Spain - Day One in Madrid

Woah.

I knew this would be my first reaction, and really I don’t think anything completely unexpected or overwhelming has happened yet. I’ve also only been here for about 15 hours. However, in the brief time that I’ve been here, I have learned A LOT about what to expect, and what I may be up against. Granted, Madrid is a completely different city from Seville, but already in my limited time here I have been encouraged, confused, insulted, and befriended by a range of Spainards – some obviously more inclined than others to accommodate my inconsistent language skills.

I didn’t manage to get a wink of sleep on the flight – a mix of nerves and really loud Boeing 767 engines. My flight arrived in Madrid around 10am Spain time, but my body was quite sure it was only 4am. I barely missed the first group that met at the airport to go to the hotel, so I ended up sitting around until 1pm waiting for the next group to assemble. I managed to run into some other students from my program while I was waiting at the airport, so we had plenty of time to get to know each other before we took a bus into downtown.

The hotel is fantastic – to the side you can see a picture of the view from my private balcony. Each room has a flat screen t.v., a bathroom with a shower and tastefully modern furniture and lighting (It lives up to the name Hotel Moderno). Perhaps even better than the accommodations in the hotel is the location. It is situated adjacent to the Plaza de Sol – the center of downtown Madrid (picture below). API certainly went out of its way to impress the group, and they have largely succeeded. There are roughly 40 students from the program at the hotel participating in the orientation and everyone is raving.

My first real experience and interaction with the Spainards came when a group of us decided to go grab a bite to eat in the early afternoon (dinner doesn’t get served around here until around 9 o’clock, so we needed something to hold us over). We had only just gotten settled into the hotel, and wandering around the streets of Madrid with around a dozen other students from the U.S. really drove home what it is to be a rat pack of Americans abroad. It was painfully obvious to every person we passed that we were hungry, tired, lost, and confused foreigners. When we finally picked what appeared to be a nice and reasonably priced café, the language barrier came into play.

Americans are notorious for their expectation that all peoples of the world should be able to speak English. Now I don’t believe any of us held that view walking into that café, but even with the few proficient speakers, it was a real struggle. The menu wasn’t impossible to figure out, but my problem, which others had, was that there are so many words that we simply have never been exposed to. I could pick out an item on the menu and tell that it was a chicken dish with a sauce and rice, but nothing about how it is prepared, exactly what type/part of the chicken, or what surprise the sauce might hold. There were a few people with us that were completely clueless – they had to hold up the menu and point to order their food, others were sneakily trying to thumb through pocket Spanish-English dictionaries in the hope that they would not order pig rectum. For my part, I decided to roll the dice on the chicken. The waiter went around the table, and I happened to order last. Everyone ordered water to drink, and by the time it came around to me, he assumed that the last bewildered American to speak would not dare break the unanimity of the beverage choice. Despite the fact I was extremely nervous by this point (when you have a long time to figure out what you want to say in Spanish and how to say it, the more you rehearse it in your head, the harder it can be to actually spit it out when the moment comes) I ordered wine.

He asked me “blanco o tinto?” [white or red] to which I replied “blanco.” He then said something else that I did not quite catch and finished by asking if I were sure. Nodding and smiling like I knew exactly what he said, and playfully joking that I was considering changing my mind, I said “si, mas or menos yo creo…” [yeah, more or less I think so].

When he came back and plopped a big ol’ bottle of white wine in front of me, my first reaction was “fuck, he must have asked if I wanted a glass or bottle, who knows how much this bottle costs, I’m probably going to end up dropping close to 30 Euro on just lunch (almost a third of the cash I brought hoping it would last these first four days in Madrid). The meal I ordered came with a salad, a few chicken legs deliciously seasoned (though a touch salty), and fries. Little did I know that wine – even an entire bottle of it – came as part of the meal, while water (a bottled mineral variety, what you typically find around here in lieu of tap water) cost 2.50 Euro. Here I was thinking that I had already suffered my first major blunder of the trip, but in actuality, by not opting for water, I got to enjoy a tasty Spanish wine for free. It’s hard to believe, but what I heard about wine being cheaper than water really holds up…sorry Jesus, the Spainards don’t want you going around depreciating the value of their liquids.

After lunch, I took an incredible 3 hour nap. I’m pretty sure I was out once my head hit the pillow between the sleep deprivation, easing of the traveling stress, and the fact I had just downed five or six healthy glasses of wine (nobody else seemed interested in drinking at lunch and I wasn’t about to let it go to waste).

Once I got up from my nap, API took the group out to a dinner that was not all that Spanish (I had pasta with a wine sauce and swordfish). However, I could overlook this since it was free, and my first 100 Euros seemed to be disappearing quickly on only my first day. Things are rather pricey as Madrid is one of the most expansive cities in Spain, so thankfully Seville will be more affordable.

Despite exhaustion everyone seemed raring to get out to the bars after dinner. Bar promoters linger outside bars and prowl plazas everywhere around downtown. Follow them into a bar, and you’re guaranteed a half-filled glass of Heineken or a shot of some diluted liquor. After walking around for a bit with a group of five or six, we were tracked down by a promoter and led into this pirate-themed bar of some sort that was blaring Eninem’s “The Real Slim Shady.” The music tends to be a mix of cheesy American super hits and Spanish pop…it can be very contextually confusing…

After a few drinks, the long plane ride followed by an eventful day began to take a toll on everyone, so eventually we made our way back to the hotel. Only one day in, and I can’t wait to find what the next day brings and I certainly can’t believe that I will be living here permanently for the next four months. It probably won’t become clear until I get to Sevilla, since the Madrid portion of the API stay is more of a vacation-like introduction to Spain…