Heat and Fantasy in Madrid

 5 de julio, 2025

Dear. friends, known and yet to be known.

Midmorning, it is already hot. Today I miss the cool morning temperatures of Utah. However, nostalgia aside, Alicante is pleasant. 

This week saw me in Madrid for two days where it is higher, drier, and hotter.  

The AVE (high velocity) train between here and the capital is a marvel as is watching the countryside change. We climbed out of the almost absurdly dry coastal plains and hills—with no green except where there was an exotic water source—up to the central plains, the meseta or altiplano, the roaming ground of  the strategically deluded Don Quijote, before  seeing greener valleys open and buildings rise as we dropped slightly into Madrid, an almost megacity.

Truthfully, I am not sure who is more deluded, the inestimable and idealistic Spanish nobleman wannabe, or us. He saw beauty and sweetness in rough women, Dulcinea; perfectibility in his nag, Rosinantes, and all kinds of ghosts, castles and enemies in the fat-based windmills of this very breezy plateau. All of this is similar to the fantasy offering of Madrid’s Gran Via, its shopping golden miles(s), from tawdry to glittering—anyone with money can appear noble. 

Compared with the coastal cities of Valencia or Barcelona, Madrid is not really all that old, yet is has aged, showing centuries of glory, fading dreams, and dwellings of ordinary people (poor and otherwise). Still, its streets and avenues hold out charm—sidewalk cafes under sycamores (plane trees here), buildings from earlier centuries mostly eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth that hold an authenticity and beauty seemingly lacking in the concrete and glass late century.

Nonetheless, the almost-psychedelic towers near the torturous Chamartin Train stations promise a future of the over-drugged Elon Musk who is horribly uncomfortable in the contemporary world. At least one reminds of an idealized interplanetary space ship ready to blast off to mars, with toreadors and Quijotes on board. 

However, nothing can beat stretching out on the grass in Madrid’s El Retiro Park, or on benches in the more formal Royal Botanical gardens next door, or perhaps exhausted from art over a coffee or cold water in the Prado museum, also next door.  Or you can escape them and lose yourself in a descending pedestrian street of book vendors, one after another. You can also cross over to an older neighborhood by the other mega museum of contemporary Art, the Reina Sofia where Picasso’s Guernica has its home. Very close, on a narrow street going up a hill, you can avoid the masses of gawking tourists before Picasso, in a thoughtful and resistant feminist and LBGTQI bookstore, rainbows everywhere. 

Behind the also mega museum, the Thyssen Bornemisza, (across the street from the Prado) with its stupendous collection of renaissance and late renaissance art, as well as a significant holding of contemporary works, I found a charming little place, trumpeting Peru. 

Its name QoriTika, means golden flower in Quechua, although the servers seemed to be far removed from knowledge about Peru and its food. Still, it was a refuge, a Retiro with chilled and clovy chicha morada, salted canchitas, and a menu of creole dishes. 

Madrid overwhelms with its richness of offerings and, after two days, I was glad to face long lines and confusion to board the late train in Chamartin back to the coast. 

Yours, a truly sad American the day after what should have been a day of celebration of ideals. 

David

 

Hot Days, Mediterranean Sleep

 We are at the minimum temperature for the day, 23 celsius or 74 Fahrenheit. The sun only hints at rising and song birds, at least a few of them in this overbuilt space, sing into dawn.

Just a bit of cool blows in a slight breeze. I feel it as I sit shirtless on my terrace six floors above the street and about a mile from the Sea.

Being awake now in this quickly disappearing darkness is a luxury. So few people are. We are still three hours or so from the city’s awakening when cafés lift their shutters as people trickle from residences on their way to work. Well, it is Sunday, so a correction, maybe four or five hours till that trickle of people leaving home for one reason or another becomes noticeable. 

At midnight, last night and tonight, the sky over the sea by the city did and will erupt in color. Claps of explosions bounce in the air and smack buildings. The city is nearing the end of its June firework competition in which five firms are competing to see who can claim the official seal of performing the best show of colored bursts at the time when one day changes to the next.

For some time now, journalists and promotors have hailed the Mediterranean diet. In all honesty, it seems to weaken in the onslaught of industrial food and marketing. Still, there is something else Mediterranean worth looking into and celebrating, sleep divided into two. 

Afternoons are so hot. Yes, I know. I look at the numbers and they are not any hotter than they are in much of the United States, So, yes. People live the rise and fall of temperatures differently here. Spanish officialdom encourages people to pull down their persianas, their slatted shutters on a roll, to block out light and hence heat, to keep the inside temperatures down. They also encourage windows and doors be opened into the night to draw cooler air inside. 

After lunch, while the sun blazes, it is dark inside as a result and people sleep for a two or three hours until the heat breaks its rise and begins descending seriously.

This is the siesta and it is far more than a nap. That word suggests a brief snooze while here people easily get an hour or two of sleep and that makes up for less sleep at night.

At midnight the city sponsors noise and explosions. They expect whole families to be up and enjoying the time. And, in fact, they are and do. 

Yesterday afternoon, when I came back from the nearby grocery store, a neighbor from the floor below mine, a learned woman in her early seventies, stood at the building’s door with a pile of bags. She was waiting for her husband and grandchildren to return from going for the car. (my building does not have its own parking and so people must rent or buy spaces elsewhere). 

We smiled and said hello.  I asked if they were off somewhere thinking maybe they were taking a weekend trip. “We are going to the beach—to one a bit away from the city’s center—to see the fireworks with our grandchildren.”

It probably was two or later before they returned and tumbled into slumber. No worries, today is Sunday and they can sleep in. Wake a bit before noon, have a leisurely coffee and toast to begin their day at the same time when in the US people are preparing or eating lunch.

In any case, here, mid afternoon, say three thirty of four, after their lunch, they will stretch out again on their beds, in the dark inside and sleep again. 

I am not a scientist wiring people up to study this biphasic sleep, to know how deep it is or to figure out its effect on the body. Instead, though a trained observer, I live here and now I too sleep in shifts, one at night and one in the afternoon. I have taken on this Mediterranean rhythm of life. Mine is probably more triphasic—I love the dawn; so I sleep, wake up for a couple of hours, sleep again, wake up until after lunch I sleep again and then am up till near midnight. It all works out to about eight hours.   

The gulls have been calling for a while now, while I type away. The doves have started cooing and just now pigeons began their more rattling calls. Dawn is fully here. The sun is now beginning to climb above the horizon. Heat will soon follow. 

  

Barriers and Shuffling: Another Day in Alicante

 

A man, with well barbered gray hair, and a clipped and combed mustache hobbled while pushing his blue walker up the slight incline into the Cafe where I sit. I see him almost every day, either sitting on his walker in a cafe and sipping coffee or sitting in the shade on a street. I also see him with his halting pace working to get around. 

I know nothing of his story other than what I can intuit: he is retired, somewhere in his mid-seventies, with legs that barely work. Yet, he refuses to leave it at that, and continues, day in and day out, to shuffle on a few block round that makes up his mornings. 

Of course, I—a half year seventy-year old—walk much of the same round daily because my flat is on its edge and I too insist on walking. I have feet that have seen better days and sometimes just feel numb. But I work them, to keep what feeling and mobility I have—fortunately my mobility is good even if sensation is not quite there. Pre-diabetes and peripheral neuropathy along with intense chemo for leukemia of which, fortunately, I have been “cured”, have had their way with my feet to my frustration. 

But that is life.  My Grandmother on my mother’s side , who immigrated from West Yorkshire, had leg and feet problems that seemed so mysterious to me. They were always bothering her and mornings she would carefully wrap them. I did not understand until recently, my aunt who is in her nineties and suffering Alzheimer’s heard me state I had gout. She said “oh David, you have inherited mother’s gout.” Until that moment I did not know other people in the family had similar problems. I have recently learned of a cousin who also experiences this problem with processing uric acid.  

Every time I see this gentleman, who looks right through me when I try to say hello, I pay attention. I learn about the details of troubled movement which I might face, and more than anything his courage and determination, carved like stone into his jaw, cheeks, and eyes. 

Well, this is a strange theme, and not the one I had planned to write about on this sunny and hot, post-fiesta day in which I feel a little strange from taking a poison, colchicine, to stop a gout attack that was spiking itself into my foot.  

That aside, I think of a warm and smiling Chinese woman who has almost no Spanish or English, though several kinds of Chinese, I think, grace her tongue. Even without the language, she came to Spain and runs a restaurant with delicious offerings cooked by her husband. If you know what you want on the menu and can signal it, there is no problem, but if your wishes require words, suddenly her face clouds with frustration and even shame. She holds up a finger and runs to find someone who can help. 

I do not know how I would respond to running a business relying on words and not being able to understand them or make them myself. I do know I turn inside and work hard to figure out everything for myself and then have to just be patient when misunderstood. 

 That little restaurant has become one of my favorite places, and not just because of the delicious food. I also love the lady’s smile, the light that crosses her face when I try to say siè sie, thank you in Mandarin. In my few words, I try to, even if absolutely at a minimum, cross the boundary into her linguistic world.

In the last month or so, a different Chinese couple has opened a “chino” across the street from my building. It sells a variety of inexpensive merchandise for the home, from hardware to a bit of food. These are very useful stores.

After more than another month of rehabilitating that space that has been empty since I moved here, some green plants for sale outside marked the opening of their business. The  youngish woman there also doesn’t speak much Spanish, kind of like all the foreign tourists who shop at the neighborhood supermarket in tourist season and often even lack hello or thank you. I resist the temptation to jump in every time they speak English—since most have at least some command of that language—to smooth things over. 

Not being able to communicate can be as important an experience in a foreign country as trying to speak the native language with its thousands of years of practices and layered connotations that take a lifetime to really get. 

Yes, I am speaking in part of my difficulties with the Spanish here. It is a language I have spoken almost my entire life and I often feel a fool here, though every day less so. 

The woman in the “chino” looks too young to have a early twenties son, but there is a young man who is often there and does speak Spanish as does the upper forties man who also hangs out and carries a body and face that says simply “owner”. 

To put together a store like this requires substantial capital, in inventory if nothing else. I get the sense that there my be several extended families who work together to open and manage these stores and possibly pool capital. 

I have seen the owner-man in other "chinos", looking just as much the owner. However, a block away there is another chino and the people there are physically different and their Chinese sounds different, possibly being a different regional variety. That owner man is never there in my experience. 

Spain has a substantial Chinese community and has had for a few generations. In this are family ties and business ties between this overseas community and the homelands as well as business centers in Spain and China. The stories of this community would fascinate me for a long time. 

However, to continue with the theme of these musings, a week or so after the chino across from me opened I had the need to buy something and crossed over. I found it in the back of their crowded store and went to the register. 

Here I have gotten used to paying with my phone through a debit card it holds. I seldom have cash because of the cost in time and money of getting it from an ATM. The card machine in the Chinese store did not function yet. Their bank had not yet finalized its use. So they asked me for cash or bizum. This latter is a way of paying money electronically directly into someone’s phone and hence their bank account. I had not activated that yet. 

We looked at each other, merchandise between us, and realized we had no way of finalizing a transaction. 

If language or legs can be a difficulty, so can something ostensibly simple like money. I will not describe the gyrations I have gone through before simplifying them in order to receive my retirement checks from the US and get Euros for daily needs.

  

 

Good Times while the Bad Times Roll On

On this chilly gray Alicante day, Carnaval Saturday, when directions are easily confused, I see a woman across the street walking her two beagles.

She is the very image of normality. Even her dogs, usually rambunctious, seem calm, as if the reduced light has softened their energy.

Yet my screen is filled with the after effects of the White House bullying of Ukraine. Both the US President and Vice President are shameful and should not lift up their heads in polite company.

I shall not jump even more aggressively on to the pile castigating them, nor much less support these wannabe vipers and real life bullies.

Instead, I shall relate a question from the server at a small and charming cafe where I had breakfast.

After telling me she chose soft jazz to set the tone for what might become a raucous day, she wondered if carnaval would even take place this late afternoon due to the forecast of rain.

I do not know about Alicante, but in Peru and Bolivia, water is very much part of Carnaval. Youths roam with water balloons, buckets, and water uzis in hand. They soak the unsuspecting or those who would get them first.

Cans of foam have replaced some of this but water is still a major symbol in this festival of fertility.

Spring is shortly to come in Spain, despite today’s cold. In some ways, Carnaval is about the bacchanalian confusion of a warming earth readying to open and throw up sprouts.

(In the Andes it is about high summer and the need for water for the crops to ripen, all the while the earth prepares to close down for winter’s cold and wind).

The costumes and movement take place here tonight, on the Rambla—a former gully now canalized and covered with the former stones of the city’s walls. The street then goes around one edge of the hill Benalcantil where the Moorish and Christian town remains, and where the castle of Santa Barbara (she of lightning) still stands. At its end, the street now opens onto the Esplanade, the tiled, Pedestrian avenue along the sea’s edge.

Furthermore, the Rambla starts at the city’s public market where a road named for the Castilian King Alfonso X, el Sabio who took the city from the moors, meets a road that continues to the other side of Benalcantil.

It is named for the King of Aragon, Jaume II who removed Alicante from the Castilians in favor of the Catalan and Aragonés speaking peoples who, joined by the Murcians with their own language and the more highland Castilians form the bulk of the provinces population. They give it linguistic complexity.

One should not forget the often ignored Moors. They did not pass simply into history. Many left, some converted, and over the centuries since, many others have come in the back and forth between Alicante and North Africa.

Many people will spend today inside with their families. Yet, it is fitting that others fill the Rambla—that Avenue into the past and the present—in masks and costumes.

After all, on Monday Lent begins and I wish the threatening war on Europe’s edge and the political destruction in the US capital were as easily finalized and contained in words as this Feast.

In these Times: Roses in Spain

A sign blocked my path as I was out walking this morning.  

Ask about “miguelitos de la rueda” it informed in loud letters. 

So, I opened the little grocery store, went to the register and asked the matronly woman with graying hair about them. 

I am out.  We won’t have any more until Friday.

Hum.  I had to ask what they were.

A donut sized bit of puff pastry filled with chocolate or cream,  They are from Madrid.

To my ears, that all sounded pretty ordinary but I can’t opine until I actually try them. Still, this reminded me of another sign I saw on my walk today. It simply said, the best cookies in Alicante. 

This one was in the door of a little cookie and coffee shop on a much frequented small street a block from the major Alfonso el Sabio Avenue. I know the people who own it and run it are from the US, the midwest, and used to celebrate that fact in their signage.  The man is large and bearded and often wears a full man-dress. 

To my tastes, their cookies are only so so, but without even remembering that, I thought “how would you guys even know yours’s are the best. Have  you tried all of them or did some one do a comparative taste and quality test.

Then I remembered how in the midwest it seems every small town claims to have the biggest or the best something or other as a draw to get people off the freeway. PR speak, the claims are their’s to make and no one should call them out to check on it, unless maybe its a neighboring town and they can make an event of it at, maybe, the state fair. 

Thinking about naming, advertising, and claiming, I remembered reading earlier about Spain's ultra party, the very right wing, authoritarian and nationalist VOX led by the apparently sleazy Santiago Abascal. He's from the Basque region, the industrial and Port city of Bilbao, specifically,  which claims the majestic Guggenheim. 

Abascal grew up during the time of guerrilla violence for Basque independence and in a city where I heard lots of basque spoken. 

In Utah, there are Basques, many who came to herd sheep and who stayed.  Last year at Salt lake’s Living Traditions festival I asked the delightful woman who was selling churros--pieces of extruded and fried dough--if many people still spoke Basque now that they have been in the Great Basin for a couple or three generations.  She insisted they do and that young people take classes in the language. 

A Spanish nationalist, whose history I only know from reading two or three newspaper articles and--gasp--Wikipedia, Abascal challenged Basque nationalism as a young man in the University. He argued instead that in Spain there should be only one language, Spanish (what many people here in Valencia call Castillian).

When asked about death threats he had received and whether he was afraid to continue arguing against the Basque guerrillas ETA and the Basque language as an official language of the Basque region, he boasted he was not afraid. 

Abascal, in both his corruption and presence seems like a macho in the Tumpian PR tradition. His image is of defiance. 

I further read that his party VOX is deliberately, as a strategy, attacking journalists. Activists have received recommendations from the party to look for when media journalists are in the middle of filming or broadcasting a live broadcast. They should seek the right moment, interrupt, and knock the microphone out of the journalists' hands, as Spaniards are growing accustomed to seeing. 

The strategic point, evidently, is to challenge the idea of press neutrality while breaking even constitutional protections of a free press. They claim you can only know the truth from within their party and their party's media and channels. 

Note, I actually wrote the meta point but remembered that Zuckerberg has claimed this useful word as the name of his business, one that supersedes his Facebook and Instagram. Sigh, he has made this term private and indeed protected by law. Even in legitimate external usage, such as I was going to write, where the term means that which is above, Zuckerberg’s oligarchic power can be felt. 

He is in the news this days for removing fact checking from Face book, allowing people to say what they wish. He along with Musk of Once-Twitter, now X, are indirectly claiming truth is related to power and not to facts. 

This is the marketing of we are number one, or America f… yeah! Even facts become suspect in this powerful and possibly proprietary speech. 

The residue of arguments like these--in the dictatorial antecedents of VOX, the Franco regime’s tactics as dictator and even during the Spanish civil war--are marked in the streets and soil of Alicante. Monuments to martyrs murdered by the fascists are found, such as in the middle of the Dr. Gadea Avenue or to the side of the Seneca Plaza, and so on. You can also visit bomb shelters set up to protect the population from Facist air raids. 

I can only imagine the fights advocates had to get these recognitions on buildings, in parks, and in streets. Even today, fifty years afterwards, there is still resistance to recognition of the Republic and its martyrs. 

I guess the poetry of Shakespeare from another time, retelling a story of the Italian Renaissance would be false.

 A rose, by any other name, would not smell as sweet. 

The name, it seems, should make the rose and not the petals, the thorns, or the perfume. 

Let me end by actually citing from Mr Shakespeare Juliet’s challenge to hereditary authority--such as Mr Abascal likes or even the Great Man Randian authority preferred by Messrs Musk and Zukerberg .

What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other word would smell as sweet. 

So Romeo would, were he not Romeo called, retain that dear perfection…without that title...