Madrid1.0

    The last time I was in Madrid Francisco Franco was still alive, my passport got checked by seedy little men in ill-fitting jackets every time I  turned around (or so it seemed) and I fell asleep on a park bench one afternoon after consuming what I thought was a jug of fruit punch but which turned out to be some pretty potent sangria.
    So it might be understandable when I say that going to Madrid for a long weekend was something I looked forward to with a certain degree of wariness.
    I shouldn't have worried. The city is still as beautiful as it ever was - maybe even more so these days - and now that the last Fascist dictator is long dead and safely in the ground I didn't feel as though I was being watched everywhere I went while I was there.
    Madrid is, in large measure, an artificial place. Phillip II (he of Spanish Armada fame) created it practically from scratch because he wanted Spain's capital to be in the center of his empire's home country. In addition, he reasoned, had the capital been located in Barcelona (which was the choice of many), Valencia, Girona or any of a dozen other major cities that could well have led to bad feelings among those populations that were passed over and he definitely didn't want that. That was important politically then because Spain was only newly - and loosely - tied together. Those loose bonds are still apparent today, in fact: Catalunya wants its independence, for example, and has for more than 300 years; the Andalusians have also agitated for their independence as have the Basques.
    There was a small village on the site where the capital now stands but that didn't trouble Phillip, his architects or his engineers. In the way of kings and their retainers, they simply built where they wanted to and the old village was, as a result, virtually consumed by massive public works projects that included the construction of Phillip's palace, assorted churches and cathedrals, bridges, parks, bureaucratic offices and those businesses that did business with the government.
    As a result, Madrid is a city of contrasts. In old Madrid the streets are narrow and they shoot off in all directions. As you leave that part of the city you encounter broad streets and even broader avenues. In old Madrid the buildings are narrow, five or six stories tall. In the rest of Madrid the buildings tend to be massive and there are modern skyscrapers that give the city an impressive skyline.
    The trip to Madrid by train from Reus means taking AVE - the Alta Velocidad Espanola. Roughly translated, that means "pretty freaking fast."
    (Okay, it really means Spanish High Speed but I like my translation better.)
    AVE is also a play on words... "ave" is the Spanish word for "bird" and it suggests that you're going to have not only a fast but also a smooth ride.
    There is a hitch, however: To take AVE to Madrid you have to leave Reus, which has a perfectly good train station, and go to Camp Tarragona. The reason: Reus and Tarragona both wanted the AVE station and so the government, rather than make a difficult decision, put a beautiful, modern, high-speed rail station in the middle of nowhere.
    Trust a politician to take the easy way out, whether he's a member of the U.S. Congress or the Spanish government.
    Anyway, the trip to the station isn't a hardship - only about 30 minutes by car - and the train itself is a beauty: Bullet-shaped with comfortable seats that offer passengers plenty of leg room. (After spending too many hours crammed into Hobbit-sized airplane seats going to New Zealand in June and then flying back to Spain in late August I REALLY appreciated that leg room...)
    The trip to Madrid takes 2-1/2 hours at speeds of about 200 mph on average. At the end of the line is the thoroughly modernized Madrid-Atocha station, which is itself a work of art complete with its own forest, resident bird population and a giant pond filled with koi and turtles.
    Pretty darn impressive.
    (Stay tuned for Madrid 2.0.)

The AVE pulling into the station at Camp Tarragona on Friday afternoon...

... and getting ready to leave Madrid-Atocha station Sunday night.

In Madrid government officials seem to have fallen in love with the concept of  bigness, an example of which is this sculpture of a giant head just outside the train station...

... and this fortress-like building with gigantic statues on the roof. It's the Spanish Ministry of Agriculture but it could just as easily be the Ministry of Defense.

   

Late night in Reus

    One of the reasons I decided to move to Reus is the fact that, for a city of only about 100,000 people, it has a very vibrant cultural life.
    Take Thursday night for example: I went for my usual evening stroll around 5:30 p.m. and after about a half hour stopped at a small cafe for a cappucinno in Placa Mercadal. I nursed my coffee for another 20 or 30 minutes while reading (I should probably say re-reading)  Isaac Asimov's "I, Robot" collection of novels. (It's one of my favorite old books for a lot of reasons but chief among them is the fact that I find it absolutely amazing how many of his casual predictions about life in the far future have already come true.)
    As I was reading, I saw a man across the placa start setting up some speakers and before long some weird music started playing. (I say "weird" because it was a sort of techno-punk-Asian blend... turned out to be entirely appropriate for what he would later do.) Curious, I wandered over to join a small crowd that had surrounded him as he talked in rapid Catalan. My grasp of the language is still tenuous but I got the drift: He was telling jokes while arranging a series of props on the placa and people were laughing at his observations of the current political scene. The more he talked the more people gathered until he had a good-sized crowd watching him.
    For the next 45 minutes he told jokes, juggled, rode a unicycle (while juggling flaming torches) and flirted with a number of pretty women in outrageous fashion. It was great fun and when it was over and he passed the hat people gave generously.
    From there I wandered down the Calle Major (despite its name - which translates to Main Street - it's a narrow thoroughfare with a few hundred brightly colored umbrellas suspended over it) to the Centre de Lectura. The center is something of a cultural icon in Reus. It's 150 years old and contains a small library, a movie theater, a lecture hall and assorted exhibition rooms. I went there to see a free exhibit of paintings by Polish artists and sculptors from Gdansk and I wasn't disappointed.
    Contemporary art in this part of Spain tends toward the fantastic with bright colors and surreal images. Of course, there is also a lot of classical art on display around the city (it is the home of Fortuny, after all) but it, too, is very colorful.
    The paintings and sculptures by the Polish artists were much different: The paintings, for example, were darker; the colors muted, the themes more primal. One sculpture of dark metal and dark wood was particularly powerful depicting the torsos of two men in obvious agony.
    As I was leaving the exhibit my friend Elena and her friend Manuela came down from the second-floor lecture hall where they had been listening to a talk about Fortuny. They were heading for a small jazz bar across town called The Keynote where, on the last Thursday of every month, poets gather to read their works on stage so I tagged along.
    The poetry was, as you might expect, varied. A young poet with requisite long hair and pale complexion, for example, wrote about death, suicide and torment. An older poet, solid through the middle with close cropped hair and glasses, commented on the political situation and wrote about the kind of mature love that you, if you're lucky, grow into over the years.
    The scotch was excellent.
    Just an ordinary Thursday night in Reus... the kind of night that makes me glad I moved here.

This street performer, who went by the name Frankie, entertained a good-sized crowd Thursday night with his juggling and jokes.

One of his tricks was mounting a unicycle... which he got a volunteer from the crowd to hold while he pretended that he was going to run and jump onto it.

Instead of jumping, however, he climbed up the volunteer's body and eventually wound up on his shoulders where he told a few more jokes before actually getting onto his unicycle.

Once on it he did a pretty impressive juggling routine with flaming torches.

Bogart

    When I was in middle school and high school we lived in a trailer.
    (I know, I know... we like to call them "mobile homes" now and, if we're really being politically correct we call them "manufactured housing." That's all very nice but the simple fact is we lived in a trailer that we hooked up to a semi and pulled from place to place when my father took a new engineering job somewhere.)
    Because we did, and because there were a lot of us crammed into a 60-foot-long by 12-foot-wide space, I slept on the couch in the living room. Why? Simple: I had more brothers than we had beds and since the alternative was sharing a narrow bunk with one of them sleeping on the couch seemed like a good idea at the time.
   In fact, it was a very good idea because bedding down on the couch led to what has been a lifelong love affair with old movies. The reason: Sleeping in the living room meant I had unfettered access to the television in those dark days before cable when television stations, stuck for something cheap to fill in the late-night hours, showed old black-and-white movies.
    It was while using the couch as a bed that I first saw Gable and Colbert in "It Happened One Night" and first watched John Wayne fight his way across the Pacific. It was there that I watched "The Thin Man" and "The Invisible Man" and "The Wrong Man" on a screen that wasn't much larger than the one on my laptop.
    I enjoyed them all but, by far, my favorite late-night flicks were old Bogart movies.
    "The Maltese Falcon" was my first Bogart movie and something about his portrayal of Sam Spade struck a chord with me. I saw him in "The Petrified Forest" next and even though Bette Davis and Leslie Howard were the stars of that flick, Bogart's portrayal of gangster Duke Mantee stole the show as far as I was concerned. So many more great films followed: "To Have and Have Not" with Bacall, "Key Largo" and "The Big Sleep" and, of course, "Casablanca."
    Flash forward to a few days ago when, while I was maneuvering my way along a crowded sidewalk here in Reus, I looked up and there, staring me in the face, was Bogart.
    Well, anyway, it was a life-sized photo of Bogart wearing a classic trench coat and snap brim hat. I glanced at the store that posted the photo on its wall: Of course it's named "Casablanca."
    All of which explains why I'm now planning a Bogart marathon: I've got seven of his movies on DVD and all I need now is some popcorn, maybe some nachos and salsa, a generous amount of ice cream, some soda and a weekend when I'm not doing anything else.
    Oh yeah, and a couch.
    Gotta have a couch...

Bogart... here's looking at you  kid...

Zombies among us...

    Okay, so I'm sort of a fan of the whole Zombie thing (is it a subculture? A movement? I'm not sure, exactly, so that's why I called it a "thing.") I've got all the "Resident Evil" movies, for example, and I've gotta confess that the "Castle" episode a couple years ago featuring the living dead was one of my all-time favorites.
    So when Josep, who thinks Zombies are very cool even though he regularly blows them to pieces on his X-Box, said that he wanted to go to Sitges because folks there are holding a week-long Zombie festival I was pretty much in.
    We got there around 8 p.m. on opening night, (yeah, his mom drove... I felt so junior high) and discovered that we were just in time for the Zombie Walk... about 350 folks paraded through the town's very crowded streets in their makeup and costumes much to the delight - and the occasional screaming horror - of people lined up to watch them. Some of the Zombies really got into the roles: Staggering walk, drooling, guttural sounds, eyes rolled up into the top of their sockets, lunges at unsuspecting watchers... others not so much; they were busy taking pictures of the crowd with their phones and cameras.
    After the parade we went down to the beachfront - Sitges is a little more than halfway to Barcelona and it has a great beach, an old castle and a lot of really fine restaurants - where Elena was attacked (sort of) by a Zombie and we wound up eating sushi.
    Pretty good night, all things considered, and we even managed to get home with our brains intact.

A Zombie casts a baleful eye on Elena.

Hey, I might be dead but that doesn't mean I can't check in on Tumblr and Twitter and update my Facebook page...

The Zombies were cool but the little kid in the back was priceless.

Cool makeup by the parade people and some of the watchers.

More cool Zombie makeup.

I liked this guy... and apparently so did the woman watching him so intently.

These folks weren't in the parade, but with those demonic red eyes maybe they should have been.

Yeah, there's more than a couple Zombie fans in this part of Spain.

More cool Zombie make-up.

   

Building castles in the air...

    Catalunya is famous for many things from art and architecture to poetry and even paella.
    Oh yeah, and castles.
    Human castles.
    A few days ago one of the organizations in Reus that makes human castles celebrated its 30th anniversary by - what else - building a human castle. Other organizations from around Catalunya showed up to build their own castles as part of the celebration, which took place in the plaza in front of city hall. Several thousand people gathered in the plaza to watch the festivities, which went on for a couple of hours starting at around 8 p.m.
    The castles are remarkable for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is the fact that this is a uniquely Catalunyan pastime. I don't know when this castle-building tradition began but I do know that it requires not only strength but an incredible amount of teamwork to build one that is several stories tall. It requires pride as well, enough pride in yourself and your mates that you will not, no matter what, let your teammates down.
    It also requires you to trust everyone in the group.
    If you are one of the people on the upper levels of a human castle you have to trust that the people below you are not going to let you fall 40 or 50 feet to the pavement. If you are the person who climbs to the very top, usually a very young and very lightweight boy or girl, that trust has to be absolute.
    It's breathtaking to watch the castles being built, and I mean that literally. All around me people were holding their breath as the members of the organizations scrambled from the base of the castle to the various levels, going higher and higher. When someone slipped, even for an instant, there was a collective gasp from the crowd. When the last person reached the top and waved the traditional white handkerchief to show that he or she had done so, you could hear people in the crowd finally starting to breathe normally again.
    Truly, it's an exciting thing to watch.
    My only complaint about that night: The plaza was so crowded that I couldn't get as close as I wanted to in order to get some good photos of the castle building but I managed to get a few to give you an idea of what it was like.

This castle was made by the organization celebrating its 30th anniversary.

As you can see, they kept building it higher and higher.

These guys are members of another castle-building organization.

And this is a castle built by yet another group.

Building a castle takes strength, coordination, teamwork, pride and a lot of trust...

...especially if you are the one climbing to the very top.

Wednesday in the park with Mustafa, Ali, Inez and a cast of thousands...

    One of the things I love about Reus is the number of parks and plazas dotted throughout the city. My favorite of them all, however, is Parc Sant Jordi, which comes complete with interesting artwork and people of all ages who are even more interesting.
    I discovered the park one afternoon not long after returning from New Zealand while I was looking for a gym to work out in three or four times a week. I didn't find the gym that day but I did find the park and fell in love with it immediately. It's a fairly long walk to the park from this apartment but that's all to the good since assorted doctors have told me that walking will slow down the deterioration of the nerves in my legs. Besides, I enjoy walking through the city so even if it wasn't good for me I'd still find a way to get out and prowl around Reus every day.
    The park - named after St. George, he of the epic battle with a dragon - has a lot of sculpture, a couple of playgrounds for kids and shady walkways running throughout it. It also has benches (you can choose a shady one or find one that's parked in one of the the sunnier parts of the park.) I always carry a book or two in my backpack so for the first few times I visited the park while I was running errands I'd take an hour - two if I didn't have a lot of places to go - and read. A couple of weeks after discovering the park I added a sketch pad and some colored pencils to my pack and began drawing as well as reading.
    That's when my visits started to get really interesting.
    To understand what I mean you have to know that Reus is famous for producing artists and architects including Maria Fortuny and Antonio Gaudi (who wasn't born here but whose small village is close enough that the city claims him as one of its own.) Because of that, people here tend to be very appreciative of art in its many forms and they are not shy when it comes to discussing art and artists.
    So it happened that while I was quietly sketching one afternoon a man walked over, sat down on the bench beside me and asked to see my sketchbook. I'm as vain as the next amateur artist so I gave it to him. He leafed through the pages and gave me a running critique of my work. He liked the realistic drawings I had done of birds and trees - he was less impressed with the trees than the birds - but he was most taken with the wildly colorful, more fantastic drawings I did of birds and people. (When I say "fantastic" I'm not praising my work, just noting that the drawings were more fantasy than reality. I'm vain but not that vain...)
    That led us into a discussion of whether I had been influenced by Gaudi's Modernist architecture, which is known for its fluid, fantastic shapes and colors. I said perhaps but noted that I have always let my imagination run wild when drawing and painting. It wasn't long into that part of the discussion when he saw a couple of friends and beckoned them over. They also leafed through my sketchbook and before I knew it I was in a full-on discussion of my work, art in general and the use of color - which these guys all felt was much more important than shape.
    In the end, one of them asked if he could buy one of my sketches, which I sold to him for 1 Euro (about $1.30.) He thought I should charge more but I told him I'd already been well paid by the pleasure of their company and couldn't, in good conscience, take any more than that.
    Since then, I've also started hauling watercolors, brushes and paper to the park and have attracted a wide variety of onlookers, including a lot of kids. Some of them want to draw as well so I now bring even more paper and pencils with me when I go so they can try their hand at being artists, if only for a little while.
    To my mind, there's not very many better ways to spend a couple of hours on a sunny afternoon.

The fountain at Parc Sant Jordi shows definite Gaudi influences...

... as does this resting place...

... and this one.

The park is a really beautiful place to spend a few hours.

Inez wanted to draw but some of the other kids asked her first to be a model for them... she put up with that for about five minutes before she took a seat and began drawing.

Mustafa and Ali have stopped by a couple of times to draw when they see me in the park.

One of the entrances to the park.

In addition to the fantastic shapes of the fountains and resting places, the park also has more realistic sculptures.

And just in case you didn't know what city the park is located in...

La Elena returns...

    Elena has returned from New Zealand (well, actually, from Australia... once she heard about the fact we couldn't leave the Sydney airport on our flight home she applied for a tourist visa online, got it, and then spent three days staying with a friend who works there.)
    Now that she's back my stint as surrogate dad to her son Josep is pretty much over. It's been fun and, I've gotta admit, a physical challenge for someone of my advanced age. What with school registration, book-buying, daily laundry (the more of his clothes I washed the more I came to appreciate the whole nudist lifestyle), doctor's appointments, daily house cleaning (boys can be soooo messy), shopping daily to meet the nutritional needs of a boy who seems to be constantly in need of food, dentist appointments, cooking for that same boy - who comes complete with the usual number of food phobias - and coping with the bewildering complexity of teenage social interactions I was more or less (mostly more) exhausted at the end of the day. That aside, I'm glad we got to spend this month together. We had a couple of arguments (well, we're both male so that's kind of natural) and a lot of fairly lengthy discussions about everything from the Catalunyan independence movement to school, girlfriends, religion, fashion, piercings, tattoos, careers, bullies and a dozen other topics.
    Now that Elena's back, it's time to look for a new apartment. Originally, I planned to live in this apartment above Elena's mom but those plans went pear shaped toward the end of our stay in Middle Earth. Apparently, about 2-1/2 years ago Elena told some acquaintances from France that they could rent her house in the suburbs while their house in the same neighborhood was being built. She didn't hear anything from them for almost two years and so she and Josep were going to move there as soon as she came home from New Zealand. (They had been living in this apartment above her mom while she had some remodeling done at her house. That remodeling project was completed while we were in New Zealand.) Anyway, toward the end of our stay in The Land Down Under and Over a Bit the French family got in touch and said they'd like to move in at the end of August. That presented Elena with a moral dilemma, which she resolved the only way that she could by telling them it was okay since she had promised them they could live there while their own home was being built. (She was still living in Delaware when she made that promise...)
    Long story short, I'm apartment hunting. That's not difficult here because Spain's economy is not in the best shape and there are a lot of nice apartments for rent at very reasonable prices. I'm in search of something airy where I can write and paint. (I haven't had much time to do either in the past month and it's unfair to ask Elena and Josep to put up with my schedule, which often includes writing until 4 or 5 a.m. On top of that, I'm used to living alone and, frankly, I quite like it.)
    My other requirements: It has to be furnished (I gave away all my furniture when I moved here) and it can't be more than three flights of steps from street level to the apartment. (It takes me a while to climb them these days but I don't mind steps. However, three flights is about all I can manage.) There's a place on Placa Prim, which is not far from here, that I'm considering and another near Parc Sant Jordi, where I've been known to spend an hour or two reading in the middle of the day in between shopping and assorted other chores.
    The place I'm searching for doesn't have to be perfect but it's got to be a place where I can live and work because wherever I end up I plan to stay for at least the next five years.