Christmas Cheer



We are now in full festive season in this highly catholic country, and the time has come to celebrate the birth of Christ, or El Niño as he is affectionately referred to here.  The streets are lit up with good tidings, transforming downtown Madrid into a display so festive it is only a matter of time before a confused jumbo jet pilot tries to land on the Gran Vía.  Apart from finally putting Madrid on the map of what can be seen from space, the decorations have brought much Christmas cheer to the freezing Madrileños, as well as a polar-bear-crushingly vast carbon footprint.

These luminous delights are of many different varieties and put Joseph’s coat to shame in terms of technicolouration.  A crib scene can be found at every corner, and the main thoroughfares of Salamanca are lit not only by the usual Christmas fare of stars, reindeer and snowmen, but by a wide range of words from the “Christmassy” semantic field, such as JOY, PEACE, as well the somewhat contradictory  terms “FIESTA” and “QUIETUD”.

The Paseo de la Castellana, on the other hand, has gone down a distinctly modern route as regards this year’s decorations, leaving the boulevard resembling some kind of evil cross between the Tate Modern and a fluorescent-themed 80s rave.  Giant pink cones adorn the 18th Century walkways and at night the avenue is lit with wreaths of a colour scheme which seems specially conceived to explain the word “garish” to illiterate Spaniards.

However, this is far from the most evil of displays to be found in the Spanish capital, which is the main subject of this post.  Indeed, all the above glitterings pale into insignificance next to this most sinister of exhibits.

can you hear the evil laugh?

Over the Plaza Felipe II has descended a fearsome collection of ghastly plastic figures, all part of the winter wonderland set up by the all-powerful department store El Corte Inglés and dubbed with the rather cringeworthy title of Cortylandia.  It is basically a vast paying playground which supposedly has some sort of a Christmassy theme to it.  But there is nothing bad about feeble theme parks per se, indeed it is something else altogether that makes Cortylandia so special.  I am of course referring to the aforementioned ghastly plastic figures.

and his sidekick the evil squirrel

Malevolent grinning elves with pointed hats are everywhere and make the whole area feel like some Lemony Snicket joke come to life.  It is difficult to find words powerful enough to describe the aura of sheer evil emanating from these impassive, cruelly

smiling plastic faces, but luckily I managed to snap a few photos of the sinister spectacle.  I could see things were about to kick off, so I got outta there.

As you can no doubt appreciate, it takes a braver man than me to stand up to the terrifying

Shakespeare reference

inhabitants of Cortylandia, so I have chosen this point in my blog to announce my imminent return to my family in Brussels.  Tomorrow in fact.  But fear not, I shall be back soon with a little conclusion on the scarcely reported end to my Madrid months.

something sinister is afoot in Felipe II

O-live, O-live oil

I had heard of the Mediterranean omnipresence of Olive oil, but as with many of Johnny-foreigner’s little foibles, one rather has to see it to believe it.  Although well acquainted with this penthouse-dweller of the food pyramid, I was surprised at both the quantities involved and the variety of its uses.  Indeed I couldn’t hold back an air of polite surprise when, early on in my stay, at a family supper, Papá proceeded to pour what I would have considered to be a weekly recommended allowance of olive oil onto my plate of pasta.  “We have olive oil on everything here!” he boomed, emptying the bottle on his plate.  I had just been introduced to aceite de oliva, a staple of the Spanish diet.

Olive oil has been a part of mediterreanean life for about as long as anyone can remember.  Homer has been caught waxing lyrical about the merits of this “Liquid Gold”, and as any fule kno, many an ancient athlete would smear up before his chariot race or cross-channel swim.  It is unclear to me which came first:  the ridiculous number of olive tree plantations or the equally preposterous number of uses for olive oil.  The fact remains that olive oil has fuelled lamps, athletes and mediterreanean economies for millennia, and that trend only seems set to continue if my pasta is any indicator.

Living up to its reputation as the butter of the south, similar uses are extracted from olive oil in Spain.  Any frying is done with the food fizzing in a pool of oil.   It is also used in cake mixtures.  A typical Spaniard will complete his frugal breakfast with a golden piece of toast, topped off with brown sugar and olive oil.  It can be spread like butter on a baguette, if one is in search of a quick bread-based snack.  Olive oil is present in any tin of absolutely anything.  And as you will have guessed, the composition of Spanish salad dressing is not complicated.  Apart from these more common uses, I have noted more than one olive-oil flavoured ice cream…  With so much of the oil being consumed in one way or another, large stores are kept in a cupboard: 5-litre bottles of olive oil, now there’s something you might struggle to find in Tesco’s/Carrefour.

Not that I am complaining of this olive oil profusion.  Quite apart from filling in my picture of the Spanish way of life, and providing me with a blog post, olive oil is extremely healthy.  According to this possibly biased website, consumption of olive oil helps prevent heart disease, diabetes, breast cancer, high blood pressure, arthritis, gallstones and, in a final flourish that sends all these claims  flying in an explosion of implausibility, the common cold.

Quotes of the week: Cecilia

au pair's revenge

The other day, I was playing in the living room with the three girls and the boy from next door.  Nicolas, six years old, happens to go to the Lycée Français of Madrid, so I took advantage of this to get out my French, which has fallen into disuse lately.  While we were chatting away amicably  in the tongue of Molière, Cecilia had picked up on a foreign language being spoken in her vicinity.  How dare we say things that she might not understand!  She glowered at us with completely unconcealed disgust: “he speaks Spanish too, you know!”, she snapped at me before returning to more important affairs.

A rather different incident occurred during one of our “English lessons”, when I was quizzing the girls on various items drawn out on flashcards.  At one point, I held up a card with a representation of the steel instrument used for spearing food and generally accompanied by a knife.  Imagine my surprise when Cecilia shouted out, perfectly and precisely pronouncing a four-letter expletive beginning with the same letter as “fork”.  I was quick to correct her pronunciation on this particular occasion, lest this new addition to her vocabulary find its way back to her parents.

Although our relationship got off to a somewhat rocky start, Cecilia did still show some interest in me, particularly in anything regarding my family.  She was also interested in the country that had provided this inconvenient extra member of her family.  It is fair to say that she developed a fairly warped picture of my home country.  In Belgium, Cecilia argued, everyone was as bad as me.  Just like me, Belgians were apparently stupid and useless, and ate loads.  But she did concede that maybe, just maybe, my sister isn’t so bad.  After all, my sister, as she accurately pointed out, is a girl.

As a post-scriptum, and just to show how far Cecilia and I have come since those terrible first few weeks, she suggested to me her most recent cunning plan, meant to deal with the fact that I wouldn’t be in Madrid for much longer.  Perhaps inspired by my lego-building skills, she told me: “You can build yourself a house here in Madrid, so you can come and visit us”.  She paused, then added, as an afterthought: “But not too often…”

Of little green men

and little red men

My continued exploration of Madrid being almost exclusively on foot, I have come across a number of things to look out for when walking the streets of Madrid. Although there are a great many phenomena worthy of mention, there is perhaps none more vitally important, and I use this word in its most literal sense, than Spanish traffic lights.

In truth, semáforos, as they are known, play a fairly peripheral role in the streets of Madrid. For cars, a red light is a vague indication of when would be a good time to stop. The green light, on the other hand, signifies to the driver that the road is now rightfully his and, pending a few honks on his horn, is wholly subject to his will. The Spanish driver, of course, is not one for splitting hairs, and a just-turned-red is as good as green. The orange middle light, although bringing Madrid in line with other capitals of the world, is a strange addition to this piece of street punctuation: indeed, to Spanish eyes, it is merely a paraphrase to a green light, with perhaps a slight nuance of “accelerate”.

As you see, in Madrid, the car is king. This has serious implications for the population on foot, such as yours truly: always brought up to wait until the light turns green to cross, I have now modified this golden rule to “Wait until the light is green and then until all the cars have stopped moving.”

Yet in perhaps characteristic Hispanic manner, this newfound rule of mine has never occurred to the local pedestrians. Indeed, the general attitude to a “little red man” is a growing sense of “Sod this, I’m not waiting any longer”. Admittedly, traffic lights are long, and the Spanish, although in large part devoid of urgency, don’t take kindly to something as regulatory as a red light.

This is illustrated by the occasional solitary defiant foray in to the middle of the highway by a fed-up old Grandpa. Amid blaring horns and screeching tyres, Señor will stand in the middle of the street, waiting for the traffic in the opposite direction to subside before continuing on his way. This occurrence, repeated many times, leads to a staggering of pedestrians across the zebra crossing, with everyone edging forward as if playing a giant game of “What’s the time Mr Wolf?”

At odds with the decidedly Anglo-Saxon custom of all waiting until the light turns green, this approach is more easy-going and a lot less picky about which colour corresponds to which action. On the whole, it is another part of the Mediterranean way of life that is relaxed, unconcerned, and very dangerous.

Field of dreams

El Prado is arguably Madrid’s top tourist attraction; and without a doubt one of Europe’s leading art museums.  Located in between the Retiro and the Paseo del Prado, it lies in what is generally held to be one of the richest areas of art display on the planet.  Indeed the Reina Sofia and the Thyssen art museums lie not fifteen minutes walk away and form, together with El Prado, the so-called Golden Triangle of Art.  Although the two former museums also hold more than impressive collections, El Prado is unrivalled in terms of world-wide reputation as well as the sheer size of its collection.  It contains an astonishing 7800 paintings, of which only about 900 are on display at any one time, which is anyway a lot more than can be seen in one visit.  And in the unlikely event of an indifference to all of 700 years of European painting, there are also a further 10 000 drawings, prints, statues, sculptures, coins and other decorative objects.  This almost ridiculous amount of art, spanning from Roman statues to early nineteenth century painting, resides in a 200-metre long red brick structure along the West side of Madrid’s main artery, the Paseo del Prado.  The architecture, if grand in an antique column kind of way, is unremarkable, and puts one more in mind of an American high school than a tribute to the vast collection of art it houses.  Madrid’s 17^th-century answer to the Tardis, it consistently seems larger when seen from the inside; and invariably transports the visitor (and his awed assistant) to distant times and places.

The building was commissioned by Charles III in 1785 in his ambitious project to, somewhat anachronistically, ‘re-urbanise’ the Paseo del Prado.  The project was interrupted at the death of the king and did not resume until the end of the Peninsular War, under Charles’s grandson, Ferdinand VII.  The museum opened in November 1819, and was renamed as Museo del Prado, after the meadow the museum had originally been built in, when it was acquired by the state in 1868.  Its royal collections soon grew and the museum was expanded in 1918.  El Prado has since experienced multiple expansions and renovations over the course of 190 years of history, and is now a veritable labyrinth of artistic excellence.

The collection sprawls over two floors, both divided into countless rooms and corridors.  The paintings are at regular intervals on a plain background, presented in a tasteful understatement of priceless works on display.  Information panels inform the visitor, in miniscule Spanish text, that the painting on show ‘depicts a woman and her baby’, with no indication as to whether this is a unique jewel or one of the museum’s lesser exhibits.  If anything, this only amplifies the dizzying effect of El Prado, especially for the relative philistine I am as far as Art History is concerned.  The museum almost seems designed to lose the visitor in its maze of masterpieces, each room more impressive than the last.

Much like El Retiro, the Prado museum has become one of my favourite places to go during my free mornings.  Not only does it provide me with my pretence of intellectual stimulation for the day, it is also another blissfully peaceful place to walk around in.  At least, until the coachload of six-year-olds on a school trip arrives, at which point I scurry off to seek refuge in one of the more hidden away Goya rooms.  El Prado is a great place to have some quiet time, and has endeared itself to me further by virtually falling over itself to get me in free of charge.  I have got in for various reasons: being an under-25 citizen of the EU, being present on the 190^th anniversary, coming on a Sunday afternoon, and, most commonly, for being under 18.  So, having given up on ever being able to discover all of El Prado’s secrets, I content myself with a relaxing wander ever now and again and wonder what might have been, if only I had read Gombrich’s Story of Art.