It’s Sunday: the end of another successful week at Gestamp and another enjoyable weekend.
On the whole, the week went according to what has fast become my usual routine here: up at 6.45, metro at 8, start work at 8.30, break 2 till 4, finish at 6. My work has consisted of translating more company documents from Spanish into English and correcting existing translated texts.
On Tuesday, we had a bit of variation in the form of a corporate lunch, which had been organized to celebrate the company’s recent successes. Almost the entire department turned out for it, making us around thirty people - just imagine my mortification when I was made to introduce myself to the entire table.
We were going to the restaurant in our lunch break and therefore straight from work, meaning we all had to find transport there. I somehow ended up in the manager’s car, which felt more than a bit awkward since some people who had worked there for a lot longer than I had were having to take the metro. Nevertheless, it was a surreal and bizarrely exciting experience to be cruising up the motorway in the back seat of Juan’s 4x4 with Fatima, Jose and Matthieu (the French guy who never speaks).
The lunch itself was not the most vegetarian-friendly I’ve ever been to (being a set tapas menu for so many people, I guess this was inevitable) but it was nice to meet and talk to some more people from Gestamp, at any rate. The company generously fronted all the costs so it was more of a social occasion than anything else. Afterwards, most of us went on to a nearby cafe for coffee (also paid for by Gestamp) and it was gone half-past five when we broke off into small groups to make our separate ways home.
The rest of the week passed without event, so much so that by Thursday I was getting bored of the routine and decided to go into the city centre with José. We went by train (still a relatively novel experience for me here) to Recoletos, which is in the Chueca district, where José lives. There, he showed me more of the local sites, including the Biblioteca nacional (National Library) and the Palacio de Longoria (Palace of Longoria), which is commonly thought to be a Gaudian work, and is the only building of its style in Madrid. It was built in the 20th Century modernist style, but not by Gaudi; it was actually built by José Grasés Riera in 1902 as a residence for the banker Javiar González Longoria. It’s now owned by the Spanish writers’ and artists’ association but is worth seeing just from the outside - its art nouveau style and curved contours are stunning and unusual.
The next day, Friday, we had the afternoon off, and Maria had invited me to go to the pool with her. She’s lucky enough to have free access to it, since it belongs to the residential block from where her mum runs her business. After going upstairs for lunch with Maria and her mum, who was lovely, the two of us made our way down to the sunny central courtyard, which consisted of tennis courts, a large swimming pool and a wide grass perimeter with wicker parasols. We spent the afternoon chatting and alternating between pool and poolside, before Maria’s two younger brothers arrived and we went to play with them in the pool.
When it was time to leave, Maria kindly walked me to the metro station, and when I got back to the house, Marellia, my housemate, was getting ready to leave. She’d invited me a few days earlier to go out with her and her friends, and said now that I was still more than welcome to come. The problem was that I had just returned from the pool and needed to finally get round to organizing how to transport my belongings home, as well as eat and completely get ready, before I could go out. We eventually decided that I would join them as soon as I could and send her a message when I was at the metro station.
Typically, I arrived at Sol metro station (which, horrifically, is officially called Vodafone Sol after its sponsor) only to discover I had no credit on my phone - which was ridiculous since I’d topped up five euros only the week before. The good thing is that the shops in Spain are open so late that I was able to dash into Orange and use the top-up machine; otherwise I would have been really stuck.
A few minutes later, Marellia was there, and she took me to meet her friends at a nearby bar I’d never have found on my own. What I hadn’t realised was that every single one of the ten-or-so people would be French, which was a little bit tricky since French happens to be one of the languages I don’t speak. The bizarre thing was that they all seemed more keen to speak English to me than Spanish, despite having been in Spain for however many months. At any rate, they seemed nice enough and made an effort to talk to me.
I consider myself quite an easy-going person, and I’m usually pretty good at reserving negative judgments until someone has proven they really deserve them, but there was one particular guy who just seemed to have nothing to say that wasn’t intensely irritating. He started out by saying that Birmingham was horrible (a fact I don’t deny, but something I feel only West Midlanders should be allowed to say), before going on to say that English villages are like death. He then proceeded to claim that he hated Paris and London, but loved how small and safe Madrid was (an interesting idea, since I haven’t met anyone here yet who hasn’t been mugged). I agree that Madrid is small for a capital (it has 4 million inhabitants, half that of London) and I think it’s a beautiful city, but I also think calling it a safe city is a bold claim.
This wasn’t all. To name all the ignorant and obnoxious things he came up with during the night would take up pages, but I think all my readers will understand my outrage when he said that English people are impatient with foreign people trying to speak their language. This coming from a French guy! I didn’t have enough of a death wish to voice my witty retort in front of a circle of French people, so I told him I completely agreed in the hope he’d grasp the irony.
We went to several bars, including one really cool place selling cheap mojitos, and a club that was completely empty, before ending up at a shisha bar. I spent most of the night talking to Marellia, who is really lovely, and a guy called Toma with whom I had a surprising amount in common. At the end of the night, Marellia and I made our way back to the house together.
I hadn’t made any other plans for that weekend, since everyone from work had gone away. Apparently this is the done thing in Madrid; most people have beach houses or, if they don’t, they have friends or family to visit all over the country, since a lot of them don’t come from here. For this reason I had a quiet Saturday morning, catching up on odd jobs, doing my share of the cleaning and packing up my box of belongings to be sent off the following Monday. When Marellia woke up we had an extensive Internet search for horse trekking centers (she loves riding as well) but couldn’t find any decent ones that were accessible by public transport.
After lunch, I took to metro to Retiro Park alone, as Marellia wasn’t feeling well. At any rate I was glad to have a bit of time to myself, reading El diario de Ana Frank in the shady gardens of Retiro. At half-past five I walked down to the Prado museum, which is free from 6 until 8 Mondays to Saturdays, and from 5 to 7 on Sundays. By talking to the guard I found out that it would have been free for me at any time had I not had my student card stolen, at which point the guard launched into a speech about how unbelievable and heartless it was to steal from a pretty girl like me. I know, I know, tragic.
The queue to get free entry into the museum was one of the longest I’d ever seen, stretching around the corner and all the way down the length of the building on the adjacent road. It did move surprisingly quickly, however, which was a relief since I was rapidly beginning to melt in the suntrap I was standing in.
The Prado is one of the things you really should do whilst you’re in Madrid, and that’s why I was there really, to see what the fuss was about. I’m far from being an expert in art and I have to admit that I did feel like a bit of a philistine breezing my way past most of the paintings, which all looked quite similar to me. In all fairness, most of the other visitors were the same, only they were putting on their ‘serious art faces’ to feign interest. There is something about being in museums that changes a person’s entire demeanor; their facial features, even their walk, becomes contemplative as if to show that they are taking in the culture.
At any rate, at least I had the initiative to decide for myself whether I liked the paintings or not, unlike most of the rest of the tourists, who were quite clearly religiously keeping to the list of famous works indicated by the Masterpieces section on the museum plan. My problem is that I prefer more contemporary art - not the ultra-modern, splash-of-paint-on-a-page stuff, but impressionism, expressionism, surrealism, that sort of thing. The Prado Museum collection consists of works from 1100 to 1800, which is probably why, after going around the entire museum, I only found a few paintings that really grabbed my attention. My favourites were the Pinturas negras (Black Paintings) collection by Franscisco Goya, as well as some works by Flemish painters Bosch, Patinir and Brueghel.
I’ve since done a bit of research on these and have found out that Goya painted his Pinturas negras, a group of fourteen paintings, after he moved into a house called Quinta del Sordo (Deaf Man’s Villa) in 1819, at the age of 72, when he himself was almost completely deaf. The paintings were originally created as murals in the house and were transferred to canvas in 1874. It’s evident from these paintings that Goya had been deeply effected by the Napoleonic Wars and the chaos within the Spanish government, not to mention his own personal turmoil of surviving two near-fatal illnesses. The sense of fear and hysteria and Goya’s loss of faith in mankind makes these paintings incredibly striking. The fact that they weren’t intended for exhibition and were named by his friend makes them, to me, in hindsight, even more fascinating as they seem to be a stark expression of a part of the artist he had never wanted anyone else to see.
Other than these, two paintings by Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights and Table of the Seven Deadly Sins and the Four Last Things, were also particularly striking. The former is a triptych dating between 1490 and 1510 and is widely interpreted as a warning against the perils of succumbing to temptation. The left panel shows God presenting Eve to Adam; the central panel shows animals and nude figures indulging in ‘earthly delights’ and the right portrays the torments of damnation. The painting is so intricate that I stood looking at it for ages, from all different angles, to make out all the tiny details.
The Table of the Seven Deadly Sins caught my eye because I’ve been interested in this idea ever since reading Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus way back in sixth form (not to mention watching the film Seven). Prado has it placed in a mounted glass case parallel to the floor, so you can observe it from above and see all the different segments of the grid from the correct angle. It consists of four small circles, portraying ‘Death of the Sinner’, ‘Judgment’, ‘Hell’ and ‘Glory’ surrounding a larger circle depicting the sins in scenes from everyday life. Like the other painting of his, there’s something quite haunting in this that I can’t quite put my finger on. Maybe it’s the fact that people back then were so terrified of following the rules governed by religion; or maybe it’s just because I probably commit most of the sins on a daily basis. I remember talking to Giorgos once about which sin we would be, before we decided we’d probably be all of them for one reason or another.
The last two paintings I’ll mention are Landscape with Charon Crossing the Styx by Patinir and The Triumph of Death by Brueghel, which, like the others, drew my attention with their slightly sinister qualities. The first, because it takes its subject matter from Virgil’s Aeneid and Dante’s Inferno, showing Charon, who takes souls of the dead to Hades, transporting a human soul across the River Styx.
The Triumph of Death which depicts a horrific battle scene between mankind and an army of skeletons, stands out for obvious reasons. It shows people across all spheres of society being snatched by death - portraying the way in which all of life’s petty preoccupations, such as money and status, are made irrelevant in the face of death. I do admit that this is pretty macabre and apologise for my morbid tastes.
By the time I made my way back through Retiro to the metro, dusk was falling and the park was buzzing with life. The evening sun cast warm shadows on the wide paths along lake, where street entertainers were performing to lively crowds of couples and young families. It felt strange to be alone amongst so many people, almost as if I were an invisible observer, a ghost watching life from the outside. I contemplated how wonderful it would be to be able to capture the intoxicating atmosphere of the Madrilenian evening and store it in a box to be brought out in moments of loneliness or sadness. Maybe I had already been lost in my own company for too long.
I had a much-needed rest that night and woke up fresh for the next day. Marellia and I had put our alarms on early to wash our hair before taking a day trip to Segovia, a city in the region of Castille and León, just north of Madrid. We had aimed to catch the 11.15 bus, according to the online timetable, but arrived at 11 only to find the next one wasn’t for another hour.
Not to be discouraged, we bought our tickets and waited in the station for our bus to arrive. At 1.15 we finally got off the bus in Segovia to find ourselves in a surprisingly bearable heat (nothing like the storms predicted by the online weather forecast). After paying a quick visit to the Tourist Information counter in the bus station, we followed our maps to the Aqueduct of Segovia, the city’s most famous monument.
The aqueduct, which was constructed between the 1st and 2nd century, is the most important Roman civil engineering work in Spain. It is 818m long and its highest point is 29m, and it consists of approximately 25,000 granite blocks held together without the use of any mortar.
When we had walked up the quaint main street and seen the aqueduct, we ascended the stone steps to the top and stopped for some lunch. We then followed our map to find the other notable sites in the city, since Segovia, declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1985, has many other sites as well as the aqueduct.
Segovia Cathedral is the last Gothic cathedral built in Spain and is considered the masterpiece of Basque-Castillian Gothic. As such, we didn’t mind paying the three euros to get inside, especially since the interior was quite unusual in style. Our next visit was to the Alcázar de Segovia, a royal palace located on the cliff top. This was less worth the four euros fifty I had to pay to enter, not having my student card, as it was a short visit and basically consisted of a few almost-empty rooms and a couple of small armory exhibitions, which is far from being one of my interests. From the outside, though, it looks like a Disney fairytale castle, which was well worth the walk to see.
As we were leaving the castle it began to pour with rain, but since it was only 3.30 we didn’t have much choice but to go on with our tour. Almost as abruptly as it had begun, the rain soon stopped and we were able to see the other main sites on the map, including the Muralla (city walls), which had been constructed around the perimeter of the city at the beginning of the Middle Ages and were rebuilt in the 11th century.
By this stage the weather had become close and humid, so we stopped for a welcome Smöoy break on the main street, directly in front of the aqueduct. Whilst we were sitting out on the terrace, we noticed signs of a formidable storm threatening on the horizon - and sure enough, within minutes the sky was flashing with thick forks of bright lightning, and the air was being pierced with heavy claps of thunder.
Since there was no sign of rain yet, and we had just over an hour before we needed to think about making our way to the bus station, we decided to meander the streets looking for postcards and souvenirs for Marellia. Both of us bought a Turkish eye bracelet, since Marellia had been given one that had given her unbelievable luck, but had since broken. The man gave us an extra one for free, which both of us we too polite to accept; it was eventually decided that since Marellia had already got one for her mum, I would take this one and give it to mine.
It wasn’t long before the rain started up again, and this time it really was the thunderstorm Google had predicted. We began to head towards the station dashing between the awnings of shops, meeting crowds of people on the way with the same idea. Finally we took refuge in a cafe, where we warmed ourselves with hot drinks and waited for the worst to pass. By the time we emerged half an hour later, the rain had relented and we arrived at the bus station relatively dry. We were just grateful that we’d only had an hour of storms and not the day of awful weather we’d been expecting.
By the time we got back to the house, I was exhausted but glad I’d made the most out of the weekend by seeing some more of the culture Madrid and its surroundings has to offer. I only have one week left here and, as the Spanish say, hay que aprovechar.
