Festivals of Lights

Happy Hanukkah, everybody.  More to come soon....

Due to a small disaster involving my phone switching off accidentally while I was copying pictures from internal memory to an SD card (ironically in order to back them up and also create more space on my phone) I lost a bunch of pictures due to damaged sectors on the JPEGs.  Aside from providing some interesting internet reading about JPEG repair programs, I didn't get much from this experience, but I have been able to recover some of the few not backed up photos, which were mostly taken over the last week, as Madrid becomes more and more twinkly with holiday lights.  As tonight is technically the first night of Hanukkah (and I still forgot to buy matches, and therefore with gas heat am condemned to sit and look at my pretty new menorah with two unlit candles tonight), I thought it made sense to show what I can of the winter lights in this pretty city.  For those of you reading this on big screens, sorry the image are small and low-res.  I'll try to get more and better ones over the next month and replace them as much as possible.

A conical metal sculpture, set up to look like a tree.

It makes sense to start with the city center, and in fact the exact center is of course the Puerta del Sol's famous Kilometer Zero, where a gigantic "impression of a tree" has been set up.  There's actually a similar "tree impression" at the Plaza de Callao a few hundred yards away too, and in other strategic places.  These are actually giant metal cones, picked out with lights in many colors, some of which flash on and off, which people can walk inside, and thus look directly up from inside the lights, which I think is a nice touch.

To the left here you can see the municipal building (which in this photo does not yet have the pretty wreaths interwoven with more lights hanging from the windows that it acquired this past weekend during the puente de la Inmaculada, as I have learned it is called), which has all kinds of sad fame as a site of sinister detention and torture in the past, but at the moment is just a big pink office building.

To the right you can see the Puerta del Sol's iconic "Tio Pepe" sign, which has moved around the square a bit over the years I've been coming to Spain, but is now definitely part of what marks the scenery.

Moving from the Puerta del Sol to other famous tourist spots in the neighborhood, there is a Christmas market selling churros, and waffles, and every other conceivable kind of street food in the Plaza de Opera (I think it's technically the plaza Isabel II or something like that, but it's metro Opera), and it is now impossible to emerge from the Opera metro station without being absorbed by the crowds.  There is another Christmas market with lots and lots of little model railroad figurines for creches, or Belenes, as they are known here, in the Plaza Mayor, and the Plaza Mayor itself is decked out with neon representations of candles between every window, in a nice symmetrical display (also with wreaths in daylight).

The Plaza Mayor with "candles" and icicle lights, and the corner of a Christmas market stall.

Moving in the opposite direction from the Puerta del Sol you come to the Paseo del Prado, and the famous Cuesta de Moyano, where all the second hand booksellers have stalls along the edge of the Parque del Buen Retiro.  (It's also right by the Atocha Station, so people who have read The Summer Snow will know that the book ends there, just in sight of the Cuesta de Moyano, about a month earlier in the year.) 

Carousel by Atocha

There is now a carousel on the Cuesta de Moyano (similar to the one in front of the Palacio Real), and there are lights all along the Cuesta, over the book stalls.  The lights have a sort of a star-inspired theme, but they are actually pretty abstract, something I have noticed is a trend which becomes even more pronounced in less famous places.  

Lights on the Cuesta de Moyano

The Spanish sometimes include stars or snowflake themes, but that's about as representational as the lights get.  Mostly they're just geometric, which (as compared to endless candy canes and terrifying Santas and similar) is actually in refreshingly good taste.  A friend here who is a self-confessed connoisseur of "Belenes" was startled and amused to hear that in the Caribbean the figures are electric and lighted up and glow.  She thought that was cute, but it's not the style here for lights.  Perhaps appropriate, since as a New York friend of mine who recently saw the Sagrada Familia for the first time commented "the lack of images is almost Islamic."  (Well, yes.  As Jon Stewart would say, "funny story about that...")  Spanish Catholicism certainly has no problem with very lifelike images in general, but when it comes to lights in the depths of mid-winter, this is a culture that lives with bright blue skies, and stars that are clear even when they are cold and distant, and they believe in lights being lights.

By the Calle Atocha

Sometimes they're a series of colored cubes (as in this photo near the Anton Martin metro stop, parallel to Atocha).

Sometimes they're the classic upside down umbrella strings as in the Plaza de Chueca (below).

Plaza de Chueca

Sometimes they're just solid rectangles of lights, enlivened by some that flash on and off randomly in a contrasting color or in white, as they are along the Avenida General Ricardos as far as my metro stop (and no further, whether for economic or other reasons I couldn't say), though this is probably one of the least Christian neighborhoods in Spain.

Avenida General Ricardos

But all in all, the lights are pretty.  As at home, you do catch occasional glimpses of Christmas trees in people's windows, and balconies and windows are frequently picked out with colored lights in nicely random patterns.  But so far the only actual tree I've seen in a public place is at the polideportivo, where the very classic fir tree motif is a little odd against the pock-pock-pock of squash courts, and the damp heat of locker rooms where the hair dryers are going almost constantly, and where people keep going past in t-shirts and shorts.  Still, I'll sign off with the polideportivo tree, because it seems like a happy little tree.

Happy festival of lights, everybody.  Tomorrow I will try to get matches, and show you pictures of my menorah in action.  (Small children have already been invited for the end of the week, so they will have a chance to light it.  Special thanks to the kind friends here who are coming over with their kids.)