May in Review

This will probably be my last post for a few days, as I'm wrapping up in the archives today and want to see friends and need to pack before I fly home on Sunday. Since I arrived in Madrid, my weekdays have had a pretty regular rhythm. I get up and have breakfast. I go for a run or do a little yoga or write in my travel journal. I get cleaned up. I have a cafe con leche on my way to the archives. I log somewhere between six and nine hours looking at documents. I head home and drop off my computer and either meet up with friends or relax with a glass of wine on a terrace or with a novel or an episode or two of Downton Abbey at home. This month has been full of good finds in the archives, good runs (though short ones) along the Madrid Rio, and good times with dear friends who live here. I've enjoyed being here again, but I feel ready to go home and spend time with my spouse and doggy.

I kept my goals pretty limited for May because I knew I'd be on a different schedule while on this research trip. They were:


1. Run half-marathon number 9. I knew the Capital City Half-Marathon was going to be a bit dicey because I was running it two weeks after having oral surgery, but I finished. I had a good time running it, and it was a fantastic excuse to visit a dear friend. 

2. Make the best possible use of my archival time. I think I've done a good job of taking advantage of my time in the archives on this trip. I've spent most of my time in the Biblioteca Nacional, but I have also used three other archives during the 3.5 weeks I've had in Madrid. I'm going home with about 60 pages of notes and transcriptions and a cache of photocopied documents.

3. Take lots of photos. I've done pretty well with this one. I haven't always wanted to take my DSLR around with me and sometimes haven't had either my camera or phone with me when I've wanted to take some shots, but I've managed to get quite a few good ones for my 365 project.

Gardens on the Madrid Rio

4. Stay active. I've done more sitting than I normally do because you can't really do otherwise when you're reading documents in archives, but, because of the increase in public transit prices and the location of my apartment and archives, I've done at least an hour of walking every day since I've been here and sometimes plenty more. I did manage to get in 10 runs while I've been in Madrid, and I went hiking in La Pedriza. I have done some yoga at home, although I didn't make it to my yoga studio. There just aren't enough hours in the day....

5. Spend time with friends and visit favorite spots in Madrid. I have spent quality time with dear friends and visited a number of my favorite places. My favorite cafe-bar in the city was closed when I tried to go to it a couple of weekends ago, but I might try again tomorrow.

Lunch with friends P. and JL.

How has your month been? I'd love to hear what's been going on with you!

Weekend Adventures: Museums, Eurovision, and Running in Parks

This weekend was a fabulous one that recharged me for a final week of work in the archives. On Saturday I got up relatively early and went for a 5 mile run along the Madrid Rio. After getting cleaned up, I sought out a cute bakery and cafe that I had noticed one day when I was on my way to the archives and had a napolitana de chocolate and a cafe con leche. Then I went to Lope de Vega's house. I have tried to go a couple of times in the past to the Casa de Lope de Vega, but each time it had been closed. This time I was successful and managed to get inside and take a guided tour with a group of Spaniards. Unfortunately, no photography is allowed inside the house, but it is allowed in the lush gardens behind the home.

In Lope's gardens

After visiting my second favorite Spanish playwright's house, I spent a couple of hours meandering around an art museum in Madrid.

Saturday evening my friend C. and his partner J. invited me to join them and some of their friends to have a Galician feast of food and to watch Eurovision. Being an American who doesn't pay too much attention to singing competions, this was my first time to pay any attention to Eurovision at all. I had a blast, as we also scored the entries and came up with our own top 5. However, it was incredibly cheesy, and the Bjork-wannabe from Albania got way too many votes....

Intent on tabulating our scores

On Sunday morning I slept in a bit, and then headed to the Rastro (a big weekly flea market in Madrid) to buy another pair of harem pants and to do some looking around the other stalls. I meandered for a while around Madrid, had some lunch, and then spent a couple of hours reading a novel. Then I headed out to find the Parque de la Dehesa de la Villa to go for a run. While I'm glad that I explored a park that I was unfamiliar with and that I got a second run in this weekend, I'm not completely sure that this was worth the 3 euro in metro fare that it cost me to head up to the northern part of the city. The park was crowded with couples and families strolling around and kids playing soccer. So I didn't run for long.

Do you watch Eurovision? Readers who run, do you drive or take public transit to places where you run or do you just run from your door?

32 in 32: Speaking Spanish for an Entire Day (Almost)

Yesterday I came very close to crossing off number 24 on my 32 in 32 list. Since I arrived in Madrid a few weeks ago, I've made every effort to speak only Spanish with my Spanish friends, some of whom I became friends with as a result of language exchanges when I lived here five years ago. I have been eager to brush up my Spanish, because I have lost a lot of vocabulary and gained a bit of accent since I moved away. Most days since I've arrived about 95% of my interactions have taken place in Spanish. During the hiking trip, I spoke some Spanish and some English. I've spoken in English with other American Hispanists that I've run into here at the archives. I have a couple of American friends who reside in Madrid, and our relationships are in English. And M. and I have had a few phone conversations since I left.

Yesterday I went to the archives. As I was just about to arrive, a felt something wet on my hand and arm. It was bird shit (which is apparently good luck), and my first reaction was to curse. It was in Spanish. I only spoke Spanish in the archives and with the waiter when I took a break for lunch. I met up with a friend in the afternoon for a couple of drinks before I went to see a performance of some Baroque interludes at the Teatro Clasico. We spoke Spanish the entire time, and the theater had me feeling pretty good about my Spanish again.

After I got home from the theater and was unwinding for the night with an Isabel Allende novel (La isla bajo el mar), I was thinking that I could cross this one off my list. A few pages later and my phone rang. It was an American friend of mine (who is actually a native Spanish speaker but with whom I have a relationship in English), and without thinking I answered in English and we talked for a few minutes before I realized that I had just screwed up.

There will be another couple of opportunities to try next week, so I may still nail this one completely. I hope that I do. Otherwise, I may have to be satisfied with having gone a day speaking only in Spanish - minus 7 minutes.

I'm curious. How many of you readers speak a second or multiple languages? How fluent do you consider yourself? How do you keep your fluency when you live somewhere where that language isn't spoken?

Loving and Loathing in Madrid

I've been in Madrid for two weeks now and have less than two weeks left on this trip. In many ways it feels like not a lot has changed since I lived here in 2006-2007, but of course a number of things have. A lot of the things that I loved about Madrid still make me so happy to be here, but there are some things that rub me the wrong way, too. Some old, some new. As a compulsive list-maker, I will give them to you as follows....

Things I Love:

- Being able to touch documents from the period that I work on in beautiful work spaces like the Biblioteca Nacional

- Cafe con leche

- Spending time with Spanish friends

- Springtime in Madrid

- Cañas con limon

- Being able to visit fabulous museums like the Prado and interesting monasteries (more on this to come)

- Living in a city with good public transportation and lots of cabs

- Seeing more people out running

- The Madrid Rio

- Pimientos de padron, tortilla española, and patatas bravas

- Seeing men and women, young and old wearing pink, purple, red, yellow, and blue pants (and of course harem pants, too!)

- The fact that now bars and restaurants are smoke-free and this actually seems to be enforced

- Fruterias and panaderias

Things I Loathe:

- The fact that my Spanish friends tell me that my American accent is thicker than it used to be and knowing that my vocabulary has also shrunk

- Seeing signs of the economic crisis in closed store fronts and half-empty bars that used to be full

- Strange men who feel the need to express an opinion about my breasts or my ass

- Dog shit on the sidewalks

- Archival mishaps 

- Having less time than I anticipated to do all the things that I want to do and see all the people that I want to see while I'm here....

Perceptions on the Running Culture in Madrid

When I lived in Madrid five or so years ago, I ran inconsistently. In part, this was because I was a smoker at the time and not really in the best shape for an activity that can burn even healthy lungs at times. In part, though, it was because I always felt like I stuck out like a sore thumb when I ran in Madrid. I almost never saw other runners out on the streets and even in the parks there weren't all that many runners. Those who I encountered tended to be fast guys. It wasn't exactly encouraging.

Well, I'm happy to report that something has changed in the five years since I have moved away. I see runners everywhere now, and it's obvious that they're not all tourists. I still see more men than women running, but I no longer feel at all self-conscious about running in Madrid. Since my arrival last week, I have seen runners of various genders, shapes, sizes, and at various times of day in various places. I've seen them in the narrow streets near my apartment. I've seen them in the parks. I've seen them along the wider avenues leading to the museums and the business districts. I've seen them along the river. This heartens me significantly. The city that I love so much has given me yet another reason to love it.

Perhaps one of the causal factors in the boost to running culture is that there is now a relatively new space for running, cycling, and rollerblading in Madrid. About 10 kilometers of paths intermixed with playgrounds and basketball courts now stretch along the Manzanares River in Madrid. I went on my first little run on this new-to-me route a couple of days ago.

When I went hiking this past Saturday, I fell into conversation for a while with a runner from Madrid. He had a Madrid medio maraton technical shirt, and we got to discussing distance running. He said that he and a group of guys run together every weekend. I told him that I'd love to run the Madrid Marathon some day, but it probably won't be in the near future because it falls on a date in the middle of the academic term. I'm going to keep it on my bucket list, though. And hopefully during the interim the running culture in Madrid continues to flourish.

Runners, have you ever lived in a city where there was no running culture or have you ever been pleasantly surprised to find a lot of runners in a place where you didn't expect them?

Weekend Adventures: Hiking in La Pedriza

On Saturday I went hiking with a group of people in the countryside to the northwest of Madrid. A couple of years ago I had encountered this hiking group on Facebook. It popped up in my suggestions, possibly because I had posted something about doing the Camino de Santiago or possibly because every now and then FB’s algorithms can be spookishly spot on. I had liked the group and every now and then had seen it pop up in my newsfeed. On Wednesday while I was checking email and waiting for my documents to arrive at the Biblioteca Nacional a post popped up from the administrator of the group to say that the group’s email account wasn’t working so that anyone who wanted info about the upcoming hike should contact him on the FB page or by his personal email. I emailed him and asked him for details about the hike and decided it would be a fun way to get some exercise, breathe some fresh air, and meet some people. Plus, he was offering pb&j’s as part of the lunch fare. In my opinion, peanut butter always tastes even better in a country where it is harder to find and spendy to purchase.

Saturday morning I got up, got ready, and caught a bus to the meeting point at the bus station at Plaza de Castilla. From there the group took an 11:00 bus to pueblo called Manzanares El Real and walked about 20 or 30 minutes to the real starting point of the hike in La Pedriza. We were a group of about 30 people, and we were very international in nature. There were people from Spain, Ireland, Scotland, Poland, the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, Venezuela, Columbia, and the states. Many members of the international crowd had been living in Spain for several years. Everyone was very nice and it was a fun day of switching languages and climbing up and down rocks.

The Castillo in Manzanares El Real

Hikers

The group’s leader, a super nice guy named Beau, had described the hike to me as having a medium level of difficulty. But it was a pretty hot and humid day with temperatures getting up to the 90s, and I struggled a bit at some points to keep up the pace. We did a line hike, and the scenery was stunning. The group was moving a bit too slow for us to go to the point that we had intended which was about 7 kilometers out from the official starting point of the hike. By vote we decided to take an alternative route to another spot which Beau promised always had a terrific breeze. We were all sweating a bit and wanted to stop more frequently to rest and drink water during that last hour or so on the way up. That last half kilometer on the way up was the most difficult for me. I was fading fast and let several people pass me. We had been walking about 3 hours and had made it to the turn-around spot, though, and once I had some lunch – sandwiches, chips, fruit, and chocolate – and some more water, I felt revived and only slightly nervous about the descent. (I frequently bite it going down on hikes.) However, I was less nervous about the descent than I was for the people climbing near the peak of the rocks.

Still sweaty but fortified by food and ready for the descent

The descent was mostly physically easier if a bit more mentally taxing. I put my camera away and focused more on my footing. I did bite it a couple of times and got a nice scrape on my hand the second time. I wasn’t the only one, though, as several other people got a bit scraped and bruised on the way down. Fortunately, though, no one was seriously injured in any of the falls. On our way down, we suddenly heard a loud noise as if someone was tumbling end over end in the brush just a few yards from where we were standing. Although I never spotted it to be sure, several people in the group were convinced that it was a mountain goat rushing down. All I can say is I nearly had a heart attack because for a few seconds I thought a hiker was tumbling end over end down the hill. During the last hour of the hike it started to rain, and I actually didn’t mind, as I had been hot and sweaty during the better part of the day. We arrived back in the village and had a caña (a small glass of beer for those not in the know) and caught the 6:45 bus back to Madrid.

It had been a full day and I was exhausted, so I turned on my hot water heater, ate some dinner, took a blessedly hot shower, and climbed into bed. The restorative sleep definitely helped and I was only about as sore as I am after a half-marathon the next day.

What did you do this weekend? Any races? Any museum trips? 

Hola from Madrid

Hola! I arrived in Madrid yesterday morning after one of the weirdest and most annoying flight experiences I've had. To make a long story short, the guy that I was sitting next to on the flight was annoying and invading my personal space and ultimately tried to get a little bit handsy. I had to tell him off - after which there were no more issues with him - but I basically got less than one hour of sleep on the flight. After what seemed like an interminable voyage, we landed. After I made it through passport control and collected my luggage, I took a bus to the train station at Atocha to meet a friend of the friends whose apartment I'm renting. My cell phone wasn't getting any signal at all, so I had to ask a nice woman on the bus to let me use her phone to make the call to let my friend's friend know that I was arriving. The woman was very friendly about it and that helped to get the bitter taste from the flight out of my mouth. Soon the friend arrived at the meet up point and gave me the key. I, then, headed to the apartment to settle in and take a bit of a nap.

I spent part of the day running a few errands - acquiring a Spanish cell phone and doing a little bit of grocery shopping - and part of the day walking around and taking some photos so as to try to keep myself awake until I could reasonably go to bed, sleep for 8-9 hours, and get my clock mostly reset. After a while I headed back and made myself a sandwich, watched a couple of episodes of Downton Abbey, read for 10 minutes, and went to bed.

This morning I got up and headed to the Biblioteca Nacional, arriving just as it was opening at 9:00. I had to get my reader's card renewed, which was something of a process because I had my passport on me but I wasn't carrying my driver's license or my faculty ID. (It doesn't seem wise to carry all my ID around with me.) So it was a bit of a process to get that sorted out. But before long I had a sermon from 1649 in my hands, and was at work in a beautiful and inspiring work space once again. So all was well.

Right now my only complaint is that I haven't figured out the trick of getting the pilot on so I don't yet have hot water in the apartment. I took a very fast and quite cold shower yesterday. I'm hoping that I can figure it out tonight because I'd really like to go for a run tomorrow, but I don't want to get too sweaty until I know that I can take a hot shower.

Race Report: Capital City Half-Marathon

On Saturday I ran the Capital City Half Marathon. The night before - while eating delicious sweet potato gnocchi with two lovely friends - I was telling them that I was excited to run on a flat course but that I wished that I were better trained (and had not had oral surgery two weeks ago). I didn't want to have any goals other than to finish, but part of me hoped that I could somehow pull off a faster time than I had on my birthday at the Get Lucky Half in Minneapolis.

I really like this motto. For running and for life. 

On the morning of the race, my friend who we will call AUH and I got up early, had a quick breakfast, got on our race gear and headed out. It was humid, but thankfully not as hot as I had anticipated it being. We got near the race site, found parking, and snapped a couple of photos before we headed toward the start line to get into our respective corrals.

While I was waiting in Corral C for the race to start, I ran into a former student who I knew was running the race and chatted with her for a couple of minutes before getting into the zone. I decided to line up with the 2:20 pace group and see how things went.

Before long the gun went off and soon we were across the start line. I kept pace with the 2:20 group until mile 4 and then I dropped back a bit. The humidity was bothering me a bit and my lack of real conditioning was starting to make itself felt. I did manage to stay in front of the 2:25 pace group for the next few miles, until around mile 7 I walked for a few minutes to take a GU and to let it settle. The GU revived me and I had a solid next couple of miles. During mile 10-11 I realized that I was feeling uncomfortably water-logged and that I really needed to urinate. I stopped for a quick biffy break at mile 11 and lost a couple of minutes. I then settled into a 4:1 run-walk routine until about a half mile out from the finish line. I crossed with an official time of 2:33:19.

My friend rocked her first half and finished in 2:30:42. I'm really proud of her and, even though we didn't actually run the race together, I'm so glad that I got to watch her finish (she was in a later corral so she finished after me even though she had a faster time) and that I got to be a part of her first half-marathon experience. After we made our way through the finish line, we went back to my friend's place to clean up and get on with our day, which included a trip to Pattycake Bakery to have some delicious post-race treats.

So, although I was not thrilled with my performance and struggled physically during this race, it was a fun event. The water stops were plentiful - there was essentially one every mile. The route was scenic and a fun way to experience a city where I used to live. The volunteers were friendly and the bands and deejays along the course were lively and entertaining. There was a lot of food at the finish line, including bagels, bananas, oranges, and chocolate. It was a sold out event with 13,000 participants between the half, quarter, and 5K, and it was a pretty great way to spend a morning.

May Goals

Happy May Day! I have finished my grading and submitted my grades, and I have packed up and cleaned out my campus office. Now I'm switching gears and getting ready to go into research mode. Because May promises to be something of a different month from the routine, I'm setting a limited number of goals this month. In no particular order, here they are.

1. Run half-marathon number 9. I'm running the Capital City Half-Marathon in Columbus, OH with a friend this Saturday. I'm not in the best shape for it, and my only goal is to finish this one.

2. Make the best possible use of my archival time in Madrid and spend 30 minutes or so each day writing up summaries of the day's findings and noting where they might fit into the manuscript.

The Biblioteca Nacional - Sala Cervantes

3. Take lots of photos. My archives don't allow photographs, but that doesn't mean I can't take photos on the way to and from the archives. I'm also planning to take one or two little day trips on the weekends that I'm there.

4. Stay active. I know that most Americans lose weight when they visit Europe, but experience has shown me to be retrograde in that area, so I want to make sure that in addition to walking around, I continue to run and do yoga. I'd like to go for at least 10 runs and go to at least 5 yoga classes while I'm in Madrid.

5. Spend time with friends and visit favorite spots in Madrid. It will be my first chance in over three years to see friends that I made during the time that I lived in Madrid, and I can't wait to catch up with them over cafe con leche or a caña!




















What are your May goals? Academics, are you done with your semester yet?