Madrid Musings

Traveling between La Palma and the US, you basically have to stop overnight in Madrid going both directions, because of how the flight connections work. On the way outbound this meant little more than a shuttle to an airport-area hotel, a quick meal, and a short jet-lagged sleep before getting on a plane the next morning. Coming back, however, I had enough time to take the subway in from the airport area to downtown to wander around for a few hours, eat a Spanish dinner, and see some of the sights.

Mostly I walked around the downtown area, from Callao along Gran Via to the Puerta de Alcala, down past the Prado and the Jardin Botanico, then back towards Plaza Mayor and Puerta del Sol, in case you're at all familiar with the city. It's a surprisingly modern city with a typical "downtowny" feel, but in other senses it's very different from US cities I'm used to. The architecture of the grandiose apartment buildings, government ministries, and palaces are a very nice backdrop for wandering the city streets.

Unfortunately, I didn't have enough time to go into any of the museums, being there only at night. The Prado, above, was a surprisingly bland building considering what's inside it, but I guess you could say the same thing about the National Gallery in DC. I particularly liked the maze-like manicured hedges around the back of the Prado - made me think of Harry Potter V - but I couldn't get a good picture of them. And there is an impressive cathedral right behind the Prado too.

Wandering around downtown Madrid you can't help but pass a handful of these restaurant/bar/deli type places called, as you can see, "Museo del Jamon." You probably don't need a Spanish-English dictionary to know that translates to "Museum of Ham," and in many ways that's exactly what it was. Those Spaniards sure like their ham. I guess they are famous for it, acorn-fed Iberian and Serrano Hams and whatnot. Anyways, these places cracked me up not only because of the name, but because the insides held a bustling counter jammed with patrons ordering wine, beer, ham sandwiches, chorizo, and other late-night snacks of the ham-variety. I could go on, but plenty of other American travelers in Madrid have had the same experience and documented it better than I probably could. One such example of a good recreation of the Museo del Jamon experience is this blog entry - the pictures there are from the one I actually went inside to explore. In looking around the internets for other folks' descriptions of the Museo del Jamon, I found one in particular that I found pretty hilarious. The article's title is "A Quest for Vegan Food in Spain," so you can probably tell where this is heading. An excerpt:

"Unlike Americans, who intently close their eyes to the graphic details and images of slaughtering animals for food, Spaniards do not blanch at the thought or sight of eating a rotting corpse. Typical of bar-restaurants is the spectacle of pig legs, from the top of the thigh to the bottom of the foot, hanging behind the front counter. One of the grisly legs is ensnared in a cutting block to slice pieces of flesh for the sandwiches or tapas. The Spaniards apparently love ham, as one regularly passes ham specialty shops called Museo de Jamon that, true to the name of “ham museum,” look like a slaughterhouse inside and feature every imaginable way to dismember, display, and consume a pig. If pig is not to the Spaniard’s taste, there are always the seafood shops that feature a glass window of lobsters, crabs, squid, and other ocean delights waiting for the human command to boil them alive. Author Carol Adams writes about the “absent referent” of animal bodies in food consumption in order to mask the reality of death and suffering. While this may be true for Americans, the animal referent is unflinchingly present for Spaniards enjoying menu delicacies such as “blood pudding” and “brains.”

This is all very true. In La Palma we went to a great seafood restaurant where you pick out the freshly caught fish that you want, they cook it up and bring it over to your table, where they chop off the head and tail and debone it before putting the fish on your plate.

Another thing about food in Spain, maybe Europe in general, is that all of the waiters seem to be men, while all the "busboys" were women. Hmmm. Wonder how that worked out.

One last note about differences between Europe and the US that I was keenly aware of requires a switch over to the topic of sports. Given that the start of baseball season rivals (perhaps has surpassed?) Christmas for me in terms of amount of excitement generated, I spent a little time trying to find Red Sox-A's scores on European TV while overseas. Alas, no baseball. The sports that I was able to watch included:

• Women's curling - actually very exciting, especially when the Canadians were playing as I could actually understand them as they discussed the strategy behind their shots. They just barely pulled out a win to beat the Japanase team, Ari.
• Track cycling world championships - this is the velodrome event where you ride a fixed-gear bike around a wooden track with banked curves. Sounds a little mundane, but it can be pretty dangerous at times, too. Kind of neat, but apparently the euros eat this stuff up, as it got top billing for several days. More on this below...
• Snooker - a billiards style even where there's more little red balls than I can count, some other colored balls, and all the guys wear bow-ties. That's about all I know. Yes, this was on TV.
  
• MotoGP - crazy fast motorcycle racing. Think indy-car but with two wheels, where your knees scrape the ground on the turns.
• European basketball - only saw a little bit of this, and perhaps I have some latent American "Dream-Team" snobbism going on, but man they were bad. Kind of amusing to watch, but in retrospect I much rather would have watched Davidson's improbable run to the Elite Eight.

It was kind of neat to see some of these new sports. Especially the curling, where in the US you only really see that for 15 minutes late at night every 4 years during the winter olympics. I was actually glad that I had seen some of the track cycling championships too, because as it turns out my neighbor in seat 18D for the 12-hour flight from Frankfurt to San Francisco was none other than Jennie Reed, fresh off a bronze and gold-winning performance at said track cycling world championships, which were in Manchester, England. Pretty neat! A very nice girl to oblige my curiosity despite being exhausted after a weekend of competition and a missed flight, it was fun to hear about her sport, her performances, equipment, etc. She even showed me her medals! If you missed the Eurosport broadcast of her win in the keirin event like me, you can see it on YouTube. Congratulations, Jennie! I'll be sure to root for you in Beijing this summer.