Madrid

Spain of this century…

Hog leg

Every once in a while, I find myself quite surprised by my inner child. Fortunately, he didn’t age along with the rest of me. Madrid caused him to exclaim with glee every time we came upon another amazing structure built when Spain battled England to rule the world.

I was in Madrid once before, and I mean a long time ago — more than a half century, in fact. When Generalissimo Franco still ruled the country as he had since the 1939 civil war. When I was there the first time, there were soldiers in the streets armed with machine guns, and we’ll just say that behavior was somewhat … muted.

Today, the sense of prosperity on the busy streets was remarkable to me, and how clean those streets were. The spectacular architecture from Spain’s years of empire had not changed in essence, of course, but seemed brighter. Jingoists decry Spain’s socialist premier, but something is working.

The taxi from the airport deposited us at a hotel that was a cut above the hostels with pillows full of sand I stayed in on forays from my campus in France so many decades ago, or the mid-cut hotels and hostels of the years wandering the planet since.

Madrid is full of people; the public squares have trickles and streams and surges from side streets and subways crossing to various avenues and thoroughfares.

Then there’s the Prado. I remembered the hours I’d spend wandering decades ago through its monumental halls filled with Goya and El Greco (now shortened to just “Greco,” and I wonder if that’s a nod to correctness or a trick of my memory), and Hieronymus Bosch and van Eyck.

The history of art that sits in those walls is hard to describe.

The paintings rarely show anyone smiling. That says something, but I don’t really know what. Solemnity of royalty? Triviality of joy?

We took in a Flamenco performance, but the primary attribute of the three energetic dancers was the musical accompaniment. Nothing to displace a memory from fifty years ago of the beauty of the woman dressed in black and red who danced on the stage of a seedy bar, and the purr of her castanets. Apparently modern Flamenco has left castanets behind.

Marcel was after roast suckling pig, and we found two restaurants on subsequent nights where the meat fell off the bone and the fat was crisped to flavorful perfection. Hog legs hung from a rack from the ceiling. On one of those nights I had a leg of lamb cooked the same way, and it was perhaps the best I’ve ever had.

Our last night in Madrid, we returned from the restaurant and hugged once on the sidewalk and again in the hotel lobby. Susie and Marcel were headed back to Oregon the next morning, and I was off to Portugal for the last leg of my own travels.

You can’t tour with just anyone for as long as we did: the Canary Islands, Morocco, Madrid. But Marcel and Susie and Kimberly, who flew home from Morocco, aren’t just seasoned travelers; they are incredibly gracious human beings with deep curiosity and appreciation of different cultures.

I always felt a little rough-edged when around them, and appreciate that they invited me along. As much as I’m looking forward to seeing Portugal, about which I’ve heard great stories, I missed them from the time I got on the plane and left Spain.