Reflections on Madrid

 I’m safe, sound and somewhat settled in Spain. I’ve been here for almost two weeks now – it’s hard to believe it’s already been that long, to be honest. My bout of homesickness has subsided slightly, but it comes in fits and starts.

Anyway, let me share some tales and observations of Madrid. I got there Monday, Sept. 25 at about 10 a.m. On my flight, I knew four girls, three of whom were coincidentally placed in the same autonomous community (basically the equivalent of a state) as I was. One of the girls is from my high school, another was from journalism school, another is a friend from study abroad in Costa Rica and the other girl is my Costa Rica friend’s friend. Got that?

Familiar faces made me less uneasy about my move. The five of us planned to meet up in Madrid with some other auxiliares whom we met on Facebook. My fellow journalism school-er didn’t end up staying in Madrid, but the rest of us did. We stayed at Las Musas Residence hostel, a young-people-centric hangout near the center of Madrid. The place had wi-fi and no bedbugs, so I give it a thumbs-up. The workers were great, as was the location. However, I’ve never seen a smaller shower than the one in our room. The beds were like boards, and the comforters were stained, but hey, that’s hostel living, right? Man, I really know how to make a place sound terrible. Mom, are you reading this?

The offensively tiny shower

The eight of us clicked immediately. Now that I’m in Don Benito, the town where I’ll live for the next eight months, I miss them dearly. I think part of me sees those girls as a sort of lifeline or safety net because we were together when this whole adventure started, and they know what I’m going through as a displaced American 4,000 miles from home. We’ll stay in touch via WhatsApp, an über popular texting app in Europe, and Facebook.

Our group, minus Mandie from Kansas

We didn’t really do much in Madrid. We did a lot of wandering, getting lost and putting our collective memories together to figure out which direction we went in or came from. Anybody who knows me well can probably guess I wasn’t a valuable contributor to the group’s navigation.

Right after we arrived at our hostel, we took a free walking tour. Our tour guide, Harriet, was a pithy Brit with bright-red dyed hair and an eclectic vibe. She took us and a bunch of other hostel dwellers around the city, noting people and places of historical and political importance along the way.

Below is the Palacio Real de Madrid (the royal palace). The palace, which has 1.45 million square feet and more than 3,000 rooms, was completed in 1755 and was first occupied by Charles III in 1764. The current king, Juan Carlos, and his family don’t live there; the building is only used for government events. 

The Catedral de la Almudena is next to the royal palace. It’s a very pretty church, but it’s not particularly decadent compared to other European holy places. Harriet said the theory is that it was built “plainly” so it didn’t upstage its neighbor, the palace. The side facing away from the palace is more intricate.

Facing away from the palace

On our tour, Harriet took us by a home, shown below, called a “malicious house,” because the people who lived there in the 1500s deliberately put windows in between floors to throw off the assessors trying to figure out how many spare rooms were inside. See, when the capital of Spain was moved from Toledo to Madrid, there wasn’t enough housing for the royals and nobles. Madrid, at the time, was a small, forgettable town. It wasn’t exactly good politics to evict locals from their homes, though, so the rule was that the locals in Madrid (people in Madrid are called madrileños) had to move into a spare room in their home, while the nobles and other important folks relocating from Toledo could occupy the rest of the house. So, madrileños built homes with windows in odd places to make it hard for assessors to determine from the outside if there were spare rooms, based on how many people were in the family (assessors weren’t welcome inside the homes). Neat, eh?

Doesn't look malicious to me.

Plaza Mayor, shown below, is kind of the “it” gathering place in Madrid. If you haven’t been to Europe before, you probably don’t have a sense of what a typical European plaza looks like. If you have visited Europe, though, Plaza Mayor is similar in appearance to cualquier plaza en cualquier ciudad (any plaza in any city). However, it is quite large. The plaza in its current form was built in 1790. The original plaza(s) was constructed of wood, and it went up in flames not long after it was completed (using open fire for heat in a wooden building isn’t a good idea). Apparently, madrileños didn’t learn quickly. The plaza was reconstructed out of wood after it burned down in each of the subsequent four winters (I think it was four). Eventually, the king decided stone was a better idea, and the stone plaza still stands today. Harriet said a piso (translated to a “flat,” better known in America as an “apartment”) in the plaza will set you back 1 million euro.

This is getting long, so I’ll wrap up. With eight girls each hauling eight months’ worth of luggage, one can imagine how epic our stash of suitcases was. After a full day and a half in Madrid, we packed our hired van with our goodies, rode to the Estación Sur de Autobuses (the bus station for people traveling south) and headed toward our Extremaduran adventure.  

I couldn't quite capture its epic-ness.