Feel free to re-visit and comment some of my previous posts.  The Story So Far has been updated as well, and now reads until mid-May.  However, there is still much more to tell.

Please do return here at the end of June, I’ll make sure to post some belated updates on my Gap Year.

Until then,

Dasvidania!

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

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.

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…”

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.

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.

hard at work

Cecilia is six years old and at the height of her powers.  Master of all her angelic little eyes survey; the eldest of my three charges lords it over the family flat in her parents’ absence.  With a single barked order, her sisters play baby, pupil, patient, or any member of society that happens to take her fancy.  Although Toñi, the simultaneous cook, nanny and cleaning lady very occasionally presents a tougher challenge to Cecilia, not always bending to her will as easily as her siblings.  However with a short burst of screams, an brief yet intensive shedding of tears, Cecilia usually gets her way.  Cecilia, in short, leads a good life.  Or at least, she used to.  Little did she know, at the end of August, that her years of domination were nearing an end; and that her authoritarian regime would soon topple.  She had not fretted away much of her busy life thinking about this new member of the family.  Indeed, why should she be worried by this jeune garcon au pair?  Granted, boys were stupid, and in fact hardly worth her precious time, but she was confident that this new arrival would pose no great problem to her.  How wrong she was.

You will have understood, by now, that Cecilia and I were destined to have a somewhat rocky beginning to our relationship.  I would describe her as having a bossy streak, if that were not misleading:  more accurately, she might have a streak about her personality which is not bossy.  This streak is fairly complex, and worth examining.  Cecilia is an intelligent girl who seems to do very well at school.  She works hard and, as you may have gathered, is exceptionally strong-minded.  Nevertheless, underneath the severe dictatorette façade, there is a more fragile and, to be frank, nicer side to her personality.  But let us leave the best until last, and concentrate for the moment on her more obvious traits.  Cecilia is the kind of six year-old who is cute at first sight.  In the right photo, she can look adorable.  Her blond curls and blue eyes atop her stout silhouette can hardly be said to imply a tyrannical character.

When I arrived, my first impression was that of a shy and reserved girl who just needed a bit of friendliness.   Yet, to my surprise, I soon grew accustomed to the sulky and determined face she reserved for persons as patently treacherous as me.   For Cecilia is not one for uncertainty:  she has to know where she is going, what she will be doing, how long it will take and what colour it will be.  And don’t you dare say you don’t know.  Importantly, Cecilia organises everything meticulously, and her acquaintances are similarly filed exclusively under MALO/TONTO or BUENO.  Needless to add which category I found myself in.  For Cecilia, I was basically the older brother she never really wanted to have.  She was doing fine without me, thank you very much, and didn’t need any silly boy, no matter how tall, to tell her what to do.  She has an aversion to even the merest pretence of authority.  Indeed, for a while, I could only pick up a very limited vocabulary from the six-year-old, most of it dropping into my bulging “childish insults” folder.  As a determined au pair, I tried every trick and strategy I could think of, and for weeks on end faced harm and humiliation in a hundred different ways while trying to win the ferocious little blond señorita’s heart of steel.

For obvious behavioural reasons, I cannot reveal all on this blog, yet the fact is that I somehow managed to get round Cecilia.  We now get on well: she rarely berates me quite as badly as before, and often begs for me to pick her up, carry her or tickle her.  She shares secrets with me, and explains the quite obvious facts of life to this stupid Belgian boy.  Our relationship remains always on the edge of Armageddon, however, and the occasional “random tantrum” does arise.  Nevertheless, this story can be said to have a sort of happy ending.  I have three weeks to avoid a tragic epilogue.

This process, undoubtedly already well known to some of you, can also be described as the “meet the parents” phase, and is probably not dissimilar to the future in-laws procedure.  In the same way, you are being generously welcomed into a family and the pressure is on to make a good impression.  Yet there are also fundamental differences in my case.  Firstly, I did not yet master the language well enough to make educated comments on the subjects of conversation; and therefore pathetically had to rely on a permanent smile and a continuous stream of monosyllabic appreciation.  Secondly, I had been dropped in at the deep end of a culture that was all but completely alien to me, and suffered accordingly.

The family, by which I mean the one comprising Grandparents and cousins as well as the nuclear family; is, as in many Mediterranean cultures, a matter of utmost importance here in Spain.  Typically, a son will live at home and continue to have his clothes washed and ironed by his mother until he marries, which could be after he reaches his thirties.  Although sometimes dismissed as yet another national stereotype, I have first-hand accounts of this situation and can now assure you it is completely accurate.  Furthermore, the son, unless of the darker ovine variety, will set up his family not too far from the mother ship, as it were, enabling his dear parents to come over every Sunday for an afternoon of lavish feasting.

This is more or less what happens every Sunday in the family I now live in.  Papá’s parents arrive around two o’clock, always late and bearing ridiculous amounts of food. They then proceed to greet everyone with multiple hugs and kisses and present gifts to the youngest members of the party.  Nibbles will be handed out, as will a crescendo of alcohol, while the aforementioned little ones cry and fight over which present is whose and exactly how its hair should be combed.

And finally, the meal itself arrives.  At some stomach-rumbling time around three or four, we are all called to the table and I am generously served by Grandmother who returns my plate invariably creaking under the weight of the larger part of this week’s animal.  As part of the Spanish idea of a balanced diet, there is a side offering of Garlic and olive oil, with a few potato slices thrown in.  With my stomach groaning in protest, I politely gorge myself on the overload of meat and try my utmost to take some part in the conversation, also known as near-violent argument, going on at the table.  Yet woe betide me should I finish my portion, for I would immediately discover it replaced with another by that dear hospitable grandmother.  The amount of meat consumed is quite incredible here, and a six-year-old is served a leg of chicken any adult from my more northern culture would be awed to find on his dinner plate.

The meal, long and copious though it may be, inexorably draws to a close around five or six in the evening when the fully sated participants retire to a deserved siesta.  I am at last released from the kindly old Grandfather’s explanations and comments, and can go in search of a quiet lie down in order to get over the whole ordeal.  Indeed, the meals act not only as a test for my stomach, but also as a veritable afternoon of Spanish lesson.  The concentration required can be quite exhausting.

Yet somehow, despite the intellectual and physical hardship endured, these family dinners could quite obviously be described as a grand thing.  For a busy family that doesn’t spend a lot of time together during the week, it provides invaluable argument time with parents, children and relatives, and maintains the close-knit feeling typical of Mediterranean families.  However, I must admit that after a few Sundays like the one described, I soon acquired a taste for weekend day-trips to sites outside Madrid.  Therefore, unfortunately absent from the proceedings, I have been unable to partake in the last few feasts.

El Retiro

The largest park in Madrid is located only fifteen fast walking minutes away from where I am living, conveniently in the general direction of the city center.   It provides me with a most welcome oasis of calm from a noisy and stressful young family’s flat.  El Retiro, or, to give it its full title, El Parque del buen retiro, is a vast and magnificent expanse of paths, trees, ponds and bushes that forms a green square kilometer completely surrounded by the rest of Madrid.  It is comfortably large enough to get lost in, and for a moment, wandering its deserted tracks on a Monday morning, you could be forgiven for forgetting you are right in the middle of a major city.

Although the cliché goes that El Retiro is Madrid’s answer to New York’s Central Park, it should probably be the other way round.  Designed and built in the earlier part of the 17th century, the park mainly catered for the royal court of the Hapsburgs and its entourage; undoubtedly offering a respite from Spanish summer for the hordes of sweating courtiers of arguably the world’s foremost power.   Under the reign of Philip IV, quite the art lover, it was conceived as one of the great artistic wonders of the renaissance, with statues and monuments punctuating its gardens à la française.  Despite many great political upheavals, the gardens of El Retiro survived the centuries more or less intact and were made public in 1868.

More than 140 years later, El Retiro remains as one of the main landmarks of the Spanish capital and soon became one of my favourite spots.  As indicated by its name, El Retiro is a pleasant retreat from both the bustling city of Madrid and the somewhat claustrophobic, all-crying and all-screaming, atmosphere of my host family.  As I have mentioned in previous posts, all five of my host family are exceedingly welcoming; yet there will always be moments when one just needs to get away from it all.  I happen to particularly enjoy being able to hear myself think, a luxury I can rarely afford while in my Spanish home, but one that I can enjoy hours of while in the Parque.  Many a morning, afternoon and even evening have I spent in peaceful meditation in the idyllic greenery of El Retiro.

That is not to say that the park is always deserted, even less that it is shunned by the locals.  In fact quite the opposite is true.  Whatever the time of day or the weather, an impressive assortment of madrileños can be found availing themselves of their city’s “lung”.  From the cyclists, a near extinct species on the streets, to the roller skaters of all shapes and sizes and the countless joggers; El Retiro is everybody’s favourite gym.  Spaniards of all ages are out there, from the young families in the many playgrounds to the elders of Madrid out on their morning paseo.  Then there are the alcohol-fuelled get-togethers, the hyptonising bongo circles, and probably the world’s highest concentration of rowing boats on one pond.  Finally, much like the world, El Retiro can be said to be a stage, as demonstrated by puppet theatres, magicians, tamers of various animals, fortune tellers, saxophone players, large and furry (if somewhat tatty) Disney characters and some rather feeble living statues.

All this contributes to making El Retiro an important landmark in Madrid, and one that I have a particular affection for.  For although changing its coat as the seasons pass, shedding its leaves and seeing its sunbathers disappear; El Retiro remains a very special place indeed for me, and one that I shall probably miss when we have to part company in a month’s time.