Thursday, January 18, 2018

The light is coming back!







It's always cheerful when the days start to get longer...

Sorry for being temporarily in hibernation.  It was cold, and I was not doing much except working on my Peterson chapter.  But last week I happened to be by Príncipe Pío at around 6:00 PM, and noticed that the sky was dramatically orange with streaks of dark cloud and azure twilight, instead of being full dark as it's been at 6:00 PM for a while now here.  And today I had the opportunity to have a nice long walk home from the Gran Vía, and I took the "classic" route from the Plaza Mayor down the Calle de Toledo (so named because it was the road to Toledo, duh), through the Puerta de Toledo (or rather around it, because it's a traffic circle with a big impractical victory arch in the middle), down to the oft-photographed Puente de Toledo (source of the famous quote about the city having such a fine bridge that they should either sell it or rent a river), and then up the Calle General Ricardos and home (with a brief stop at the Mercadona for some groceries).  And at precisely 18:15 today, I took the following photo of the Puerta de Toledo:

Sunset at the Puerta de Toledo, today, looking out from Madrid toward Carabanchel and home....

This is not an important photo, or a particularly new view, but I thought it was pretty.  And I find it tremendously comforting to have the light last longer.  A lot of Spaniards flatly refuse to believe that Madrid and New York are on the same parallel - about 42 degrees North - and have the same number of hours of daylight but just distributed differently.  (They're positive New York is further north.)  I tell them that Madrid and Budapest don't have the same distribution of daylight hours either, but they're still suspicious.  But I received funny confirmation last week, when I talked to an undergraduate from the University of Indiana who is a foreign exchange student at the Complutense.  I mentioned that I loved how light it stayed now, and he said it was about the same as Indiana, which is just inside the Eastern time zone in the US (but much farther west than New York).  He added cheerfully that the fourth of July fireworks are never until after 10:00 PM because it's not dark until then in summer (like lovely Madrid), but was stunned when I said that in New York it was light at that time of year at 5:00 in the morning.  Who knew that the East-West thing in time zones really mattered?

After my long walk home I rested briefly and then went to the pool, and was happy to be back after a couple of weeks absence.  Wednesday evenings there is a life saving class with eerily half-human formed weighted orange dummies.  So as I swam back and forth I got to watch the (mostly teenaged) class a few lanes over work with the dummies.  A few weeks ago when I was there the instructors were chucking the dummies into the deep end of the pool and the students were obediently diving down and dragging them up to the surface and shoving them out of the pool according to the protocol.  (Basically, the protocol is that even though it looks like the easiest place to grab a dummy, you probably shouldn't drag it by the neck which is not actually a handy hook for grabbing.)  This week the students were wearing flippers and carrying yellow life saving devices with belts, which they were securing under the rudimentary armpits of the dummies (they don't have arms but they do have armpits, with little stubs) and then rapidly towing the dummies (vaguely abdominal side up) in the little yellow cradles created by the life saving devices to the other side of the pool.  It was amusing to watch on and off.  I also performed a small good deed, and found someone's locker key on the bottom of the lane, and returned it to the only other person in the lane, an older gentleman who thanked me profusely and was upset that it had fallen out of his velcro pocket in his swim trunks.

After the pool I walked home when it was fully dark, and very clear, and enjoyed looking at the stars.  There are no photos of the stars, because they require better camera equipment and better skills as a photographer than I have, but those faithful blog readers in the northern hemisphere (which according to the blog analytics are 100% of my readers) have all probably seen Orion's belt on clear winter evenings, twinkling along with the Pleiades.  The Christmas lights are gradually disappearing (they're already gone from public places), but the natural light is coming back.  That's nice.

And I have a chapter draft!!!

https://i.pinimg.com/736x/1b/bb/77/1bbb77316242ded94f260b4db0386835--snoopy-happy-dance-dancing-snoopy.jpg

Tune in soon for more stories of the polideportivo, and of some low-key museum-going that I've been doing to reward myself.  The semester at the Complutense is ending now, and as I don't have any final exams there, I should have a little while to breathe and blog.  (Though I'm also scheduled to go to the mid-year Fulbright check-in in Salamanca in a couple of weeks.  How did the time pass so fast?)

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