Madrid

Because of my delayed flight I’d missed the chance to get a sense of the terrain I was travelling through so I was looking forward to the drive to Madrid. But the terrain was pretty monotonous. The land is covered almost exclusively with olive plantations. Olives for hours, and no other sign of life. No birds, no animals, no people, just the occasional massive billboard bull.

The bus I was on apparently had wifi, but it didn’t work well. The onboard entertainment system had a genuinely terrible selection of music and a bunch of films that were mostly in Spanish with no subtitles. I ended up watching Amelia, because it was the only one they had in English, but it lacked sufficient emotional depth for me to feel invested in.

So I stared out the window and reminded myself of how big the world is. It’s easy to forget that in the UK where everything is so dense and close together. Elsewhere, there is so much empty space. Driving always puts me in a pensive mood.

After Granada, Madrid felt big and unfriendly. I wasn’t there long enough to really get a sense of the city and it seemed like there was a lot less opportunity to interact with people beyond transactional stuff, like buying a meal. Even that wasn’t a particularly friendly experience. Serving staff spoke English but they weren’t all that enthused about having to help out and at every place I ate I had significantly slower service than the people around me. At one point I stumbled upon a weird restaurant that had cheap sandwiches and was inexplicably filled with nuns in groups of threes but I couldn’t figure out how to order food so I left.

One night I went to see a tabla flamenco show on the recommendation of a friend and out of a desire to keep up my quota of watching dance shows. It was interesting, but very touristy, not the sort of thing that I would normally do. I enjoyed the performance but at these sorts of encounters I always find it more interesting to pay attention to the meta experience of being there, watching the watchers and trying to figure out what about the encounter made it feel inauthentic.

Madrid made me feel like there were things happening and I wasn’t really a part of them. Perhaps I was missing having a high vantage point to look down from. In my accommodation I slept without covers and the noise of the traffic, garbage pickup and road maintenance continued on until 4am forcing me to dig out my earplugs to get some sleep.