Madrid to Carabanchel - a novel tour

 My Fulbright year officially ended on June 14, and the blog is sadly winding to an end, but here's a little story of one of my final activities....

Faithful blog readers will recall my long winter's silence when I was trying to finish a novel as well as working on my thesis. A few of you have read or heard more about this project, so I thought it would be nice, as one of the final entries, to do a little tour of how important places in the novel look in the present day. So this will be an entry of photos, not so much about my daily life as about the places I wrote about (more or less), although I give fair warning that the neighborhood has changed so much in the last fifty years (and even the last twenty-five) that almost nothing remains of 1876, when the novel is set, and when Carbanchel was a country village outside a much smaller Madrid, that still stayed more or less inside its gates.

San Isidro: cocido, churros y chocolate (part 3 of 3)

Eating and drinking are fundamental, not incidental to the Fiesta de San Isidro

Waiting on line for the free cocido madrileño in the Parque San Isidro on the Día de San Isidro

Ok, I promise this is the last entry about San Isidro, but it was two days of cool and intense activity, with lots of photos and videos, and many interesting things, and while I was originally planning to make yesterday's entry "chotis, chulapos, and churros" I realized that song, dance, and funny costumes deserved their own entry separate from food, drink, and picnicking (not to mention the fairground ride and fireworks).

Possibly because a friend and fellow researcher I've met here is writing a dissertation about food and politics in 1940s Spain, and possibly because of older research interests of my own, I couldn't help but notice how much importance food is given in the fiestas de San Isidro.  This is a city which has known hunger, and a fair number of the popular songs for San Isidro come close to "food porn."  I was initially impressed on Sunday afternoon in the Plaza de Vistillas that the song which got the audience up from their chairs and dancing (as well as singing along) was something which I initially, listening, thought was a love song, but which actually I would classify more as a "food song" called "Cocidito madrileño."  (A few hours later I mentioned to the friends I was with that there appeared to have been a song dedicated entirely to cocido, whereupon the two of them - mother and daughter, both Madrid-born - exchanged sheepish grins and began to sing "cooocidito madrileñooo...")  Picture an entire plaza full of people singing "porque eres gloria pura, porque eres gloria pura, cocidito madrileño!" in a spasm of civic pride and hungriness and you get a sense of the scene.

San Isidro: Chotis and Chulapos (Part 2 of 3)

 

¡Viva Madrid! ¡Viva San Isidro!

 

Or how an international city does a local party

 

There's a whole wonderful set of silly traditions around San Isidro.  And the best thing is that they're all unashamedly modern and cheerfully not purely "Spanish."  Just purely Madrid. 

San Isidro was canonized sometime in the seventeenth century when Spain's new capital city needed a local saint.  By the late eighteenth century, the sleepy backwater town had doubled and quadrupled in size into a capital city of a flailing empire with huge inequality and plenty of political problems, already about to be eclipsed, but still with a far-flung influence that stretched from Mexico to Manila to Milan...and of course back to Madrid.  By this time San Isidro was well ensconced in his hermitage, and the tradition of the verbena was a standard rite of Spring.  Goya captured the scene in 1788:

Goya's version of the Pradera de San Isidro.  All the buildings in the background are still there, and you can still see some of them.  But there are a lot more buildings blocking the river nowadays.  And a lot less river.

For comparison, here's a picture of the same place I two weeks ago.  Not as different as you'd think:

Note royal palace (Palacio de Oriente) in the distance on the left, and people sitting on grass, as in Goya's painting.

A funny detail of the rain...

Apologies for letting the blog slide for a few weeks...

I've been trying to finish a piece of writing over the last month or so, and I'm afraid this blog has been neglected.  No, not my thesis (sorry, if any of my professors are reading this, I swear it will get done too).  Just some fiction inspired partly by my neighborhood - and in direct response to my Complutense mentor here who said "nothing ever happens in Carabanchel"  and partly (ironically) by the class of said mentor last semester, which I audited, and where I got to learn a bit more about a chapter of Spanish history that shows up in my story.  (And it is literally a chapter, or chapters.)  The story is about a young academic who comes to Madrid doing research on manuscripts and ends up in Carabanchel.  I wonder what could have ever given me that idea?  😁

In any case, I'm afraid that between working at finishing that story, plus following up on my visit to the embassy and doing some of the lectures to college students that they asked me to do, plus the odd glance at reading for my thesis, plus staying on top of emails home and welcoming a few visitors, there simply hasn't been much time to blog.  I promise many blog posts to catch up on what I'm doing in terms of interesting trips and lectures and so on, but this is just an assortment of random details that I thought were charming and/or curious.  Consider this entry an apology to my faithful readers.

It's raining, do I still have to save the world?

I was planning an amusing blog entry, but couldn't find the event that was supposed to happen.

First off, I should say for all those readers out there in the blogosphere that it's not snowing.  Somewhat north of here (in much of Castilla-León) it is snowing, and El País is reporting three deaths and multiple cut highways due to a winter storm.  The Guardian is also reporting that trains and roads are closed in Britain, which is getting a heavy dumping of snow (probably a lot heavier than northern Spain, to be honest), and I assume the same conditions prevail across much of the EU.  So, I'm lucky it's not snowing.

It's raining.  A lot.

After the super-dry autumn this is hopefully good for the reservoirs (though El País now is saying there are flood warnings for the Duero, so I don't know how much they'll be able to hold onto the water).  However, it also seems to have rained out an event I was planning to go to in order to spice up this relatively dull blog, as the last week or so since my return from Malaga has been quietly curled up reading articles, and doing a bit of outlining, and writing, which is not very interesting.  (That is, I think the content is interesting, but the process is not interesting to write about.)  I am giving a couple of guest lectures at the Complutense in a few weeks time, which I will report back on, but in the meantime yesterday on the way to the metro I passed a flyer pasted on a bus shelter calling for a "manifestación" to give Carabanchel its own Centro de Salud.  It was one of those wordy posters that explains the many years that the residents of Carabanchel have been forced to go out of their neighborhood to a different Centro de Salud for healthcare, with lots of statistics, some of which are repeated here.

Snow and cold

Another reason madrileños are called "gatos"....

This was the view outside my kitchen window this afternoon.  The white streaks that may be barely visible (depending on the size screen you're viewing this on) are not dirt on my kitchen window (I have nice clean windows, thank you).  They are fat, wet, almost snow-flakes, falling toward the ground (where they melt on contact, leaving the street all wet, but not frozen).

My across the street neighbor has just raised the shutter and opened the window, and is standing in her window smoking, and leaning out the window looking down at the street with an expression of disgust.  Two boys are huddled under the portico (just to the left of the picture frame) busily on their phones, with their coats pulled up around their ears, absolutely refusing to go out.

Spring-like evening, with cats

 

Having spent a few days feeling somewhat guilty about my lack of adventures, a quiet Sunday turned into a lovely confirmation of why I love this neighborhood.

I had nothing particular planned for this Sunday, which enabled me to have a long lazy breakfast, do some minor cleaning up, and then hang around and not do terribly much for most of the afternoon.  I had noted that the weather was an unseasonably warm 16 degrees (about 62) according to my phone, but couldn't quite believe it.

However, I had planned a minor quest today, to make sure that I got out of the house and stretched my legs.  As most things are mostly closed on Sundays (more on that later), I decided to head out to the Hipercor, where the Corte Inglés is open seven days a week, and where I had noted a while ago that they sold (a)Kikoman's soy sauce (I distrust the Heinz and other suspicious brands at the supermarket here which have added sugar) and (b)couscous.  Along with coconut water, I have been missing couscous.  (Also, it is the ultimate fast prepared food, and now that my yoga has shifted more toward the evenings I get home relatively late, and want dinner quickly.  Plus, I think couscous goes well with fish.)  However, couscous (along with chopped meat and coconut water) is one of the things which is mysteriously rare here.  I remembered seeing it at the Corte Inglés and found it, after a little searching, just separated from the main rice, pasta, and lentils aisle (legumbres) by a horizontal through aisle.  Also found the right kind of soy sauce opposite the couscous in the "salsa" section as opposed to the super-fancy and expensive soy sauce in the "comida internacional" section.  (There is an art to supermarket shopping.)

It was such lovely and unbelievably warm weather that even though the sun was already setting when I left the Corte Inglés I decided to take the long way home, and loop around past the pretty fountain and the little park and playground on the far side of the Hipercor, and then head along the Calle Laguna to the Via Carpetana, rather than just the boring Calle de la Oca.  For some reason most of the clothing stores (as well as the fruterias and restaurants) and also the video game trade-in place on the Calle Laguna were open, even though it was 7:00 PM on a Sunday.  I have no idea if this is a special Sunday, or if people were inspired by the spring-like temperatures, or if it's just that the Calle Laguna is awesome.  However, open it was, and there were people spilling along the sidewalks (and a fair number of children on scooters, even on the streets without open shops, because it was a nice evening, and children need to run around for exercise), and it was very low key and pleasant.

Dreidels "por encargo"

Oh dreidels, dreidels, dreidels, you are quite tough to find...

Some thoughts on shopping trips, and a new neighborhood.

I

My menorah and candles

My quest to find a menorah in Madrid ended up being only a ten minute walk from my apartment, and as you can see above, the Aladdin's lamp is working nicely.  (It's on tin foil to prevent hot wax drips and sparks on the nice wooden furniture.)  As I now have the menorah in place, and one of the friendly medievalists I have met here has invited me for "nochevieja" I of course reciprocated by inviting her and her family for this weekend so they get to have a "traditional" (within the very loose sense of the word) Hanukkah.  As she has volunteered to bring her children so they can light candles, and as when it comes to tradition I draw the line at looking up prayers in Hebrew that I don't know and don't normally recite, I thought I should have dreidels for the kids to play with.  (If I have any European readers who don't know what I'm talking about, this is a dreidel.)  This turned out to be difficult, and may yet be impossible.

Introducing Thanksgiving (II)

A slightly delayed Thanksgiving dinner for friends has an unexpected complication...and an unexpectedly lovely gift.

As the "Semana de Black Friday" does not involve any actual non-work days, and as my (generally free) Friday was slightly occupied with the Colegio Estados Unidos de America this week, I invited my oldest Madrid friends (the grandparents of the second-grader I know at the Colegio EEUU) to come and have modified traditional Thanksgiving dinner on Saturday.  All in all, and in spite of one unexpected bump in the road (I think now smoothed out), it was a huge success, and a great joy.

On (not) celebrating Thanksgiving and parallel neighborhoods

I was expecting to make a big thing of Thanksgiving, but I find that I'm ok finding analogies, rather than exact equivalents.

[UPDATED 11/26/17 with pictures]
 
First off, apologies for not blogging for several days.  I've had my usual interesting and happy routine, and while various things are going on, none of them seemed blog-worthy, though now looking at the posts I see that I have to do a few follow up entries since I left my faithful readers hanging about a couple of details.  I promise those are forthcoming, but this is a special (not quite) Thanksgiving blog.

All this week has been "Semana de Black Friday" and according to the TV ads it will remain "Semana de Black Friday" until November 27.  This reminds me of nothing so much as a line in El Intermedio when in response to a headline "Corruption trials dog the leadership of the PP" the host El Gran Wyoming remarked, "¿En serio?  Esto será Día de la Marmota.  O más bien de la Gaviota."  (There's an untranslatable rhyme there, since the Bill Murray movie Groundhog Day is "Día de la Marmota" in Spanish, and the logo of the PP is a stylized blue seagull -- una gaviota.)  Black Friday ten days in a row does seem a bit groundhog day.  It also rather annoys me because Thanksgiving is one of the few holidays I actually celebrate with family, and I've always found the idea that somehow the focus is not supposed to be on being grateful for having enough to eat and wanting to share good fortune with others but really shopping slightly offensive.  Taking away Thanksgiving and leaving only the offensive part seems like a real shame.

Internationalism vs. Globalization

The lines are often fuzzy, but on the whole there are worse things....

My Madrid friends say that they are being "contaminated" by "El Halloween" (pronounced "el CHA-lo-ween" with the "cha" of Chanukah) and that the local festivities of the Día de los Santos and Día de los difuntos are dying out (no pun intended).  I suggested to them that perhaps the Día de los difuntos at least could be rescued by Mexican immigrants, for whom the tradition is very much alive, but they were pessimistic.  I have nothing but fond feelings for Halloween, but I must admit that it's a little weird to see how commercialized it's become here.  The following were displays in the local Hipercor in Vista Alegre:

It's hard to not think that this looks like a US mall, and that is kind of depressing.

I'm legal! (Nearly)

I have received my justificante de empadronamiento, that says that I've duly recorded my legal address with the Madrid ayuntamiento

 

The empadronamiento process has always struck me as a bit bizarre and redundant as a legal requirement, and in fact I know of other Fulbrighters who have been less conscientious about getting the earliest possible appointment for it because (unlike the bendito tarjeta de identidad) it has no practical daily use, especially for foreigners who neither vote nor pay taxes in Spain.  I presume that as proof of legal residence it is used to determine both voter and tax rolls for citizens.  I suppose that it might have some sense if it also functions as an automatic voter registration for citizens, but since (according to the form) it is technically a requirement for all legal residents of Spain, including those "under three months old" it's hard to see it as anything other than a relic of dictatorship.  (My understanding is that you have three months to register yourself at a new address, whether you move from another country or around the block.  If you arrive via someone's uterus your parents have until you are three months old to register you, hence the procedure for under three month olds.  Again, very difficult to see how an infant requires proof of residence in addition to a birth certificate, not mention a baptismal certificate which a friend of mine assured me "resuelva líos" here, but as one of the Fulbright mentors said at orientation "Spaniards love photocopies.")

Dialogue beneath my window

Hyperbole and hysteria aside, most Spaniards are pretty reasonable.

Fortunately, my main course for dinner tonight was salad.  This was fortunate because it meant that all I had to do was boil an egg, which meant that instead of standing over the stove (possibly with the hood on) I was chopping vegetables at the counter by the (open) window, so I was able to hear the dialogue below it, indistinctly at first, and then more clearly when I realized it was interesting, and opened the window wider and moved the cutting board closer to it.  (Hey, it's a pueblo.  If you have interesting conversations in the street people are allowed to listen.)

The Polideportivo Gallur

Little red, white, and blue penguins. (Or, Spaniards are very athletic.)

The main entrance of the Centro Muncipal Deportivo Gallur on a sunny weekday evening

I've been planning an entry about the Polideportivo Gallur for ages.  I haven't actually used their sala de musculación, since I've never been very good about weight rooms in gyms (I never know what to do with the machines and they scare me, and stationery bikes and stair machines always seem like pale imitations of the real thing), but I've been going regularly to the pool in the evenings, and it's a lovely communal experience.

Settling In - Mysore House and the Polideportivo Gallur

 

In one way it's hard to believe I've been in Madrid less than a month.  But hopefully time will stop flying and settle into a normal rhythm soon.

I have my appointments for my empadronamiento (legal certificate of residence) and picking up my Tarjeta de Identidad de Extranjero (the foreigner's equivalent of Spain's DNI) next week.  I also got an email today that the faculty meeting of the Complutense where I should get officially approved and get my Complutense affiliation (which will allow me to use the university library, and indirectly should provide me with a letter to get a card for the Biblioteca Nacional) is next week.  So hopefully within the next ten days I should be plentifully provided with various shiny new ID cards which will turn my wallet into less that of a tourist and more that of a local.

When school gets out

This should be an entry with photos, but isn't

I spent the morning doing work emails and setting up appointments with archives, and went out briefly at around 1:00 today to go to the bank (where I got to use my brand new ATM card), and do some minor food shopping.  I happened to head out just as the multiple elementary schools around me were being dismissed for lunch, which inevitably suggested a modified version of the "Teddy Bears' Picnic" along the lines of "at one o'clock, their mommies and daddies will take them home to eat, because they're hungry little teddy bears."  There was the public school down the block, and the two little Catholic schools nearby, the Colegio de Nuestra Señora de los Dolores and the Colegio de Nuestra Señora de la Merced.  The former has a stylish green D (I presume for Dolores) logo on their polo shirts and sweatpants that looks rather like the Ryanair lyre.  The latter does not have as distinctive uniforms, but I happened to walk past them on the way to the bank, so I know who they are.  (The public school doesn't have any uniforms at all.)

Bike-walking

Commuter biking is a work in progress in Madrid.

My bike, by the Biblioteca Nacional.  It was harder to get there than you would think.

I believe that "la bici es transporte" as the t-shirts say.  But so far I must admit that the handy unlimited monthly bono de transportes seems more practical than my new-old bike, even though the metro is not right at my doorstep (which was one of the things that inspired the bike purchase - that and the "Madrid Celeste" ad campaign I wrote about earlier - I am way to sensitive to propaganda).

I'm used to comparing cycling in New York with cycling in the Netherlands and Flanders, the great bicycle paradises of the world, which make New York seem very shabby and difficult in comparison.  But now I realize how much easier cycling in New York has become over the last twenty years.  Aside from the fact that Madrid is cursed with both steep hills and a climate where the temperature regularly climbs to 30 C (85 F) for four months a year, the "bike lanes" here are rather more theoretical than in New York.  And when I finally arrived at the International Institute (sweaty and terrified) on Friday by bike, I looked around the Calle Miguel Angel and the surrounding side streets for bicycle racks with vain bemusement, and finally remembered, "oh, right, you can lock your bike to the pole of a parking sign."  Locking bikes to street signs was standard when I started riding to work in NY, ten years ago, but first there was a bike rack in front of my school, and then they started popping up along the avenues, and then the side-streets....and now I wonder where Madrid keeps its aparcamiento para bicis, as my little seven year old friend here puts it.  (He has been properly raised to ride a bici and was accustomed to being taken to pre-school on the back of his mother's, so hopefully in another generation Madrid will be the bike-friendly city it aspires to be.)

Flamenco in Carabanchel

As natural as salsa in New York

Compases beneath my window call to mind a flamenco lament for the tropics.

Popular culture is such a monetized and controlled thing now (and perhaps always, just in different ways).  We're used to thinking of things like music as being the result of careful advertising, or as propaganda, clichés designed to appeal to tourists, to some mythical "national" identity, or to some kind of brand loyalty.  (Vodafone has an ad playing non-stop across all TV channels here which smoothly slides from a background track of Peggy Lee's song "You Give Me Fever" to handsome young men at their computers humming along to them singing enthusiastically, "Ya tengo fibra...FIBRA!" and dancing in their enthusiasm at having "fibra" aka FiOS internet access.  It's a shame that the nickname for Fiber-optic in Spanish sounds like an abbreviation of fibromyalgia.)

So it's always a bit of a surprise to discover confirmations of things that you normally dismiss as mere tropes.  (Rather like Bart Simpson staring at his dog and saying "you ate my homework?  I didn't know you guys actually did that!")  I had a bit of that surreal experience yesterday afternoon when I woke somewhat groggily from a siesta, and heard what I gradually realized was someone singing cante jondo underneath my open window.  After a few wails of "Por cuuulpaaa de una mujjjjjeeeer" interspersed not with tacones or guitar solos but rather with what sounded like a slightly noisy high school hallway, involving a bunch of boys giving each other relationship advice (at the top of their lungs, because most boys yell as much as they talk) I bothered to get up and look out the window, where I saw a handful of what looked to be late teenagers, wearing sagging jeans, and respectively shirtless or in sleeveless tank tops, with the odd backwards baseball cap.  (The shirtless one was also wearing a crucifix.)  In between warbling like cats searching for mates and carrying on a discussion, they were attempting (not very successfully) to do some acrobatics involving balancing in a split on the bricks of the portico of the apartment across the street.  They weren't able to do it, either because they lacked the strength and skill, or because their high-top sneakers were too slippery, so after a while they drifted away, still chatting and occasionally singing.

A walk through San Isidro's "pueblo"

The San Isidro district of Carabanchel is a mixture of old and new -- with a surprisingly small-town feel

Today was a chance for me to play photographer, and take lots of pictures of the neighborhood.  Be warned.  Many of them appear in this entry.

The panoramic view looking north across the valley of the Manzanares, from the Calle Zaida.  In the distance you can see the "leaning towers" of the Plaza de Castilla, and the "Four Towers" above Chamartín, at the other end of the city.  In the foreground are the more modest homes of Carabanchel.

Since today was Sunday, I took the opportunity to sleep late, do laundry, catch up on emails (some work related) and to explore the website of the Biblioteca Nacional Española, prepatory to going there.

Then I decided to go for a walk with my real camera, not just my phone.  These streets are worth proper pictures.