Mi Casa

First, a little about where I am living.

The street is called Valverde. From one end, the end from which I took the picture, it is quite lovely. The other end, however, is peppered with sex shops selling “love toys,” as advertised from the outside (among other things, no doubt). Also, there are a number of prostitutes on that end of the street. When I say “a number”, the number I see is along the order of 15 or 20.

[I would like to point out that this is really my first “experience” with prostitutes. I’ve seen one or two women that I’ve suspected of being prostitutes in Paris, and one or two “confirmed” prostitutes in Nantes. But needless to say, I never saw throngs of them, never up close and never every day. Any previous knowledge I had about prostitutes came from Hollywood movies. So I was shocked to find that they don’t all dress particularly provocatively, they don’t all wear a lot of make up, and the greater majority of them on my street stand in doorways mindlessly cracking open pumpkin seeds with their front teeth (chucking the casings on the pavement) and drinking fruit juice. Jackets, flip flops, pumpkin seeds and fruit juice? This isn’t at all what I had pictured]

The apartment itself is really like an upscale dorm—there are eight of us who live here, all in our 20’s. Each person has their own private bedroom, but we share a lounge area, kitchen and three full bathrooms. The entire place is immaculately clean, white and quiet. The décor is very VERY minimalist—there is little furniture and little decoration, and everything is white. The entire place is situated along one long narrow hallway, the lounge in the front, the rooms in the middle and the kitchen and bathroom at the end. The hallway has high white ceilings, halogen light, white walls, white wood floor. All of the sounds echo and resonate through this space, so everyone has taken to stepping lightly and to speaking in hushed tones. In fact, one of the girls here says that no one should stay more than two months in this apartment because it so resembles a mental institution that you will necessarily lose your mind to fit in to the surroundings. I don’t know if I necessarily agree, since I happen to love clean, quiet spaces. I won’t find out, of course, since I’ll be leaving after two months.

My immediate neighbor is quite peculiar. It seems he is Swedish and has been here since October. Perhaps he has gone mad months ago. No one knows what his name is. When I say “no one,” I am referring to a Mexican girl (Regina) and a Venezuelan girl (Maria) who are the two residents I am friendly with, and the only two who are very social. There used to be a beautiful Italian guy called Franco, who was social, but he’s gone back to Italy. He didn’t know the Swedish man’s name, either. General consensus is that he is very odd, our Swede. For one thing, he must have every season of Married With Children on DVD box set—before work in the morning, he watches an episode, and as soon as he comes home at night from work, I hear him nearly running down the hallway, fumbling with his keys, and turning it on the second he gets in the door. “love and marriage love and marriage…” The first few days I was here, when I wasn’t going out very much, I toyed with the notion that perhaps that was his cell phone ring since I heard it so often. But one evening while I was trying to sleep, I noticed that it came, in fact, about every 40 minutes and that he never spoke afterwards. And so in this way I ruled out the cell phone theory. He presumably watches the show all evening long, until about midnight, only breaking to make himself some dinner (as every time I come in or go out I hear the theme song or Al Bundy). Another, and final, detail about him: he eats microwaveable meatballs every night.

The room to the left of me is occupied by an Indian man from England (judging by his accent that I hear through the wall), whom I’ve seen only once. But I hear him most nights talking to his girlfriend over the internet (she’s in medical school in London and wants to drop out), and watching Bollywood movies.

Next to him is a young Mexican girl, according to Regina from a very small town, who spends the entire weekend making (and subsequently eating) corn tortillas from scratch with eggs and green chile sauce.

It’s quite an interesting bunch…

Complutense

My classes are at the Complutense University on the edge of Madrid. There are 90,000 students spread out throughout the different schools, making it the largest in Spain and more than twice as big as Michigan. The campus is large and sprawling, covered with trees and really hideous specimens of 1970’s architecture. My class building (see picture) reminds me quite a lot of Communist apartment buildings in Baku. The funny things is, despite all of that, the campus really isn’t ugly. In fact, I think it’s quite pretty. I can’t under-emphasize the trees—there are so many of them and they are so lovely. There are oaks and sycamore and many fir trees, the delicate kind that only grow in hot places. Also, they don’t have gardens or landscaping on campus (though there is a large botanical garden), but the untended to hills and green spaces are filled with wild grasses, poppies and some kind of purple flower/weed. The wild grasses shine gold under the hot sun…I wait for class to start on a little hill in front of my class building, and looking behind me into the grasses and pines you would think I was in the countryside. I took a picture of myself for you to see how pretty it is (please note the golden grasses : ).

There are only 6 people in my class, and 7 teachers. In fact, the ‘teachers’ are composed of 3 professors and 4 grad students getting their masters in education. The odd thing is that all of them come to class—we have four hours of class a day, in a row, and all of them sit behind us through each class. Well, they take turns teaching the classes, so only 6 of them sit behind us at a given time. The teachers are all very lively and kind, and all speak very fast, “becauseSpanishpeoplespeakfast,so[we]needtolearntounderstandthematthatspeed.”

In the class there is one Russian (Valeria, 27, who never wears a bra, has permed, peroxide blond hair—dyed dark brown at the roots—whose fluorescent clothes were all purchased one size too small, and whose “life’s dream” is to own a pink Porsche), one Italian boy named GianPaolo (23, who was looking for a ‘girlfriend’ from the beginning and who has quickly taken to making out with Valeria in front of the classroom), Meital (who is 34, Israeli and very sweet, and whose name means “dew.” I’ve been spending quite a lot of time with her and her husband, who is here working on some kind of Masters degree in International law. Both of them are lawyers), Liv (a 26 year-old red-headed Norwegian nurse with dreadlocks and body-piercings), and finally Lala (an 18 year old girl from Baku who arrogantly declared on the first day that she speaks 5 languages fluently, among which English is her very best non-native language, but who can neither speak nor understand English. Example:

Me: “So Lala—do you have any brothers or sisters?”
Lala: (blink blink blink) “you do? Family is good.”
Me: “umm….so you do have siblings?”
Lala: “Yes, I want to have many child. My father is of 7 child.”
Me: “oh, I guess class is starting. It’s nice talking to you.”

Another striking feature about Lala: she has large, lovely wide-set eyes and a very large space between her eyes and eyebrows—she paints this space in the colors and shape of a peacock’s tail-feathers.

Madrid

There are a number of things which surprise me about Madrid. Firstly, I had never actually seen a picture of it before landing here. So the hilly-ness of the city and its many trees surprise me, as I imagined it to be situated in a desert-like red bowl of dust, concave and treeless. In fact, there are many, many trees (more in the center than in Paris by far), lots of hills and there has been no red dust. Secondly, I always assumed that Paris was one of the European capitals that spoke the least English, despite its huge tourism industry. Now I have found a European capital that speaks even less English than Paris. My assumption that many people would speak French was also rebuffed by tourism office workers, waiters and store clerks who snorted and/or giggled when I asked those who didn’t understand me if they spoke French.

There are old men with Picasso-like brown leathery skin who surprise me, as they whistle down the street from their bicycles so that people will bring their knives for sharpening between the stones on his handle-bar. And there are short, large-bellied men playing classical Spanish music on harps and accordions in the street who surprise me.

There is more of certain kinds of noise here than in Paris: more guitarists with lovely voices and lively fingers singing Spanish love songs, louder conversations, more laughter, more groups of people (adults mainly) singing and clapping together on the street as they remember a song, more birds singing (and singing louder—I think they have some different birds here…). So far, I have heard less honking and much much less “Vous êtes malade ou quoi?!”.

The biggest surprise of all is the huge park in the city, El Retiro. What shocks me most about it is that it exists at all. What I mean to say is that I particularly love gardens and parks. I have books on exquisite gardens of the world, and have read many more. Further, I have even taken a semester long landscape architecture class in which we spent several weeks studying the impact of urban green spaces on their urban area and population. In all of those readings and studies, many parks and gardens around the world were mentioned. But never ONCE was this one mentioned. Not only is this one more beautiful than any I’ve ever seen (including Central Park, the Luxembourg Gardens, Golden Gate Park), but it is definitely the most used and loved of those that I have seen. Each time I go, at any time of the day, any day of the week, holiday or non-holiday, the massive park is packed with people. The reason, aside from the beauty, is that they have so much going on inside: they have cafés, food stands, potato chip, pumpkin seed, candy and nut-vendors, ice-cream stands, fortune tellers, palm readers, acrobats, south-american guitarists singing love songs, Spanish kids doing choreographed hip-hop dances (for money), Chinese people drawings names in Chinese characters, balloon animal makers dressed up as Mickey Mouse, toy stands, soccer greens, basketball hoops, rollerblading, bicycling, picnic tables, concerts….And of course, perhaps best of all, is the man-made lake in the center of the park, on which you can rent a paddle boat (see picture). There is also a Conservatory (for flowers, though it’s used as an art exhibit space now) in the woods of the park made entirely of crystal. The sun shines through the panes and beams rainbows across the grass, onto the leaves of the surrounding trees…

Finally, Madrid mornings smell different from Paris mornings—I smell more coffee and hot oil than freshly baking bread (PS I really don’t like churros, nor do I like churros y chocolate).

Duck Duck...Pigeon!

Imagine a sunny day in the 7th arrondissement of Paris, in a café echoing with old Celine Dion songs, and a creepy, too short (even seated, his near-dwarfism is apparent), dark-eyed Gaulois watching me type.

In my line of view there is a young American girl, at most three years older than me, sitting on a stool with her young Italian husband. She has a big diamond wedding ring on her finger. Something about her has seemed familiar to me since she sat in front of me about an hour ago. [Oh, and incidentally, the bit about the diamond ring has nothing to do with this story at all, other than the fact that it is particularly remarkable on her young hands. It also doesn’t really jive with her pumas, sevens and tank top. Or no…maybe it’s the floppy knot of hair that makes her ring look out of place…I don’t know; en tous cas, il y a pour moi quelque chose qui cloche.]

Occasionally I have been eavesdropping and glancing at this couple, to glean little bits of information about who they are. A few moments ago they began talking about bird watching.

She brought it up.

Her Italian husband laughed and declared that no one really did beerd watcheeng. She retorts:
-Hey! Don’t knock bird watching! It’s really serious for some people. When you come visit my grandparents in Michigan, you better not say anything like that in front of them. They spend hours bird watching.

What?!

-Yeah! There’ll be a bird going ‘tweet tweet’ outside and my grandma will be in the kitchen and go ‘oh hey, listen! There’s like a…chickadee outside’ Yeah, totally! They’re totally serious about it. So..yeah.

She pronounced these last words (so…yeah) with great conviction and with a look of having satisfactorily won an argument on her face.

So there you have it. I’m just thoroughly amused by this whole scene, nothing more nothing less. I’m also now wondering whether she seems so familiar to me because I’ve seen her before in Michigan, or whether because I somehow intuitively recognize her as being from Michigan.

Is that possible? Is there something especially michigan-y about Michiganders? Opinions welcome.


On a different bird topic, a couple of weeks ago, I was walking down a narrow street in Paris when 6 or 7 pigeons came swooping down through the middle of the street. I ducked a little, but gracefully, acting sort of like I was looking behind me. When I did, my gaze crossed that of a middle-aged man walking 20 paces or so behind me. He smiled a little at me, as in "I saw that ducking, but who ducks for pigeons? They have an innate sense of SPLAT!!!!!" One of the pigeons ran smack into his face, scratching his cheek.

"Voulez-vous un mouchoir, monsieur?"

"Non, merci," he grumbled, suddenly not smirking any more.

Good thing I ducked.