A South Jersey Yankee in Madrid

PROLOGUE: ARRIVAL

I got to Madrid on the 8th of September. It's now been 13 days since I left the great state of New Jersey. Looking through the window of my Scandenavian airline I saw what could have been expected of the landscape--the rough, red and gold tinted desert earth that covers the fields of central Spain. The undergrowth is grows sparsely, bleached white by the hot Spanish sun. Long, poplar-like trees (their name escapes me) rise like spears. Spain's flag seems oddly appropriate to the colors of Madrid's landscape and city.

(The colors of a nation, the colors of a city)

The airport was hot. I slugged my 80 pound suitcase, my laptop bag stuffed with my computer and books, and a bookbag filled with, of course, more books across the entire terminal searching for a place to exchange my money. I grinned a wry smile as I saw smoking booths as I got off the departure gate. People were cramming in like clowns in a car to get their fix. I got to the exchange place--1.50$ for every euro. Needless to say, it hurts. Watching 100$ turn into somewhere around 60 euros is sobering.

(It's a funny kind of money. One euro comes in a coin. So does 2 euros. Change isin't chump change anymore in Europe)

Sweating, with a tight fistfull of monopoly-like money Europeans call euros, I rode with my cabby to my hostel. He played some flamenco-fusion music for the first half of the ride and then switched to a talk-radio program debating loudly about Spain's economic crisis. On cue, while driving through the outskirts of Madrid, I see half-built residential buildings naked and exposed with construction cranes idly waiting for orders. In Spain, a construction bubble was rising and rising, and the bubble just blew. No doubt, my fellow yankees have something to do with this economic crisis. But hey, that's globalization for you. If a business coughs out a cold in the U.S., that cold will spread.

I got to my hostel--Ole Hostel (cab ride--25 euros). I pushed the buzzer, walked two strenuous flight of stairs, and went through my first of many notoriously dark, European stairways. Lights don't stay on in European stairways--they flash off after a minute or two. If you go to Europe and you are afraid of the dark--wait to you get in one of these stairways.

(This picture of "the hostel" is deceptive. The room only had two bunks and the picture makes it look as if there's more space where the camera person's at. The camerman must have been on the fatal edge of the balcony to take this picture)

Hostel's are great places to meet people all over the world. The problem was, I had one year of my life in three heavy bags. I went into my two-bunk room (it looked sort of like a dollhouse version of a army barrack). I could hardly make the zippers of my suitcase wink open--they're hardly was floor space. In all, not a place to stay for a long period. Take advantage of a hostel if you have a light-weight bag and if you have no problem having no privacy. (Issues of privacy were aggrevated by the fact that I shared my room with a French and a Iranian woman, but of course this has its perks). It only cost 17 euros for the night. I had the half-baked idea of staying in a hostel comfortably (until October) while I would find a place. But the expatriots in the hostel (people staying in Madrid for the long haul) were all busy posting ads and looking feverishly for habitaciones. Their anxiety spread and I got in on the act. A slow day of sleeping off jet-lag and a short night of drinking with my fellow hostel-mates ended. The next day I moved into my temporary dorm at the Universidad Nebrija, payed genorously by the folks at Fulbright

GOALS OF THIS BLOG

Tommorrow, September 22nd, I'll be starting my first official day as a teacher's assistant at the Parque Lisboa high school in Alcorcon, Madrid. I recieved my Fulbright scholarship around June and for a full-year, till June 21st, I'll be working and living in Madrid. I'm a naive and inexperienced traveler. I've never been to Europe. I'll write about Madrid, Spain and Europe as if I was a bright eyed, little boy, knowing hardly anything about the day-to-days of this most cosmopolitan continent and city. I hope this will be an accurate and entertaining record of a life lived in Madrid. I hope I will soon take courses at a university in Madrid and so far I have an interest in studying the works of the Spanish 2oth century philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset. I leave you with what I think is a great speech by Gasset on Spain, History and the task of thinkers everywhere:

"History is today to Europe the first condition of its cleansing and its possible resurgence because everyone can have their own virtues and not those of others. Europe is old. You can not have, can not even aspire to have the virtues of youth. Its virtue is in being old, that is, its long memory, its long history. The problems in their lives are at levels of complications that require solutions also very complicated, and these problems can only dealt with through its history, otherwise there would be an anachronism between the complexity of their problems and the simplicity and youthfullness without memory that I want to give their solutions. Europe has to learn in history something not found in a standard of what you can do, history does not foresee the future but has to learn to avoid what not to do. So it always is reborn from itself, avoiding the past. For us this is history, to liberate us from what was. Because the past is a revenant and if you do not dominate it with memory, refreshing it, he always turns against us, and eventually strangles us."

Jose Ortega y Gasset--Concept of History