I had with the maid at my hotel was typical:


Me: Quiero dos toallas por favor.
(I want two towels please.)

Maid: Si.

Me: Dos.
(two fingers up)

Maid: Si.

Me: Toallas.
(pointing to towels)

Maid: Si.

Me: Al diablo con gente con una toalla.
(To hell with those with one towel)

Maid: Si.

Me: Muerte a gente con una toalla.
(Death to the one-towelers.)

Maid: Si.

Me: I ain't gonna get another towel am I?

Maid: No.

For dinner on the first night I ordered "Calamari Romana" (squid in the Roman style). I had had squid at lunch but it turned out to be just greasy fried squid rings. Turns out that Calamari Romana is greaZy fried squid rings, where 'greaZy' is Texan patois for real greasy. After dinner, they gave me a complimentary aperitif, which tasted disarmingly like paint thinner. I toyed with the possibility that they were having an in joke at the expense of the tourist cowed by local customs but I figured that my stomach couldn't digest the squid on its own anyway so I gulped it down. I did drip some on the table in the pattern of my initials to gain some measure of immortality -- not for me Keats' "here lies one whose footprints were writ in sand."

In a modest contrast to California, smoking has not yet been outlawed in Spain. Wait...did I say smoking? I meant 'not smoking'. People smoked in bathrooms, restaurants, elevators and oxygen tents. Mental note, buy 100 shares of Phillipo de Morriso when I return. I saw smoking waiters, museum guards and chestnut vendors. I started making a mental collection of the best ones. By far, the gem of my collection came on the penultimate day. There was a relentless cold grey rain dripping down my neck and making my feet go 'squelch' in my shoes. The bum outside my hotel was lying on the concrete sidewalk (well of course it was concrete, I'm just trying to emphasize how hard it was) under a blanket as always but was now utterly and miserably soaked. People rushing by to get out of the rain were stumbling over him, delivering inadvertent but substantive (and randomly timed) kicks. He appeared to be asleep, and for a moment you might think he had shed his mortal shell but for a pristine, LIT cigarette depending from his right hand. Come to think of it, maybe he was the ONLY guy who legitimately needed a cigarette. Probably the real winner was some anti-climactic character like the motorcycle rider who was smoking (keep in mind that your two hands are needed to control the clutch, one brake, the throttle and your balance). The thing that struck me is that the locals ARE irritated by the smoke (i.e. it isn't just wimpy Americans). So in a restaurant, a waiter might say "This table is less smoky." Now maybe I'm just thinking like an American (and of course he probably only said that because I'm American) but if you have some intolerable situation, like giant rats with sparklers in their teeth running through your restaurant, you should start on the long slow road to rectifying the situation, Rats with sparklers section, rats with no sparklers... They just live with it.

Eating dinner at 10:00 PM in Madrid is entirely equivalent to eating at 3:30 PM in the US. Thus, the only places open are the tourist traps. On my penultimate night (what, again?) I decided to make it an early evening and went to dinner at 10:00. I'm sitting there maybe 10 minutes and poof, all the lights go out. I must admit, the waiter handled it with perfect aplomb. He came over and gave me a candle and I said in my pidgin Spanish "Todo el via or solo us (waving hands to indicate 'us')? (The whole street or just us?)" He said "Solo us"


Me: Por favor, la cuenta
(then, check please)

Waiter: You wait 20 minutes, we have electric.

Me: If I needed 20 minutes more to graduate Harvard, I would wait, but not for your tapas, no not for them.

Waiter: Do you understanding?

Me: Yes, perfectly. If I were inclined to sit in stygian darkness for an indefinite period, I would be rewarded in the fullness of time with your dreaded paella. Instead, I opt to rejoin the world of the lighted.

Waiter: You wait, yes?

Me: La cuenta not be here in one minute, you be lying in chalk as the homeboys say, capiche?

Actually, he just kept coming up with suggestions for foods that could be prepared and eaten without the benefit of vision and I kept saying "Si, si. Por favor, la cuenta.

The Prado may be worth the whole trip. I imagine that the biggest revolution in art in two millenia must have been the first guy to not paint something out of the bible. You can just see the guy unveiling a still life of a bowl of cherries followed by a deafening hail of derisive laughter followed by him explaining that these were the cherries that Christ had in the fridge when he got pinched.

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