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.