The Castilian Diversion

I decided to go to Madrid entirely on a whim, having been fully convinced after talking to a friend living there for the month who happened to have time and space for a visit. I had been thinking about going to Spain since I got here, but tickets to Barcelona became prohibitively expensive and I ended up deciding not to, but Madrid opened up as an option after G, my Brazilian friend, missed his flight home from there a couple of weeks prior and had to take a bus back to Lisbon, which turned out to be a cheap and comfortable option. After looking into it, I decided that the price was right and left for two days to Madrid a matter of hours after deciding to go in the first place. It was a snap decision that proved to be an astute one as well, which I will elaborate on further.

Before getting to describing the trip, however, I must note that my relationship with Spanish as a language and hispanic cultures in general is a long-standing love-hate affair, me having spent many years dating or caught in complicated relations with men from throughout the Spanish-speaking world, attempting feebly at various times to learn Spanish, embracing the language and the cultures that it opens oneself up to, and then invariably rejecting it all entirely and proclaiming a great disdain for anything and everything Spanish. Of late, I have found something of an equilibrium, living with a multitude of Spaniards in my apartment (and building, more generally – everyone in the building knows each other to some extent) and having a more nuanced, Europe-specific experience of cultural exchange. The result is that I find myself understanding the language very well — but not perfectly well — and being able to interact with everyone to some extent regardless of a language barrier, but having to an appreciable extent a boundary between cultural habits and mannerisms. It is still a foreign land and culture for me, even though there is a great level of mutual understanding between us; this is all to speak nothing of the differences between Spain and Portugal, something that has profoundly affected my perception of the country. I went to Madrid unable to have any specific expectations, knowing only what my friends who had recently visited had told me and other more obvious facts about it as a city in general; I had no preconceptions of how the city would feel, what would be best to do, or how I would like it before going.

So it happened that I left on an overnight bus for Spain, the cost being the same as a flight that a more intelligent person might have booked several weeks in advance, expecting to sleep but instead finding myself observing the rather tasteless and undignified sort of people who take the bus on the alternative to ALSA, which was fully booked for that night, followed by a short moment of concern over the fact that the bus broke down an hour outside of Madrid for want of fuel. A refueling and a short nap later, I had stepped foot into an ugly bus station at an ugly hour of the morning onto a marvelous, truly spectacular metro system and headed to my friend's apartment. It is a metro that, in contrast to Lisbon especially, just works: the trains run on time and there are notices for when the next trains will arrive at every platform, you almost never wait more than 5 minutes for a train, the system covers the entire city, and so on. It is comparable in feel and scope to the Parisian metro, if not nearly as visually appealing in general — the system is what I would describe as "functional" in place of "beautiful" in that it is not well-designed in a visual sense, but it does get you where you need to go with the utmost of efficiency. Portugal and its entitled, ridiculous public transportation workers who can not ever seem to do their jobs correctly or serve passengers with a shred of decency but never hesitate to go on strike could learn a lot from the brilliance of the Madrid metro.

Madrid is, of course, a rather large city, comparable in size to St. Petersburg or Dallas, and you take notice of that fact almost immediately when you arrive to the center — Gran Via, in my case — and step foot onto the calles that wind around and lead to everything the city has to offer. It is well-built city, the streets being compact and the buildings large, and you never feel as though life is not happening everywhere around you. That is the main feeling I got from Madrid – for better or worse, I got the distinct sense of it being a city very much teeming with the life of madrileños, the place where lives are made and ruined, stories are made, and histories built for the occupants there. Just as well, there is not one particular architectural style that dominates the city or pattern to the way the streets work, there is just a little bit of everything, much as there are people of all types and walks of life everywhere as well. Perhaps as a result of this, you do not see the effects of the crisis nearly so visibly as in Lisbon (and Portugal in general), except perhaps in the form of the "Compro Oro" people and shops that occupy only the most touristic areas of the center of the city. I will note that I did not find madrileños very well-dressed (less so, indeed, even than Lisbon), nor did the city feel particularly cosmopolitan, there being an overall lack of other cultures and people save for the tourists staying there just as temporarily as myself.

Plaza Mayor

Palacio Real

Parque del Retiro

Parque del Retiro

For as large of a city as it is, once you turn off of the main tourist thoroughfares, their presence largely stops and it does not feel like a place that is as much of a tourism destination as it ostensibly is. I wonder whether Barcelona feels much more so or not. I saw each major plaza, park, and general tourist spot on offer in the center just shy of going into any museums or cultural attractions, the energy for which I had run out of entirely, as well as a choral concert at the Auditorio Nacional de Música de Madrid located rather outside of the center itself. I left the city ready quite certainly to get back to Lisbon and with a much more concretely established sense of Lisbon as home and Portugal and Portuguese as being what give me a home-like comfort that is incomparable anywhere else I have been as of yet. Madrid was great to visit, although I am not completely inspired by it as a city mostly as a result of lacking a strong personal cultural connection. Fair enough, it allowed me to learn something about myself and gave me a break from routine and daily habit of Lisbon that I had needed more than I realized.

Traveling Reconsidered, or Contemplations of Position

I have made the decision not to travel quite as extensively outside of Portugal during my remaining time of this particular stay in the country for myriad reasons, the likes of which have been discussed introspectively on this blog to give it its very purpose for existence. I'll explain: because of the way my stay has worked out, I have been hesitant to solidify plans to travel, whether for weekends or otherwise, because life has happened at a pace too fast for me to ever quite get settled into anything other than the fact that I am no longer capable of waking up at a decent and respectable hour of the morning, preferring instead the latter portion of that period of day closer to what some might consider lunch time. In other words, too much is going on that I find myself ill at ease with adding so much more stimulation in the form of visiting entirely foreign places in languages I know nothing of and meeting (yet more) people I will connect with for a weekend in person and a lifetime online, all indeed because I am seeing, doing, and feeling so many things in a way that is remarkably similar but in the same place. The temporality of these months has made itself readily apparent and I am fully aware of it – there is no need to add to it. Going back to the United States will not be an easy process, however long the duration of my stay there, and the difficulty involved is directly inverse the amount of chaos and rooting that is taking place here.

To speak of all of this is, of course, not to overlook the fact that a kind of rooting is actually happening here and that I am working out the details of going through the process of turning what was originally a sojourn into a complete relocation to a country I had not previously expected anything from, much less a connection and opportunity as significant as this one. Part of the significance of this has sunk into me in the recognition of the need to discover the entire country and not just Lisbon, however lovely it may be, because the impression of a city may not necessarily be the same for the rest of the country you expect to reside in on the long term, but also because Portugal is a small country in every sense of the term and there is no particularly good reason not to see each region of it. Instead of a grand tour of the Iberian peninsula, I will instead have an interesting and sufficient tour of the western portion of it.

Such is all of this that I found myself at the beginning of March in the middle of what would turn out to be an unending upheaval playing host to a friend who, given the fifteen years of our friendship, is more of a sibling in spirit than just a regular friend. She came for ten days, being possibly the only person I could entertain without needing respite for such a period, and we decided to visit Porto as well as allow her to let Lisbon sink in amid all of the wonderful things it has to offer tourists and locals alike. Despite the fact that we are very similar, both generally speaking and by virtue of time spent and having been more or less raised together, we are as different as any two given people are from each other. In traveling together we bonded over those very differences, which as we have gotten older and somehow managed to begin to become semblances of adults have also served to strengthen our senses of self and the character necessary for any fully grown person not to be just a parrot of those around them, helpless and hopeless pieces of grey Silly Putty who interest no one and excite yet fewer. So I found myself thinking about these things, observing how she prefers to relax and take a moment to breathe when going somewhere for the first time as opposed to doing all of the touristic things you can pay insignificant sums of money to have sit in photos on your coffee table compiled in a neat, artsy book anyway. As has become clear on this blog, I prefer to run at a frenetic pace — sometimes literally, as even my parents could not quite keep up with me on the Paris metro — taking in and seeing and doing as many things as I can cram into any given period of time so that I can take the full bite, chew, and digest at some other, later point in time.

Thus, in some sense, I have adapted her approach to my stay in Portugal, taking a moment to breathe and allow myself to simply enjoy the things in the country I was intended to be in instead of running around to as many somewhere elses as I possibly could. The rest of Europe will still be there when I get back, whether it has imploded in on itself in more abstract ways or not in the meantime. So we went to Porto and didn't cram each and every possible thing one could do in the city into the three days we decided to spend there, deciding instead to focus on the historical center of the city and the river. We had to figure out just as well what there was to do in the city as we had to actually do it. Luckily, we stayed in a hostel, so that process was made simpler than it otherwise could have been, and yet it still happened. We took a walking tour both on our own and with a guide, ate a whole host of things including a pizza that had three entirely unexpected layers of meat underneath the cheese topping and of course the famous francesinha Porto is known for, did a tasting of Port wine, socialized with people from across the world, stared at pigeons, managed not to get charged for one of the dinners we ate, and did at various points nothing at all. We were relaxed about seeing the sights of the city and we were also trying to be somewhat frugal (although that went out the window with an unfortunate pack of sunscreen and after-sun lotion in Cascais after we got back) and we enjoyed all of it quite as thoroughly as it should be. I know that if I had been on my own, I would have felt more driven to see and do more, but I felt a most different sense of satisfaction out of the trip having gone with someone else and done differently. I intend to step back a bit and enjoy the rest of Portugal similarly – Coimbra, Évora, Albufeira and beyond.

Missing from this charming view of the Ribeira area of Porto is the blow-up doll (or just sexualized mannequin) prominently affixed to one of the balconies on the streets leading there.

This is the ungodly meat and cheese calorie-bomb confection known as the francesinha — "little French girl" in Portuguese — that is a specialty of Porto and claimed all across Portugal as a national dish.

An Elaboration of Previous Sentiments

Sometimes things happen in life that take the things you have spent some amount of time thinking about, be it large or small, and shift those very things into being the point of reference from which you begin to accept that the things you wanted — or did not want — have become the situation in which you find yourself. What is less predictable is when these things happen as you are exiting a club at 6:30 in the morning, your body confused by the fact that you are still drunk but the sun is out anyway, paying absolutely no attention to the fact that you have still not managed to schlep your way home and crawl into bed before becoming hungover later – or at the very least, thirsty and feeling vaguely disgusting, as though it were some sort of personal affront. It doesn't matter though, as you all look out onto the sunrise from the miradouro, in awe of the beauty of the previously unknown hour of morning, in the company of a group of people with whom you feel perfectly comfortable to be and do just as you naturally would, throwing all reservations to the wind.

Such is the irony of that moment that the individuals involved are together in a happenstance, temporary manner, some less so than others. The general idea, however, is that the course of where things are going has made way to allow for a sense of social comfort and awareness makes room for the ability to think about those all-important life decisions talked about previously on this blog in small part. Despite the fact that a good friend and many others I am acquainted with here are in the same position as me, staying for an extended but short period, and that even some of my lovers in the city are trying desperately to leave the country for better working prospects elsewhere, my sense of social stability in this particular moment in time allows me breathing room to reflect on life and the opportunities being presented in it, to make the decisions necessary to carry through other decisions that up until this point were hypothetical things that I spent time wondering about but not having a realistic or pragmatic sense to take completely seriously.

The city itself, moreover, has become utterly familiar much in the way that Denver has, despite the fact that I have yet to see or do absolutely everything that there is on offer. Much can be said of both places, frankly. It is in just such a way that Lisbon has come to feel like and, really, be home, a place where I live in the comfort of familiarity and knowledge of my surroundings without so much as being able to be completely familiar or know everything or, indeed, most things about the city and the country. I'm able to become more intimately familiar with the city as the stress of not being completely familiar with how routine, day-to-day things work here versus how I am accustomed to doing them in the United States fades and my perspective on the use of language amid all of it changes. I have begun, in small part, to scratch beneath the surface of how the city lives and breathes, what places there are to see, what things to do, what foods to eat, and so on. Progress comes in many forms. Those who know me well understand similarly well that I feel best and am able to excel in the things I endeavor to do when I am engrossed in a routine in a setting I hold no antipathy toward. It is no coincidence that my greatest productivity upon returning to the United States last summer happened sitting outdoors over espresso in the most urbane environment Denver has to offer. It is perhaps also no coincidence that I had been unable to take full advantage of the time when my classes were in limbo and I felt as though everything was in a state of upheaval.

I don't yet know in specific detail how exactly what I have in mind to do after graduating will happen, but I have a general idea and I've got the feeling that it will come to happen much the same way the rest of the things are now.