Otra Vez, Por Favor

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I cannot be effusive enough about Madrid. If you asked someone for directions in London, they'd most likely look down their nose flipping their artistically choppy fringe and whine "you just don't know the city, do you?" In New York, they would debilitate you with their hand-held Taser before you reached the end of the question. In Madrid, the person you asked for directions will then ask you where you're from and what football team you like, leaving with just a chuckled "de nada" after walking half a mile through the city with you and your friends to the exact address of the live jazz club you were asking about. Not that you'd need to go to a jazz club anyway, as the street musicians in Madrid are phenomenal; being shamelessly partial to accordion players, I spent at least five euros on the three-accordion jazz band which performed every night for hours outside the nightclub at the end of our street. Everything in Madrid seems to about sharing, from the music on the streets to the free entrance at all the museums past six on weeknights, to the delectably diet-demolishing gooey warm syrup and crispy hot fried chocolate con churros, which you can't physically finish alone unless they're filming this documentary about you called " The 6,000-Pound Woman: A Day In The Life". I miss sharing canas and tapasin the afternoon for a euro or two; you order a drink, and they bring you the specialty tapa of the house with it, which ranges from doorstopper-thick slices of Spanish omelette with potatoes and cheese on a sourdough bagel to a dish of spicy slices of chorizo in wine sauce, and of course you have to go with friends so you can dip your fork or slice of baguette in everything. When the entire Spanish Civil Guard, on their hour-long break from patrolling the park outside the Palacio Real,trooped in one afternoon and ordered coffee and donuts almost in unison (apparently the cops-donuts thing is actually universal), Xavier and Andreas and I noticeably sat up straighter and came to the conclusion that we were chewing on the absolute safest bread and sausage in Madrid. Being the only people in the entire establishment not in uniform, we finished them quickly and headed off to see Picasso's Guernica at the Museo De La Reina-Sofia with chorizo in our teeth. After two days at both the Reina Sofia and El Prado, I was overwhelmed (In Spanish, aplastado, which I think is a more fitting word for it) by art, by rows of painstakingly detailed La Sagrada Familia and Virgen Maria in rows down the long hallways like soldiers flanking the Rubens and Goya and Picasso and Dali and Velasquez. In the crowded Sala 7 at the Reina Sofia, I was able to get close enough to La Guernica to see Picasso's signature; I got into a bit of trouble when everyone else left the museum to go for more Starbucks, but quickly extricated myself from it by preparing a couple of very eloquent Spanish sentences about art for our supervisors as I rushed down the stairs. At the Prado, it can't be a coincidence that from Goya'sLa maja desnuda (the beautiful nude) and his bright royal portraits on floor 2, you have to take the elevator all the way down to the bottom to see Saturno devorando a su hijo (Saturn devouring his son), the first time I had actually descended into somebody else's madness by pushing an arrow button. During our day trip to Alcala Henares, an exquisite university town full of storks with the most beautiful Humanities Department I've ever seen, in which every shop including the optician's is proudly named after Cervantes (who was born there), Anjuna and I got told off by a security guard in the archeological museum who discovered us nearly-napping on the plush leather couches. Once again, eloquent Spanish saved the day - after a week my Spanish has improved to the point where I can order a coffee, buy shoes, and make excuses quite fluently, and what else does one really need? Most jokes are still beyond me, but I did do remarkably well with a quite amorous Barcelonian on our last night in the city. In nearly every restaurant, one cannot finish even one round of tapas without being accosted by the flower-sellers who wander in and out, thrusting roses in your face and demanding two euros, which never really tempted me as that was usually about as much as my entire meal cost; naturally, while wedged eight people to one table in the Cafe Populart listening to flamenco jazz, I was surprised when one of the ubiquitous rose sellers started yelling "oye!oye!" and delivered one to me. I was more proud of the fact that I was subsequently able to carry on a fifteen-minute Spanish conversation with my admirer than of the fact that he bought me a rose, though I was blinded by camera flashes the whole time as my friends seemed to be compiling some sort of photo essay of the encounter ("OH MY GAWWWWD! EMMA GOT A GUY IN MADRID WOOOOOOOOO!"flash flash, nearly drowning out the stand-up bass). There's always something fascinating going on, if you just stay really observant while clicking down the buzzing streets of the city past midnight in heels, and refuse to visit Starbucks, Topshop, or KFC. We all discovered the true necessity of siestas as we trudged back to the hostel past three every morning, collapsing into our bunk beds from one until five in the afternoon along with the rest of the country. One afternoon I missed my siesta and almost fell asleep during the all-Spanish no-subtitles afternoon showing of Che at the darkest and most soporifically comfortable cinema I've ever visited, but luckily there was always a part with a lot of gunfire or donkeys braying whenever I felt myself relaxing to the point of no return. For a week, I considered myself a student only in the fact that I got student discounts, for a week there was no music coursework to fret over and keep me awake, only when we landed at Bristol Airport again did the ungraceful budget-airline bump of the plane on the runway jolt me back into the impending doom of my mock exam grades and my fifteen-minute Spanish oral assessment. Wrapped in my familiar blue and white striped duvet last night at 9, attempting to battle the demon cold which could seriously interfere with my 20-minute performance component for the IB, I couldn't help thinking about how two nights before, at the same time, I would have been still rosy-cheeked and refreshed from my afternoon nap, just starting to help prepare the paella for supper. When I was eleven, I read the bookWild Magic and loved it so much that when I was about a chapter away from the end I put it away and refused to read it for a month just so I could avoid getting to the final page. So I guess I did the same sort of thing with Madrid; by purposefully not visiting the entire Dali exhibit at the Reina Sofia, by not taking a tour of the Palacio Real and not trying the amazing layered dessert I saw in the window of a convenience store in Alcala Henares, I've ensured for myself that I will go back again.

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