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.

San Isidro in San Isidro (Part 1 of 3)

The fiestas of the patron saint of Madrid mark the unofficial beginning of summer here.   And obviously living in the "Barrio San Isidro" I couldn't miss them, right?

About a month ago I started seeing the signs going up around the city...

 

Clearly, San Isidro was going to be something of a big deal.

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.)

Of pescaderías and parrots in the park

There are parrots in the Parque San Isidro

This is not an important fact, but it's good to know in case you worry that some kind of massive radiation leak has created a flock of electric green pigeons.

The parrots are unfortunately in shadow here.  But I had to take the picture against the path, because they're perfectly camouflaged against the grass.

The parrots were in fact a fairly small part of my day today, but it amused me to stand still and take pictures of them (that's a real pigeon in the background, looking forlorn and left out because he doesn't speak parrot), the way Europeans take pictures of squirrels in Central Park.  I have no idea how the parrots got there (I presume they've bred from escaped pets), or how long they've lived in the Parque San Isidro, but there are many of them and they are loud.