Deep Spain and Northeast Malta – the Madrid part

A different year

In a typical year, I take one significant trip but 2017 was a bit different because after carefully considering my original plan to travel to and through the four states I needed to visit to raise my total to 49 U.S. states, those five weeks seemed like an unconscionably long time to leave Zicomo (my cat – AKA Zico) with only 15-30 minutes of a pet sitter’s company each day. Thus, one domestic trip became two. However, I’d also planned in international trip.

After reading a blurb about a volunteer opportunity in Spain, I signed on to serve as an English conversationalist through a program called Vaughan Town Fifty-Fifty. The object of the program is for the volunteers to spend several hours for each of six days engaged in conversations strictly in English with individual Spaniards who face what must be for them an intensive and exhausting week but who hope to see a measurable improvement in their ability to converse in English by the end of those few days.

Initially, I had no plans to write about this trip. I did no research, left my camera at home and took no contemporaneous notes. However, as the end of the year draws closer, I thought I would offer my reflections and memories to them (and you) as an inconsequential Christmas gift.  Those of you who have read my accounts of other trips will find this report qualitatively different. The history, geology, geography, and other elements typical of my stories will be notably absent. This will be more personal and reflective (and perhaps a bit foggier since I’m relying exclusively on my memory).

I also tacked on a brief stay in Malta for reasons I’ll explain later. This was my second visit to this tiny Mediterranean country and I did no sightseeing. If you’re interested in my impressions of the country and haven’t already done so, you can read about them here. (Some of you might be grateful, given Malta’s long and fascinating history, that I wrote these entries more than a year after my visit and that they aren’t as detailed as those for my more recent trips which have grown increasingly complex and detailed over the years.)

Arriving in Madrid

I left the Washington area at about 16:00 on the afternoon of Friday, 13 October and, after connecting through Toronto, arrived in a surprisingly dark Madrid at 08:00 Saturday morning. I learned that Madrid was dark because its time is synchronized to the wrong time zone. Take a look at this time zone map from the website timeanddate.com.

The black dot is Madrid and you see that, while it should be in the same time zone as the United Kingdom, the gray bar shows that the time is unexpectedly synced with Berlin. Although Spain was never officially allied with Germany (mainly because the country, still devastated from its recent civil war had little to offer the Third Reich), sometime in the fall of 1940, the dictator Francisco Franco ordered the country’s clocks set ahead one hour to align them with those in Germany. And there they have remained ever since.

Given my lack of familiarity with the city, I opted to take a taxi to the Hotel Infanta Mercedes – one of the hotels recommended by Vaughan Town’s operators. Although not centrally located, the hotel had the advantage of being inexpensive and just a few blocks from both the Saturday evening tapas reception and Sunday’s departure point for our week at Gredos near El Barco de Ávila. Although I reached the hotel well before the normal check-in time, the genial fellow at the desk found an available room.

Although I rarely do more than occasionally doze on any flight, and this one was no different, I also try not to sleep at my new destination before what would be a normal bedtime. So, while my body clock was at about 03:00, I was determined to stay awake for the coming 12 hours or so. The chap at the desk gave me a tourist map and walking directions to the nearest Metro stop at Tetuán and I set out to have a walk about the city.

I hopped out of the station at Sol as he’d suggested and found that it was very much the hub of activity he’d promised bustling with shoppers, tourists, and street performers in the guise of human statues (the practice of which I later learned Sol is somewhat renowned)

or as a myriad of familiar cartoon characters from Bart Simpson to Mickey Mouse. The plaza has two large fountains, a statue of Charles III and the famous – nearly perpetually surrounded by tourists statue – the Bear and the Strawberry Tree (a symbol on Madrid’s coat of arms since the 13th century) by Antonio Navarro Santafé.

After wandering around Sol and noting the day’s human statues which included a hand standing skateboarder and a waiter balancing a tray after slipping on a banana peel, I thought I might pass some pleasant time people watching in El Parque del Retiro so I set off in that general direction. En route, I passed Madrid’s City Hall. I took this photo (one of the few during my trip) not only because of the rather spectacular building but, given the sentiments emanating both from much of Europe and the current American administration, I found the sign (you need to enlarge the photo to see it) both poignant and telling.

I made it to the park where I sat on a bench along the Paseo del Estanque for an hour or so before setting off in the general direction of the Plaza Mayor. I managed to walk past Neptune’s Fountain and the Prado – the National Museum of Spain. Although the museum houses one of the great collections of western art including perhaps the largest gathering of work by Francisco Goya, I was deep enough into the brain haze of transitioning time that trying to appreciate the art I might see there would have been pointless. I kept walking.

Construction on the Plaza Mayor began in the early 17th century more than four decades after it was initially planned under Felipe (Phillip) II. Work began in 1617 under the reign of Phillip III and it is, as the name suggests, both central and one of the largest plazas in the city. The plaza I visited is largely the work of the architect Juan de Villanueva who had the task of restoring it in 1790 after a series of fires had all but destroyed the original. The statue in the photo below (shot by Alvesgaspar and taken from Wikipedia) is of Phillip III and is a favorite meeting point in the city.

I turned back in the general direction of Sol and recall thinking that although there wasn’t much litter – probably because of the presence of a large number of trash receptacles – the city generally had an aura of what I would have described as fifties diesel dirtiness because many of the building facades were hidden under layers of soot. In all, though the dotted path doesn’t precisely mark my route, my peregrinations more or less covered the area on the map below.

The day was getting late and the tapas reception was scheduled for 17:00 so I hopped back onto the Metro, returned to Tetuán, and set off in search of the restaurant. I was the first to arrive so I took the opportunity visit the toilet and by the time I returned a tall (at least with respect to me) blond woman had entered and she looked about as puzzled as I felt. I don’t recall who approached whom but we were soon joined by our program director, Giovanna and our master of ceremonies, Fernando and we all confirmed that we were part of the Vaughan Town group.

We four chatted for a while as we ate and drank – nibbling somewhat carefully in anticipation of the others who were expected to join us. Jane, the blond, is from England and would be one of five volunteers from the UK with me as the lone American. We learned that this particular group was going to be small and unusual with six volunteers and only five Spaniards.

As it turned out, Jane and I were staying at the same hotel so we walked back together and settled on meeting for breakfast Sunday morning. Since we weren’t scheduled to depart until midafternoon Sunday, Jane, who is something of a Hispanophile and travels to Madrid with some frequency, offered to guide me through one of her favorite neighborhoods – Malasaña – and I accepted eagerly.

Note: In keeping with my 2022 reformation of the blog into shorter entries, backdated to maintain their sequence, any comments on this post might pertain to its new configuration. See the explanation in the post Conventions and Conversions.