madre

Our apartment is interior, which in Spanish architectural conventions means that its windows open to an interior rectangular patio surrounded by other apartments. In the summer, when our patio neighbors' windows are open, you can hear the life of dozens of the homes of this working-class barrio--telenovela stars monologuing, talk show hosts screaming at each other through the static of ancient radios, children laughing, babies wailing, cats meowing from windowsills, a lapdog downstairs expressing its impotent rage, the construction workers on the ground floor singing while they hammer and drill.

We 're right near a corner of the patio, and just caddy-corner from the apartment of a woman in her fifties. She's South American, by her accent, although she's been here long enough that her grown children speak with the lisps and smooth cadence of Madrid. Her window to the patio is in her kitchen, so around meal times, we get a full blast of her volatile emotional life. The family is in the living room behind her as she prepares lunch, chopping garlic and onions with furious whacks of her knives on the cutting board. She throws down pots and pans and slams shut cabinet doors, all the while screaming at her family in the next room. They don't come see her enough, they don't care enough about her, they say mean things to her and never take to her advice. She's a good woman and a good mother, goddammit, and they should be better children.

The kids respond the same way every meal: we're always here, Mom, we call every day, we eat nearly every meal with you. But there's no calming her once she's in her stride.

After the meal, she's back in the kitchen to do the dishes. Apparently the heat of the stove, or possibly that of her fervor, has become unbearable, because at this point she often whips off her shirt and does the washing up bare-chested, her naked top half in full view of anyone who cares to look into the patio. Free from her elastic bonds, she really lets loose, bellowing out the window about her terrible children, about how her shows are all jumping the shark; the bills, the rent, the government, the nagging phone calls from various parties--nothing in her world is safe from her braless recriminations.

Dishes done, she retires into the more soundproof recesses of her flat (presumably after donning her discarded shirt) and we enjoy a few hours of the relative quiet of jackhammers and yapping yorkies.

conflict

People in Madrid are plenty nice--they certainly don´t have the reputation of Parisians or New Yorkers for rudeness and aggression--but if they´re unhappy with you, they will make it damn clear. I´ve told the story of the furious upbraiding of a whole train car for refusing to give up a seat to an old woman, and over the past few weeks I´ve witnessed several interactions that confirm my initial impression that Madrileños are not to be fucked with.

On the subway home from work one afternoon, a middle-aged guy and his elderly father got onto the train. The father is decked out in all the trappings of the tourist--an open map, walking shoes, and a camera case strapped (rather unwisely, I thought) around his waist. The train was a bit crowded and they found themselves pushed up next to a couple a grungy-looking types, two guys in torn jeans and dirty t-shirts. The father was looking at his map, but the son, suspicious of the neighbors from the start, kept watch over the situation out of the corner of his eye. A couple of stops down the line, an unwelcome hand is on the camera case, and the son is screaming. ´´Get your filthy hand away from my father´s camera! Thief! Thief! There´s a thief on the metro!´´ The guy´s face gives him away--he clearly had designs on the camera-- and his friend is throwing him under the bus, putting space between them, pretending to be absorbed in his iPhone. The son´s still yelling. ´´Where the hell is security? Someone call security! Thief!´´ He´s shoving the would-be perpetrator against the wall when other travelers finally get involved, entreating him to relax before this gets ugly. When he and his father disembark, he stands at the open doors of the car, yelling to everyone getting on ´´Watch your things, there´s a thief on this train!´´ while the failed criminals disappear into the crowd.

I teach private classes in a fancy neighborhood full of fur coats and BMWs where people literally look down their noses at you. There´s a little shop near the metro I take home and I duck in for some snacks. A woman in full mink walking on a mahogany cane enters the store, carrying a large, open bag of sunflower seeds. She plops it down on the counter and says politely, ´´I would like to return this.´´ The shop attendant, a girl about my age, looks confused. ´´But you opened it.´´ ´´Well yes, how else would I know if I like them? They´re not as good as the ones I usually buy and I want to exchange them.´´ The shop girl, clearly not endowed with immense patience, explains in no uncertain terms that this is patently ridiculous. The lady can´t believe what she´s hearing--her manners rapidly erode as she spirals into a ever-louder rampage on the deterioration of customer service in this country. They both look at me, each expecting me to support her case, so I run away.

Sometimes it´s obnoxious and absurd, but there is a certain admirable boldness in it. So many people here are perfectly willing to cause a scene, no matter how large or small the issue. I prefer to go about my day in peace, generally not screaming at anyone... but I must admit I enjoy the show.

jóven

The elementary school where I teach is a bilingual school, meaning the students study English for several hours a week and also study two subjects in English, in our case Science and Art. This means I'm a Science teacher several times a week for my second-graders, which I love.

We're studying plant life, and today I had them drawing a flower and labeling its different parts. They're all working quietly when Ainhoa, a sassy, too-smart-for-her-own-good type, beckons me to her desk. She asks me, "Teacher, why do I have to learn these things? If I need to know about a flower I can just look it up online."

I froze.

This kid was born in 2006. She's never known a world without Facebook, YouTube, Wikipedia, or Twitter. She learned to google when she learned to read. She was barely forming sentences when the first iPhone came out. For her, all the information in the world is, and always has been, readily available whenever she needed it.

And as she stared up at my with critical, demanding eyes, I had to admit she had a point. Why does she need to know about the reproductive organs of a rose? I forgot all that immediately after high school and have never suffered as a result. In fact, when we started this unit in the book, I had to refresh my memory on the various parts of a flower.

I googled it.

But of course, the flower isn't the point. It doesn't really matter that Ainhoa remembers where the stamen is, or what function the sepals perform. The point is that she starts developing an understanding of the world around her, hopefully igniting an interest and a curiosity that will lead her to an intellectually fulfilling life. I don't want to fill her head with the loose facts she might encounter in a Google search; I want to teach her how to examine things thoughtfully and critically.

I offered her a kid-friendly version of this explanation, and it sufficed to turn her back to her drawing, but I don't think she really bought it. Maybe someday when she's a biologist hard at work in her lab, she'll think back on this day and realize that I was right, but until then she's probably just going to WhatsApp her friends about what a pain in the ass her teacher is.

civil

It's a general rule on the Madrid metro (and on most public transport in the world, from what I've seen) that young, healthy people should give up their seats to people who need it more. Usually, when anyone over sixty gets on the train, a couple people jump up and offer their seat. On the more crowded lines at rush hour, however, getting a seat is such a miracle that people are hesitant to surrender it, regardless of the age or physical well-being of incoming passengers.

A few days ago I'm standing, squeezed shoulder to shoulder on a downtown-bound subway train when an elderly woman with a walker climbs onboard. She looks around hopefully at the lucky ones in the seats, all of whom appear suddenly to have very important things to do on their cell phones or in the bottoms of their purses.

A guy leaning against a wall offers this second-best position to the lady, and after helping her get secure enough to withstand the jerky stop-and-go motion, he turns on the sitters.

"Look at all of these shameless jerks, bowing their heads like they don't see her," he practically spits at the crowd, who are now addressing truly urgent iPhone crises and launching search expeditions in murky depths of their handbags. "It's disgusting, it really is. All a bunch of assholes. People these days have no manners. Fuck."

Thoroughly shamed, most of them choose to hold their ground at this point, apparently deciding that they'd come too far to turn back, but one guy (possibly because he doesn't have a smartphone to hide behind) stands up and, blushing, offers up his seat. The lady thanks him profusely, clearly a touch embarrassed by her uninvited knight in shining armor. Our hero, however, can only triumphantly mutter, "finally."

parada

The elementary school where I work four days a week is in Perales del Rio, a tiny bedroom community outside of a suburb of Madrid. If I were to hop in a car, it would take me about fifteen minutes to get from my downtown apartment to my school. Since I don't have a car, I spend a little under an hour in commute each way in a foot-subway-bus combo. At first it seemed awful, but I got used to it and eventually came to actually enjoy it. It's a good opportunity to get some reading in,and occasionally I cross paths with some interesting people.

As I approached the bus stop in Perales the other day, a woman of seventy or so, looking rather agitated, began throwing questions at me before I had even stopped walking. She´d been waiting for this damned bus for nearly half an hour, she said, and was losing patience.  She supported herself unsteadily on a garled wooden cane and was missing several teeth. Her clothes were neat but simple. I told her the bus would arrive in about ten minutes.

´I remember when this area was nothing but open field,´ she says, gesturing to the little village, whose architecture and young trees indicate no more than twenty years. ´The city was smaller then.´ She says the same thing has happened to downtown Madrid, where she has spent her entire life. ´There was a public hospital on Atocha Street, right by my house.´ She´s wistful. ´Now they´ve moved it to the middle of nowhere.´ Everything in Madrid´s city center has been slowly migrating into the peripheral areas, she laments. ´I´d never leave downtown if it were up to me. But a good friend lives way out here and doesn´t like to come into the city. I didn´t have kids because I didn´t want to complicate my life, and now my friends complicate it for me. But it´s nice to see old friends.´

It´s not all reminiscing, though. Although she remembers the city as smaller, maybe more quaint, she spent her youth under an oppressive dictatorship. ´I saw people starving. Dying of hunger in the streets. Sick and dying.´ Spain´s fascist regime, which lasted forty years and fell only upon the death of leader Francisco Franco in 1975, was initially intensely isolationist, cutting off international trade and further stifiling an economy already ravaged by civil war. In the latter half of Franco´s reign, the economy grew, but this growth was enjoyed largely by the upper classes. ´You weren´t yet in the world, honey, but believe me, it was hard.´

A couple of years ago Levi and I had lunch with an retired neighbor in Zafra, a stately, sweatervest sort of fellow with a modest but very comfortable downtown flat. He showed us the Franco-era pistol he keeps in a velvet lined box and his collection of Franco coins, lamenting that those were better times, before the euro, before these liberal Popes and progressive governments, when people had money and stability and Spanish culture was at its most glorious heights. Those were the days.

mercado

Enjoying a chocolate stout with my friend Erin

Spain isn't known for its beer, and for good reason. Most bars offer only one beer on tap, and it's almost always one of a handful of domestics that resemble the poorer of the mass-produced American lagers. It's refreshing in the summer heat, but frankly, it's pretty awful. Of course, the wine here is fantastic, but after two years in Spain and a year in Thailand (where the beer tastes like its Spanish counterpart but is, judging by the vicious hangovers it causes, clearly laced with poison), I sometimes find myself desperately craving a good beer.

Juanma at work

When we arrived in Madrid, some new friends introduced us to the wonder that is the San Fernando Market. Only two blocks from our door, it houses La Buena Pinta, a tiny beer shop with bottled imports from all over Europe and select beers from America. The name of this little place is a play on the Spanish expression tiene buena pinta, which means "it looks delicious," and the literal meaning of the phrase buena pinta, which is "the good pint." The owner is incredibly knowledgeable in all things beery and makes great recommendations. He's got a nice bar setup so we sit right there and enjoy our liquid treats.

The market itself is an old warehouse-style building with two dozen or so mini-shops like La Buena Pinta. There are wine and vermouth shops, a couple of Spanish-style bars with tapas and light beer, a Greek snack bar, a sushi restaurant, various bread and cheese stores, a cobbler (who rescued my boots for seven euros) and a book shop that sells second-hand books by the kilo (Girl With the Dragon Tattoo weighs .65 kilos, so it's  €6.50). A few tables are set up in the open space and each food and drink shop has its own little bar, so you can pick up some olives, some goat cheese, and a baguette and have a picnic with your pint or glass of wine.

Sunday morning party time

On Sundays the markets hosts dance events. One weekend a big group of amateur dancers came in and showed off various types of Latin dance while we drank chocolate stout and ate empanadas. It's a great place, far and away my favorite spot in our neighborhood.

*All photos are, of course, courtesy of the incredibly talented Levi Shand. Check out his website!

basura

The Madrid trash workers are on strike. They´re facing wage cuts as the city tries to trim down it budget in light of the current economic crisis, and they are clearly unhappy about it. We´ve gone over a week now without trash collection. The ever-growing piles of bagged garbage are fine. Unsightly and stinkier every day, but I can live with it. The people who keep this city clean don´t deserve to have their salaries cut, so fine, let it pile up.

But they decided not to just let it pile up. Apparently afraid that simple heaps of rotting trash wouldn´t make a strong enough statement, the angry workers took to the streets on the second and third day of the strike to tip over gabage cans and dumpsters, scattering their contents far and wide.

The city center is a distaster zone. It looks like a tornado has ripped through the place, somehow managing to leave the buildings in tact but obliterating every trash recepticle in its path. The Lavapies plaza, the heart of our bohemian little barrio, already a touch shabby under the best of circumstances, looks positively apocalyptic. Every breeze kicks up torn newspapers and candy wrappers, and passing dogs have lefts trails of half-eaten, rotting food on the sidewalks. Even the pot dealers on the corner and the drunks on the benches look a little uncomfortable in their newly disgusting surroundings.

The newspapers say the strike may go on a while. God help us.

back

After only fifteen months away, here we are again in Spain. I couldn´t be happier. Thailand was a great experience, but it certainly taught me that I would just really rather live in the developed western world. Our little flat in the center of Madrid has hot water, high-speed internet, a flush toilet located in a bathroom inside of the dwelling itself, an oven, sinks in the bathroom and kitchen, sufficient and comfortable seating...after Thailand, and especially the jungle container, it´s pure luxury. Three months in I still emerge from every hot shower amazed at how fantastic it is to have a hot shower. I´ve been cooking elaborate meals in my fully-equipped kitchen and haven´t once had to scrub mold off the walls. Life is good.

I´ve also been struck by how much easier this transition has been than any of the previous moves I´ve made. My study abroad time in Argentina was six months of culture shock; I never fully adapted because I couldn´t speak the language well and it was the first time I´d really experienced a culture other than my own. When we moved to Zafra, it took me months to being truly understanding the accent, and adjusting to small-town life was difficult and often frustrating. Living in Surat never stopped feeling insane--just when I would start to feel at home, a spider the size of my hand would scuttle across my floor, or my neighbor would proudly present me with an entire octopus and wait expectably for me to eat it, or my school would throw an enormous celebration (the motivation for which I was never once able to fully understand) in which the students would dress up in traditional Thai dance costumes and drape Buddhist scarves around a statue of the virgin Mary, or ceremonially give me a bath towel with a bow wrapped around it. There were days when it was just wholly, insurmountably foreign.

This move hasn´t been like that. I understand what people are saying. The things they do make sense to me. I can get everywhere easily, whether my bus or metro, without walking miles through unmarked village streets or risking my life on a questionable motorbike. I can buy any food I need or want. With three years under my belt, teaching is a breeze. The challenges I face every day are normal life challenges, not ´´I can´t figure out how to order food without chicken guts´´ type challenges.

Happy to be back.

el rollo de los visados

Getting a visa is a real bitch. In Argentina, the process included a thirteen-hour vigil in a sweltering warehouse-turned-public-office in a ghetto of Buenos Aires. To come to Spain, I made two trips to Chicago (a three-hour drive from my hometown) and spent weeks waiting for various papers with various official stamps from Washington, Madrid, Mérida and, inexplicably, The Hague. Upon arrival in Spain, I paid four highly stressful visits to the federal police station in Almendralejo (Zafra being too small to merit national police), where I spent hours arguing with one of the most arrogant, mean-spirited people I've ever encountered before finally leaving (half in tears) with my residence card.

So, when I read the website of the Thai embassy in Madrid and learned of the apparently simple and straightforward process, I should have been more suspicious. They wanted merely a package, delivered by a private messenger company, containing our passports, resumés, the paperwork from our Thai school, and a police background check. Since neither of us are registered with the Spanish police, we ordered this last item from a online company in the US and sent everything off with the required 55 euros each (because apparently in Spain it's cool to mail cash).

After a few days of radio silence, I called the embassy. No one there spoke English and the Spanish of the receptionist was broken and heavily accented in a way with which I was completely unfamiliar, so the conversation was...tricky. The background checks are no good, she flatly informed me. You've clearly just gotten these off the internet. We need something official, something with a stamp and besides, we can't read English. Get an official translation. That should also have a stamp. (Our boss in Thailand had warned us of this Thai affinity for stamps but I still had trouble suppressing my laughter at her insistence on this point). There was no swaying her, and my phone credit was spent, so I gave up.

Peter, our boss in Thailand, advised us to show up at the embassy to smile, plead, and if it came to it, panic and cry. So we printed off more internet background checks (the tab for the endeavour is over 200 bucks at this point) and caught the immensely unpleasant midnight bus to Madrid. After killing the early morning hours in a cafè, we rang the doorbell at the embassy.

The consular officer, a gorgeous Thai woman not much older than me, turned out to be tough and sarcastic and visibly furious with her lot--we'd had several phone conversations at this point and she was entirely fed up with me. 'This is from the internet again!' she exclaimed, her hands actually shaking in her rapidly-escalating irritation. 'I'll have to talk to someone else. Come back at eleven.' She flashed us an forced smile (or maybe she was just baring her teeth) and turned to the next customer.

From a café down the street, we sent a slightly desperate e-mail to Peter, who we calculated would be in the middle of his workday and probably too busy to help. We knew we needed help from someone who spoke Thai, and thought maybe if someone made a phone call to halfway around the world...right this second, preferably...a bit of a Hail Mary. The e-mail remained unanswered and as we walked back to the embassy in the pouring rain, I tried to whip up some tears.

As we waited in the lobby, my Spanish cell phone rang and Peter, who had been trying to call the embassy since receiving my e-mail, told me that his Thai wife would call me in a moment, and that I was to give the phone to the woman. She called, and I passed it to the baffled and aggravated receptionist. We were clearly making no friends here, but we had confused them into complacence and harassed them into a state of such profound annoyance that they wanted only to be rid of us. Send us this one more paper, my pretty amiga told us, and you can have the visas. Triumphantly, we left the office in search of wifi to thank Peter and his wife for their incredible helpfulness.

The visas arrived in the mail on Monday; everything is all stamped and official. Only twelve days left in Zafra.

olas

An old friend of Levi's decided to visit Madrid last weekend, so despite the bitter cold, we went to meet up with him and explore the city we'd only briefly seen during paperwork visits. My previous impression had been a negative one, tainted by ugly bureaucratic buildings and 1960s commercial architecture, but I found myself pleasantly surprised by the beautiful, lively center of the city. We visited the famous plazas and parks, ate and drank in the exotic and varied sorts of places that don't exist in Zafra, and saw Picasso's Guernica at the Reina Sofia museum (it's surprisingly big). The highlight for me, in my ever-escalating nerdiness for the ancient, was a 2000-year-old temple, gifted to the city by the Egyptian government as a thanks for excavation assistance. It's a gorgeous little stone structure lined with miraculously intact hieroglyphics and altarpieces, dedicated to Isis and Amun and decorated by the Ptolemies and later completed by Augustus and Tiberius. I could have stayed in there all day.

We're budget travelers, (to put it gently; the more truthful description is that we cut every corner except wine and beer), so while Mike stayed in a comfortable, centrally-located hostel, Levi and I squeezed ourselves into the top bunk of a 20-year-old Romanian exchange student in a downtown expat neighborhood.

To explain:

Since moving to Europe, Levi and I have been couchsurfing, a strange and ostensibly reckless activity to most sane Westerners. The basic principle is simple enough: you put a facebook-like profile on couchsurfing.org, describing yourself and, if you are able/willing, offering up your couch or spare bedroom to complete strangers who might happen to be passing through your town. When you travel, you search for profiles of people living in your destination, and rather than paying for a hotel, you go sleep in their house.

While I recognize that it sounds like the beginning of a 90s slasher flick, or at least a desperate plea to be robbed blind, I've come to regard it as one of the best things the internet has to offer. In the ten or so times I've surfed or hosted surfers, I haven't had a single negative experience, nor have I met anyone who has. The system works on references, so when someone asked to stay with us, we can read all the things previous hosts have said about them, and thus far, all the references have turned out to be perfectly true. Even when we've taken the risk and stayed with a unreferenced newbie, it's been great.

I stayed with a group of happy-go-lucky Brazilian guys in Dublin and spent a great weekend with them and two German girls they were hosting. In Zafra, I stayed with a super hospitable Spanish woman who found us our apartment and would become a friend, student, and travel buddy. In Lisbon we spent 5 days in a gorgeous downtown apartment with a lifelong local who took us to his favorite restaurants and cafes. We've hosted twenty-somethings from France, the Czech Republic, Poland, Britain, America, Germany, and Austria; a Italian family with an 8-year-old daughter who knew only enough English to ask for juice, and a 70-year-old Englishman who had spent most of his adult life in Venezuela and skyped his son in Spanglish.

This most recent couchsurf landed us in Lavapiés, a trendy, bustling, international neighborhood a metro stop away from the city center. Despite the cold, the playgrounds, plazas, and sidewalk cafes were always alive with people speaking an incredible array of languages, moving in and out of the Indian, Mexican, Lebanese and Japanese restaurants. Our Romanian host lives in a small flat with a Polish couple, a French guy and a girl from Portugal. They are all students with Erasmus, a Europe-wide university exchange program, and they´re studying in English, although it's the native language of none of them.

The whole weekend was a perfect portrait of a modern, amalgomated European culture. Living in the very Spanish town of Zafra, it's easy to forget that this a globalized, progressive, diverse world exists here, and couchsurfing is a great lifeline to that world.