The tinier the streets, the better the restaurants. That’s what I quickly discovered in Madrid. The narrower the sidewalk, and some of them were barely pushing 12 inches, and the tighter the one way street that it hugged, the more quaint the atmosphere, and often, the better food as well. It only took about 24 hours in Spain for me to finally appreciate what I haven’t ever appreciated in 29 years in the U.S.: beer in the afternoon. Sitting in a tiny outdoor café on a carless, brick street with my boss as we took in the view of the Plaza Mayor a short distance ahead of us, I savored the chill and the foam of a glass of beer under a mercilessly bright sun. So this is what millions of frat boys and football fans have always known, I thought…
I forced myself to struggle through ungrammatically correct, artless Spanish sentences whenever I ordered food and bought museum tickets, asked for directions, the bathroom, metro directions, checking into the hotel, despite the fact that seemingly everyone speaks English. But the exercise was worth it; In six days my Spanish did indeed go from worse to bad. A definite triumph.
I took a short day trip to Segovia, a small town absolutely plucked out of a fairytale. The pointy-towered castle had room after room of exquisite furnishings and armor and paintings. From the castle balcony you could see an aerial view of the town. An American expatriot I met had told me about the temple in Segovia which was home to a masons-type order way before the masons. He said there was some kind of legend that if you stand in the dead center of the place you will get a splitting headache. So obviously, I wanted to try out that theory. There’s two paths from the castle on the hill to the temple below. I took this one:
This picture is a very small piece of the path which is about 20 of these steep-ass, dirt staircases hugging the hill and canvassed with trees. Slipping on the unkempt dirt stairs and clutching the railing lent a create-your-own-adventure kind of feeling to it. A short distance through part of the town, past a tiny, old-school bar of locals trying to fend off the Mediterranean heat, the temple appeared like a monolith as I rounded the corner and walked up the dusty incline toward it. Altars, eerie pictures, a tiny claustrophobia-inducing room lined with pictures of old men and a round loft-alter reachable by a staircase less even and hospitable than the dirt one from the castle, the temple kind of freaked me out. Standing in the middle, I didn’t get a splitting headache but as I walked around the place I began to feel dizzy and had a strong urge to bolt outta there. To be fair, I was probably on the verge of heat exhaustion and dehydration, so that could explain the dizziness, but the place did have a weird vibe. I read the Spanish-only brochure about the history of the place, and mostly understood it at the time, but can’t remember any of the details about when it was built or how the original sect started.
Back in Madrid I visited the posh studio of one of the photographers in the exhibit for which I was flown over to Spain in the first place for work. The opening had been fun and lively and was followed by a characteristically late 10:30 dinner at a Spanish food restaurant perplexingly called Edelweiss. At the photographer’s studio I was greeted by his two dogs, one of which took my entire hand into his mouth between his slobbery and sharp dog-teeth. Although discombobulating, it was fairly painless, like a toothy handshake. A handshake doubling as shock-therapy. The Spanish photographer and his French film editor and I had a lot of laughs. Whether or not we were laughing at the same thing, no one seemed to really know or care. I spoke broken Spanish and the French guy translated it into French for the Spaniard. A wonderful confusion was this meeting of the minds.
The highlight of my trip was probably the mellifluous classical guitar duo concert I went to in the National Archeological Museum. It was in a small reading room full of exquisite antiques, specimens, 15-foot tall bookcases, statues, tapestries and a huge rectangular wood carving attached to the ceiling. And the music was incredible and eclectic, ranging from traditional Spanish music to Debussy and contemporary pieces influenced by rock, flamenco and apparently John Cage. The two young guitarists played with a percussive physicality like athletes.
Later I ate in the world’s oldest restaurant. It opened in 1725 and Goya worked as a dishwasher there. When I walked in the maitre d’ asked if I wanted to sit upstairs or downstairs and as he did so he pointed to a handsome dark wood carved staircase leading up to a room filled with lively chatter and the clink of dishes and a narrow concrete hole near the dishwasher leading down into what appeared to be a pit of darkness. It seemed like a Hobson’s choice to me, but later I wondered what it looked like downstairs and if anyone ever chose that route.
On my way into town from the airport my cabdriver had been very pissy and exacting. He didn’t like my stunted Spanish and would yell impatiently for me to stammer out where the hotel was, what I was doing here, where I was from, what did I know of Madrid. I had basically deplaned into a Gestapo on wheels.
But on the way out of town-different story entirely. A forty-ish, shaved-head, edgy guy with a raspy rock-singer voice who chatted patiently and asked where I was returning to, “Paris?” Ah, mistaken for a Parisian instead of the vulgar, ignorant American that I am. I liked this guy immediately. We commiserated about the heat, something no conversation in Madrid seems to be complete without. He held up his whiskey bottle for me to see when we were at a stop light and he took a swig. We giggled together. I didn’t find it disturbing at all, but actually delightful. I was high on my adventures. He drove fast and turned the Led Zeppelin way up and offered me lemon candy. We both sucked on the sweet bitterness and nodded our heads to Whole Lotta Love. He glanced back at me and said I was guapa. Flattery, my friends will get you nowhere with me. Unless of course you are a very sexy, Spanish alcoholic.
At the terminal I gave him a 50% tip and he wished me happy travels as he made a gesture with his hand of an airplane lifting off. Damn shame I had to leave that city.
