Madrid - Day 1

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I’M More Comfortable

Seeing the modernization of Madrid does make me feel like I am a little bit closer to home, even if I don’t actually live in a city anything like this. I’m conflicted between this being more comfortable, and wanting to experience the Spanish culture. At this point in the trip, the exhaustion is starting to set in so I’m starting to leaning toward familiarity at this point. But I’m at conflict with myself because I didn’t come on this trip to be comfortable. I want to experience the culture, but I feel like I wore myself out the first two weeks and am having a hard time getting excited about it.





Tour Guide after Tour Guide

With my shift in motivation, I am finding it harder and harder to engage with our tours and our tour guides. These local people are so passionate about the rich history and culture of their cities and I want to be fully present and engaged, but I find it hard at this point in the trip to do so. This affects my relationship with the tour guides in that I feel like they can tell that I’m not as engaged and that affects how the tour proceeds. I am not able to form these short-lives relationships with these people as I would have done in the first week.



Modernization in Madrid

Seeing the mix of old and new in the city also makes me think about the effect this has on the city as a whole and what caused the modernization. “It may seem a bourgeois, grand, and rather suffocating sort of city on first acquaintance; however, it is open to all - its temperament having been formed by the influx of citizens from a diverse country, a large empire, and the accompanying army of bureaucrats” (Culture Smart, pg 43). This origin of the people of the city is very apparent in that it does feel suffocating at first and I think that can be attributed to the mix of styles and attitudes throughout the city.

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Photos

Skyscrapers in Madrid
An interesting sight after only a short bus ride out of the old part of the city.