Heavenly Madrid - When a City Commits to Alternative Transportation

(De) Madrid por el cielo

You can tell a lot about a city from its public announcement campaigns

I've seen the following photo on a number of bus shelters and advertising spaces in Madrid over the last few days, from my home immigrant barrio of Carabanchel to the super-pijo Calle Serrano.  I think it gives a nice sense of what I like about this city and its ayuntamiento.

Madrid's ayuntamiento is promoting bicycle travel

There are others, that are part of the same campaign for "Madrid Celeste."  While the one above supports bicycling, another argues for public transportation,

and another for sharing rides.

The events are part of a campaign for "La Celeste" which (according to a report I saw on the local news just before the orientation cut off my TV watching with dinner) is part of a Europe-wide initiative to promote alternative means of travel.  (The one above is in a metro station, so it's already preaching to the choir, as it were, but it has a list of cool pro-bike and pro-public transit events, including the "Festival con B de Bici" which is this weekend, and which I plan to check out.)

Aside from my generally pro-Transportation Alternatives feelings, and the fact that I know that air pollution has been a growing concern to the point of banning cars from the city center on some days in the summer, I think these pictures are charming for a variety of reasons.  There's the fact that the clouds of the "celestial" Madrid are also a puffy bun of white hair for a presumably older lady on a bike.  Since a lot of the Fulbright TAs have been making me feel old lately (it's a terrible feeling to realize when someone says "how long have you been coming to Spain?" that the answer is honestly "since before you were born"), I totally identify with the white-haired lady on the bike.

But I also love the series of what I think are deliberate plays on words.  Aside from the "Festival con B" ("b" and "v" are interchangeable in Spanish pronunciation, and give native speakers no end of trouble in terms of spelling, though they're obvious to English speakers who've learned the written language) which of course plays on the French "bal" (baile) to become a "Festi-Bal" or dance-party, one of my long-standing headaches with Spanish is the difference between por and para, which I've basically given up all hope of using correctly.  (Along with ser and estar.  If Spanish is going to be alone among the Romance languages in such distinctions, then I'll just comfort myself that if I'd spent the same amount of time studying French or Italian I'd speak them perfectly by now.)  So I'm glad that Spanish is exploiting its hands-down most annoying preposition to do a cool "Pune or Play on Words."  I think the primary meaning of Madrid por el cielo is "Madrid for [i.e. in favor of] the sky" implying that Madrid is protecting "el cielo," or the atmosphere and air quality.  But the pictures of people traveling happily among the clouds also use the alternate meaning of the preposition por, making it mean "Madrid through [or by way of] the sky."  So "muévete por el cielo de Madrid" can mean "travel through the heaven of Madrid" (yay, civic pride) or "move yourself [take a stand] on behalf of Madrid's skies."  Hurray for the ambiguous dative case!  To me "Madrid por el cielo" also suggests a play on the anodyne tourist slogan (used also for Sevilla) "de Madrid al cielo" (the Spanish version of "see Naples and then die.")  Of course, I could be wrong about that last one, since it might not be an obvious association for a native speaker (doing really close reading in a foreign language is hard, since you're never sure how weird your connotations are), but I still think it's cool.

In a more practical sense, last night a few fellow Fulbrighters and I were talking about the practicalities of biking in Madrid as a form of transportation (after accidentally wandering through the bicycle lane to a mostly empty stand of a BiciMad bike share station and then hastily and sheepishly heading back to the sidewalk after we realized it did not lead to a crosswalk), and one of them mentioned that she had spoken about it to one of the program coordinators, who had warned her that biking was new in Madrid, and still dangerous, and also that there are more hills than you might think.  This is of course relatively speaking true.  But I have to say that the number of dedicated bike lanes here has exploded (admittedly going up from about zero), and while the bike parking infrastructure is still lacking in places (*cough*Complutense*cough*), I think the city is near the crucial tipping point.  Of course, nothing can be done about the hills (except patient endurance and iron pills), but I must admit that the idea of biking is more tempting now in September than in mid-July when anything more than a mild amble in the middle of the day is exhausting.  It's been hot pretty much all week, with temperatures around 80 Fahrenheit (28 for my Celsius peeps), but the temperature plunged last night, and today the high was only around 70 (20 C) and it was very windy.  I got home from the hotel and changed into the pair of jeans I hadn't bothered to bring, and was more comfortable with socks and shoes than sandals.  Normally the approaching fall makes me a little sad, beautiful as the weather is for walking (or biking), but now it's so weird to have the sense of the school year beginning and me not being in my normal place.  On my way to pick up the bus in Marques de Vadillo this afternoon I passed a school that I'd passed before this summer (it's just on the roundabout before the puente Santa Isabel), that had always been closed up.  Little people with bookbags were emerging and big people were hanging around on the sidewalk with the look of those waiting for little people.  And up around the hotel in the fancy barrio Salamanca there were kids heading along the sidewalks in uniforms that look like Catholic school ones.  (I presume they go to concertados.)  And all the stores are having "vuelta al cole" sales.  It's a part of this city that I've never gotten to see, and since it's been so much a part of my life for so long, it's beautiful to see in this place that I care about so much.  And it encourages biking.

Tomorrow I will check out the Festival con B de Bici, and bring back pictures and anecdotes, and try to have the self-control to not bring back a second-hand bike from the second-hand bike fair that is advertised as part of the festivities, even though there's space for it in the patio.  I always feel ethically weird buying second hand bikes, as I worry that they're stolen, and I really don't need to spend money for just ten months.  On the other hand, if there were for example a raffle for one of the super-cool folding bikes....it's probably better if there isn't.

Will report back on the Festival con B when I have a chance.  In the meantime, it's just after midnight, and I'm going to enjoy the luxury of going peacefully to sleep.  There won't be a gargantuan and delicious hotel buffet breakfast in the morning, but there also won't be an alarm clock going off and waking me up with the sun.  So it more than evens out.