First day, part II

After my brief stay in foggy London town (more precisely, the airport of foggy London town), I boarded a plane bound, finally, for Spain. Two hours on an Iberian Airlines flight to Madrid didn’t sound too bad after the trans-Atlantic flight I’d just finished. The flight was maybe half full, and the cabin was especially roomy. The flight itself was ordinary enough, but I was excited nonetheless; this was my first baby step into complete Spanish immersion. Iberia and British Airways are owned by the same company, but since Iberia is based in Spain (Spain and Portugal make up the Iberian Peninsula, hence the name) and the flight was to Spain, the flight attendants’ default language was Spanish. A simple “Buenos dias” as I stepped on the plane marked the end of my time speaking English as a primary language for the next four months.

We landed in Madrid under cloudy skies and cool temperatures. After passing through customs, I started looking for a free WiFi area. I had told my family that I would try and send some communication via email while I was in the London airport, but was unable to find a place with free access. Turns out, free WiFi is just about nonexistent in European airports, as far as I can tell. In my efforts, I ordered a café con leche at the first coffee shop I saw, thinking that perhaps they would give me an internet access code with a purchase. No such luck. I decided that finding some WiFi would have to wait; I had a seven hour layover in Madrid before my flight to Sevilla, and I was hoping to get some exploring done.

I was pointed towards a taxi by airport personnel whose sole job is to find taxis for arriving passengers. I don’t know if this is the norm worldwide (because I’ve never had to take a taxi from an airport before), but it certainly is convenient. The taxi driver, a man who looked to be in his fifties, estimated that a trip to Casa Botin (a restaurant in Madrid that I’ll discuss more a bit later) in downtown Madrid would cost about thirty euro, equivalent to forty bucks. Yes, this is a lot for a few hours’ trip (ended up costing around sixty euro, or eighty dollars, roundtrip from the airport to downtown and back), but to hell with it. What else am I going to spend that eighty dollars on? I spend about that much on two weeks’ worth of Chipotle in Lubbock. The taxi trip was about ten minutes long, during which I got to have a chat with the driver.

This is my first time in Spain, but I’ve travelled enough to know that one of the most interesting things you can do when you’re in a new place, be it domestic or international, is strike up a conversation with a local. I must need to work on my accent (as if I wasn’t already acutely aware of that fact), because immediately after I asked him if there were any places downtown to get free WiFi, he said, in broken English, “You no espanish?” meaning, “You don’t speak Spanish, do you?” I laughed and told him “un poco”—a little. I really can speak Spanish, but it is a bit rusty (I didn’t take a Spanish class this fall) and my accent does need some work (I’ve only had one Spanish teacher from Spain, and that was more than a year ago). I’ve found it’s best to underrepresent your language ability when you’re in a foreign country. People are much more likely to give you helpful tips that might otherwise go unsaid—they tend to be more cautious about correcting you if you say you know the language just fine, thank you very much, for fear coming across as rude.

Anyway, after chatting a bit about where I was from and where he was from, he made a comment about how tourism in Spain has increased enormously since the sixties and seventies, when he first came to Madrid. There’s a pretty obvious reason for this trend: Francisco Franco. Francisco Franco was the fascist dictator of Spain from the mid-1930’s until his death in the 70’s, during which he implemented ultra conservative (fascist) policies. Spain wasn’t a good place to be in those days. Think Saudi Arabia. Or Nazi Germany. Very oppressive, very closed, military-run, etc. It was almost like the Catholic equivalent of Sharia law. For the more literately-inclined readers, Federico Garcia Lorca wrote a stinging critique of such an oppressive society in his play La Casa de Bernarda Alba – The House of Bernarda Alba – which he supposedly based on his fascist-supporting, Franco-loving neighbors. It’s also speculated that it was that play that was the straw that broke the camel’s back in getting Lorca assassinated (he was kidnapped and presumably executed and buried in an unmarked location—his body has never been found) by Franco’s men.

With that brief backdrop, it’s easy to see why people started coming to Spain in droves after Franco died and democracy was reestablished. Fascism just isn’t a whole lot of fun. And that’s what I told the driver. Turns out, he was working in Madrid when news of Franco’s death came around. The precious few tourists there at the hotel in which he worked celebrated the end of his rule. The driver (I never did get his name), however, was cautious then and still is today. He said, “I told them that it wasn’t a good idea to be celebrating in public like that.”

I replied, “Because there were still so many of his supporters around?”

And he said, “Exactly. And there still are. We’re only one generation removed from Franco. There are adults in Spain who were sons of the people who fought with the Fascists during the Guerra Civil. There’s still a lot of that thinking around here. And the judiciary is the worst of all. There are a lot of senior judges who still follow that antiquated thinking.”

Which was a fascinating remark for two reasons. First, he used a word, trasnochados, translated as “antiquated thinking” in the above quote, that I had never heard before. Second, the idea that Francoism is still so heavily entwined in the Spanish public has really never been discussed in any Spanish class I’ve taken. I just assumed that once Franco died, everyone breathed a sigh of relief and tried to forget that entire era, much like modern-day Germany does its best to completely distance itself from the Nazi era. That much of the Spanish public are probably still somewhat supportive of Franco is something that I’ve never thought about, and it’s an idea that’s essential to understanding modern Spanish politics.

Wow, again, so much writing and I still haven’t said anything about what I actually did in Madrid. But one of the things I’m going to try to do in this blog is tie in bits of history and politics with what I’m doing each day. I’ll take some time to discuss Spanish art history when we start going to cathedrals with famous murals, for example. It’s important to view things in the historical perspective to which they belong. It makes things infinitely more interesting. And, as a Spanish major, I think it’s my responsibility as an ambassador of Texas Tech’s foreign language program (and let’s not forget Betsy Arnold, my high school Spanish teacher. I’ve learned more from her than perhaps any other single person except my parents) to do a bit of teaching and explaining. Anyone can write a travelogue. I want whoever reads my blog to come away with some interesting knowledge as well.

I’m not going to dwell much on Casa Botin at this point, since it was closed and I’ll have to make another trip when we take our excursion to Madrid later in the semester. Suffice it to say that it’s a world-famous restaurant, and I was really looking forward to eating there. Alas. (Side note: the Spanish word for “alas” is eheu. How cool is that? I’ll use the two interchangeably from now on.) However, as my driver pointed out, the street that Casa Botin is on is full of restaurants. I went down the street to the Mercado de San Miguel.

It’s a really neat place where vendors sell both raw ingredients (fruits, vegetables, seafood, ham, etc.) as well as meals made with said ingredients (sangria, ham champatas, fish blends on toast, etc.). After browsing all the shops (it’s a relatively small market, maybe a few over a dozen vendors) I decided on a chapata de jamón and a glass of sangria.

Absolutely delicious. The ham on the left of the picture is on delicious freshly-made bread with a savory garlic sauce. Sangria is a mix of different fruit juices and rinds with wine, in this case, and is a very popular drink in Spain. Jamón ibérico, Iberian ham, needs a separate post on its own. I’ll do that in the future. Suffice it to say that it’s unlike anything you’ve ever had. Magnificently delicious. I think that it’s just about impossible to get any nearer to perfection without divine intervention. It is to ham what Parmigiano-Reggiano is to cheese. I could go on.

After my meal I continued my quest to find free WiFi. I saw a sign outside of a restaurant called “VIPS” that offered free internet to customers, so I went in and ordered, you guessed it, a café con leche. However, after opening my computer and waiting for the waitress to give me the access code, my battery was almost dead. And of course, there wasn’t an enchufe (plug) around. Hence the brisk facebook update and blog post. I was racing against the clock to get word out to my family that I was doing fine. I had to ask my brother, dad, and girlfriend to try and call my mom and tell her the same, as she’s still holding out on getting a facebook. After successfully updating my facebook and blog, and with no battery left, I wandered around the nearby plazas (pronounced PLAH-thas, I'll discuss more about regional dialects and accents later), in and out of the countless shops and people, until I decided it would be a good idea to head back to the airport.

So here I sit, having finally found an enchufe—the only one in the entire airport for public use. Still no WiFi. I’ve given up on finding it in airports, so I’m typing this all into a Word document, to be pasted to the blog later. However, sitting on the stone floor has taken its toll on the circulation to my posterior region, and I need to get walking again. My flight for Sevilla leaves in a bit over an hour, and it’s my hope that I’ll be at the hotel before one o’clock in the morning local time. Hasta pronto.