Nights One-Hundred and Twenty-Three through One Hundred and Twenty-Five

en el centro

I’m having a little trouble finding a unifying theme to describe our weekend in Madrid. It wasn’t particularly life-altering or revelatory, I guess. It was just a perfect perfect weekend away. Here, I’ll show you:

Madrid is the exact geographic center of Spain – all distances in Spain are measured from this point in Puerta del Sol.


Here is Juliana standing on it.


The first thing we did when we got there was, of course, eat. Now, either we had the best luck ever or Madrid is one of the best places in the world to eat, because we didn’t seek out specific restaurants or consult locals, we just stopped wherever we were when we were hungry, and we did not eat one meal that wasn’t excellent.



Our first meal was definitely the highlight, though. We found ourselves, in our very first hour in the city, in a raucous, packed, upscale joint surrounded by high-powered business people midway through lunches that had clearly started hours before and for which there was no end in sight. Did I mention this was at four o’clock in the afternoon? We asked the guys at the table next to us if they were going back to work after and they kind of all looked around sheepishly and started laughing, which either meant we’re supposed to but we’re not going to, or that question is so dumb. Then they ordered another bottle of wine and passed us over a huge pile of meat (this was after we had already finished our lunches – the waitresses had to bring us new forks, which they seemed to think was hilarious). So, y’know. Awesome.



That night, after siesta and sangria…



we went salsa dancing, which was tons of fun. Someone outside told us it cost 15 euro to get in, but the doorman apparently appraised us as being cute enough for 10 euro entry (though, apparently not as cute as the girl in front of us who got in for 6). Except for Juliana, none of us knew how to salsa, but, as luck would have it, the place was chock full of South American military guys who were giving out free lessons. But we said “no” and hung out by the bar talking about how much we missed our boyfriends. Or something. Hi honey!



The next day we went to the Reina Sofia museum, where I stood in front of Guernica for half an hour and had my mind blown.

One thing that I found funny about Madrid was that there is no major body of water – no sea or river – by which to orient. Another thing that was funny was when Carmen dropped her camera in the one body of water we did find: the turtle pond inside the tropical forest at the Madrid train station.



Okay, it wasn’t funny ha ha (but it sort of was).


Here’s Carmen finding the funny.

That night we ate paella…



at the most delightfully kitschy restaurant that had a very Lautrec-y looking painting on the wall.



The waiter saw us looking at it and said, very earnestly, that it was a Picasso. Then later he said it was a copy of a Picasso from the period where Picasso was copying Lautrec. Then later he brought us champagne sorbet for dessert and we stopped caring about the painting.



I had being going on and on the whole weekend about how great it is that Madrileños sleep late and eat late and stay out late, but I got my comeuppance Sunday morning when we couldn’t find a single. open. café. And I almost lost my mind.

Eventually we found coffee, completely confounded the people sitting at the table next to us by switching from Spanish to Italian to French to English every couple of words (oh, we’re such scamps!) and then took a lovely walk through Parque de El Retiro...



to the Palacio de Cristal.



And is this post has no unifying theme, I will also dispense with an attempt to find a satisfying conclusion.



Gracias Madrid. Me gustas tu.

Nights Ninety through One-Hundred and Ten

Going back in time a bit to do a little Christmastime recap. There's too much to recount, so I hope this little montage (inspired by my friend Dorothy's 365 days of self-portraits montage) will make you feel like you were there. (The dorm computer and flickr are not cooperating, so I'm going to try posting this facebook video and see how it goes...)

Night One-Hundred and Twenty

Night One-Hundred and Seventeen

halfway

I flew back to France on the halfway day – night one-hundred and eleven (and a half), and spent the following week in a semi-conscious, time zone-shift-induced twilight. My body showed up in classrooms and bought itself 40-cent staff room cappuccinos and had conversations with people, but my brain remained hovering somewhere off the eastern seaboard. My heart, predictably, refused to let me jerk it around anymore and decided to stay behind.

But it’s Sunday now, the sun came out today, and my cells seem to have gathered themselves back together. It’s been unusually quiet here in on the quatrième étage this week. We are all trying to absorb, I think, the strange familiarity of this once exotic place, to take stock of the first half and hold it up against our prior expectations, to make a map of the second half that we hope will deliver us satisfactorily where we want to be when it’s all done.

Carmen and I went to Marseille yesterday to see the Van Gogh/Monticelli exhibit. Afterward, we sat at the Vieux Port and ate moules frites and drank too much, stumbled into a huge demonstration against Israel, got lost, got chased down the street by a kindly gas station attendant who had given us the wrong directions, finally made it back to the train station on the metro, fell asleep waiting and almost missed our bus back to Manosque, and dozed as we trundled back home, the city giving way to vineyards and villages. I keep forgetting to take pictures of that bus ride, but sometime in the next hundred and six nights, I promise, I’ll remember.