Madrid Dìa Uno

I am writing to you from the Bristol, England airport. It is September 18th at 16:31. I am killing time until my gate is announced at 17:55. After a nice night in the UK, I am ready to return to Madrid, to sleep soundly in my apartment, and to see my new friends again. I have spent the last few hours in a Bristol coffee shop going through revising this piece. I am nervous to post. I am hard on myself about my writing. I aim to create something beautiful, profound, and compact. This pressure has prevented me from sharing for years for fear that my words aren’t up to par with the standards I have set for myself. I mentioned this to a new friend of mine a few nights ago. He told me it's best to share, even if it's bad, the people around you want to see what you have to say. He is right. This is my first post of what I hope will be a year-long series. When I told my friends and family that I was moving to Madrid for ten months, they all told me to keep a journal, to take photos, and to share my stories with them. This is my attempt to do just that. It's in its early stages. I am in the process of combing through my journal entries from the last few weeks and figuring out a format that works. I am trying to settle with good enough, so what follows is my “good enough” recount of my first day in Spain.

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Following a quick layover in Boston, it was around 7 pm EDT when I settled into my middle row seat on the plane to Madrid, popped a Benadryl, and waited for the magic to happen. To teach me a lesson about relying on allergy medicine as a sleep aid, my body refused to tire. I had no luck with my arms folded under a sweatshirt, head down on the tray table. No luck with my heels jammed into the right side of the seat, infringing on my seatmate's personal space. Bah! She’s a skinny little thing. She won’t mind a little neighborly knee action from the left. She introduced herself as soon as I sat down. I’ve forgotten her name but I remember that she was off to Madrid to start her semester abroad. That’s a safe amount of time, surely much safer than the ten-month endeavor that I’ve thrown myself into. Her face was covered in those pink star stickers that are supposed to make your pimples disappear quicker. I counted at least six of them in my peripheral vision. Despite, or maybe in lieu of the pimples, she was classically pretty, skinny, and gluten-free. I learned the latter when she offered me her banana bread. I turned her down, with graceful restraint.

The young gentleman to my left had plopped down hard with a phone to his ear, loudly interrupting my pre-flight zen practice of putting my noise cancelling headphones on(clearly not noise cancelling enough) and staring longingly out the window. He concluded his conversation with a dull “Uh huh. I gotta go. Text you when I land.” and stretched out his legs until the tips of his birkenstock clogs tucked under the seat ahead. He did not introduce himself. He put in airpods and started scrolling through Tik Tok. I mentally checked him off my Mile High candidate list. He later took a break from scrolling to watch Harry Potter over my shoulder. Lucky for him, I always have subtitles on.

As The Prisoner of Azkaban was replaced by The Goblet of Fire, the pain in my lower back started to take hold and I swore I could hear the faint laughter of a malicious benadryl dancing around my gut, refusing to crack open, jeering at me every time I readjusted. This giddy mother fucker, Hey you! I hope this goddamn in flight complementary breakfast banana bread somehow cracks you open. Give me that good stuff. It didn’t crack open and give me that good stuff.

We were about 40 minutes outside of Madrid when I abandoned my attempt at sleep, opening my eyes to see the pretty pimple girl on my right with her knees tucked into the seat, sleeping like an angel. To my left, the tik tok bro was testing the weight capacity of his tray table. He had managed to get his right leg out from underneath and plopped it on top. I stared at his slipper and cursed him out. This guy…this bro…this clown…this…he…actually might be…yeah he might be on to something. It took a couple deep breaths and a skillful knee-to-chest and then an up-and-over maneuver but hot diggity damn, Sam! I managed it. And damn was it most comfortable position of the flight.We sat like that until the plane began its descent. This guy might be less of a dud, after all.

After the flight landed around 11:30 CET, I met up with my friend Jordan who was flying in from New York around the same time. Jordan was the reason I was here. We had worked together for a few months at REI, when one day last winter he told me he had applied for this program to go teach English in Madrid: 10 months, no prior experience needed, 16 hours a week in the classroom, an 1000 euro monthly stipend. I had heard enough. I went home, researched the program and applied a few days later. They accepted me on January 9th and gave me until the 19th to confirm my participation with a deposit. I had 10 days to decide whether to upend my life or not. I remember I was staying in a hotel in Cleveland, Ohio having gone to visit my friend. I was eating turkish food from a take out container, scrolling on my laptop when I saw the email. Holy shit. This was a tangible thing now, not the “maybe this could be cool” throwaway application I had previously regarded it as. I called my parents and said “ I think I have to do it.” I remember laughing nervously, shutting my computer and then diving into some Keks Kocke sa Bananama(Balkan banana pudding) Decadent.

Seven months later and one hell of a visa process later, I had made it. Those of us that had arrived at the airport around the same time piled onto a bus to the hotel where they gave us our CIEE orientation badges, health insurance cards, and a free tote bag and fan. There were about 60 or so people in our group but hundreds more in the CIEE program and thousands of others in similar programs. Our technical job title is “Auxiliares de Conversación”(conversation auxiliaries) There are bilingual schools all over Madrid and the outlying areas. Working with programs such as CIEE, the Community of Madrid hires anywhere from 1-5 auxiliaries for each school where we will serve as assistants to the teachers. We are responsible for bringing in our English language skills and sharing our countries’ cultural aspects with the kids. Most people in the program are fresh college grads ranging from the ages 22 to 25 but there are a couple older outliers.(One gentleman in my group is around 50 and has dual citizenship in Ireland and the United States.)

After tucking our badges into the ugly blue tote bags, Jordan and I headed off to our room. As we walked away they said “no matter how tempting it might be, try not to nap!” Luckily for us, we didn't have a chance to sleep as we had our first apartment tour in a couple of hours. CIEE had warned us not to sign a lease until we got here so most of us were homeless. After the provided hotel stay of four nights, we were on our own to score housing for the year. A daunting task, but we had at least one tour to look forward to and hoped to set up more that evening. The rest of the afternoon I flip flopped between feeling full of energy/enthralled by my new surroundings and feeling very on edge, irritable, and tired. I had started to feel a bit light-headed and tingly in my toes. My back ached and I felt a cold coming on. I said to Jordan “I really need to sleep.” We were sitting on a city bench, eating prepared food from a Spanish supermarket chain called Mercadona. I had picked a salad. He had bought a 99 cent baguette and a package of jamon iberico(iberian ham.) We were killing time before our apartment tour at 15:30. The apartment was in Lavapies, one of the southern neighborhoods of Madrid. The area was colorful and lively but a bit rougher looking than we were hoping for.

At 15:30, we met Estephania at the door to the apartment complex. She led us upstairs and knocked on one of the units. A young woman answered and moved to the side to let us in. The place was very small and dimly lit. The other occupants nodded at us from the couch as we stood in their dining room/family room/kitchen. “Do you have any questions?” Estaphania asked us. We shook our heads. She walked us out, shook our hands and left us alone on the street.

Once she was out of earshot, Jordan asked

“Sooo what did you think?”

“No shot.” I said

He agreed “We can do a lot better. We will keep looking.”

And keep looking we did. After taking the metro back to the hotel, we sat up in our beds, copied and pasted our message of interest to at least 20 landlords on Idealista(the most popular site here for apartment rentals.)Through some shoddy google translate work and after finding a few of the landlords onWhatsapp, I eventually scored us a of couple tours for the following day, one at 15:00 and another at 16:30.( I am still getting accustomed to military time. I’ve switched my phone over to the 24 hour clock but I still have to do the mental math every time I check the time. ) Satisfied with the fruits of our labor we decided to call it a night, hit the sack early and try to shake off some of this jet lag. However, a couple of people from the program were messaging in the Whatsapp group chat, planning to grab drinks. We decided to push sleep back a little longer and join them. Fuck it. First night in Spain. Why not?

So there I was on a rooftop bar in Chamartín, Madrid, setting a personal record for the longest I’ve ever gone without sleep, doing ice breakers with a group of ten or so fellow auxiliaries. We sipped cocktails, cervezas(beers), and outrageously elegant mineral water from these beautiful blue glass bottles. We went through introductions, names, and why we chose this program. Everyone had a similar story. They were fresh out of/a couple years out of college, dreaded the 9 to 5 office jobs that they saw their friends picking up, and decided to grab life by the balls and go for it, move to Spain for a year. Why not? We grew hungry with all of the talk and ordered a few tapas.(Madrid is known for its tapas, small bites of food to accompany your drinks. In Spain, instead of eating three big meals, they eat smaller meals more frequently throughout the day, and usually starting dinner around 9-11 pm err 21:00-23:00 pm) . I ordered a pincho de tortilla, butchered my spanish accent but got the job done. The server brought me a potato-egg-quiche like thing. I took a couple bites, missed my mouth on the last and sent a moist yellow chunk to the floor. Shit. I looked up to see if anyone noticed. They hadn’t. Everyone was too busy listening to Livie’s introduction. I had noticed her earlier as we walked to the bar. She’s got this real slow talking, hip swaying confident allure about here. I tuned in. Her name is Livie, She’s 25 years old from just outside of New Orleans. She flew here from Greece, where had just spent ten nights or so. The Greece airport has misplaced her luggage so since her arrival a few days earlier, she has been living out of her backpack. She’s unphased. “Yeah, it's whatever, it’s at the Madrid airport now. I just have to go and pick it up at some point. It’s all good.” God, I liked her swagger. Later in the night, when someone suggested the prompt “Tell us about something you're really passionate about.” She answered with “I just love committing to the bit, any bit, really. I’ll give people fake names and everything. I like to ride it out until the end.” I couldn’t look away from this girl, too scared to miss something she said. I remember making a mental note: Woo Livie. ( if that’s even her real name.)

After Livie stopped talking and someone else started up, I glanced down and spotted the torta crumb by my foot. To my surprise, there were several ants circling the chunk, doing their ominous pheromonal ant rituals to alert the others. The ants were coming in hot from all directions. The black mass was thickening by the minute, forming a line a few inches below the collective that had formed around the crumb. I lifted up my feet and readjusted to sit cross legged on the stool. It looked like the ants were forming a cyclops smile, a one eyed beauty of constant movement and hunger. I had an idea. I tapped the shoulder of Jacob, the young man sitting next to me, and pointed to the floor. I recognized him from the pane. He had sat in front of tik tok dud. I remember he wore cool jean jorts.

I asked him "Should we make an ant smiley face?” He grinned. We dropped another crumb where the second eye should be and waited for the ants to take notice.

He turned toward me and asked “Have you seen that recent Tik Tok trend of people messing with ants?”

I shook my head.” No. What’s in the videos?”

He put his elbows on his knees, leaned in all business like. “Alright so here's what they do, right. They find a single ant, just a little guy on his own, and they drop something in front of it, a cracker or something, doesn't matter.

I nodded.

He continued “so the ant comes over and checks it out, and does what ants do and heads back to other ants to report his discovery.”

“Alright. I’m following”

“But… Before it comes back, what do you do? You take the cracker away-”

“ so this guy comes back leading this pack of hungry ants and they're all excited for this tasty snack, right, something to bring to the queen, and they get there and find nothing. And all of the ants are like “What the hell, man? You blue balled us!” and the ant that started the whole thing is just standing there all confused and shit, wondering where the cracker went.”

Jacob looked at me. I laughed. I laughed because of the story. I laughed because I was sleep deprived. I laughed because I was 3700 miles from home, on a rooftop bar talking to some guy about the act of blue balling ants.

He laughed too and said,

“Let’s try it on one of these guys.”

We spotted an ant on its own, a few inches away from the now fully developed smile. Jacob took a crumb from my plate and set it down next to it. We watched.

“Oh! Oh! It's going for it!” I said. We watched this ant crawl around the crumb, its antenna taking in all of the details.

“Shit.” Jacob said

I looked up. “What?”

“I think…we’ve got ourselves a selfish one.”

We looked back down. The ant never left, didn’t tell a soul. Damnit…but total respect.

We sipped the last of our drinks, stacked up our plates and napkins. On the way out, I made the group check out my living art creation. I can’t say for sure, but I think they were impressed.

I walked back to the hotel in a blur taking it all in, the warm air, the way that time seems to linger here. I reminded myself that I’m not on vacation, that in two weeks, three months, ten months time, I will still be here. I won’t be back in Rochester, NY, sitting on the couch with my dad, sipping a coffee and talking each other through our plans for the day. I won’t be tying my shoes up, getting ready for my shift at the restaurant down the street. I won’t be walking my dog Sammy with my mom, untangling myself from the leash and telling him to calm down. I’ll be here. Madrid is home now. It hasn't quite hit me yet. Writing this on September 18th, nearing a month of being here, I’m still not sure it has fully hit me.

We got back to the hotel, took the elevator up to the second floor. Jacob says “Next time, let's try a more casual joint. That place felt really touristy. I want to drink with some real Spanish locals.” Everyone nodded in agreement.

I whispered to Jacob. “I’ll go on one condition. They must have a pile of ants I can play with.”

He grins. “Absolutely! We will have to call ahead and make sure.”

“Deal.”

“Deal.

I returned to my room, slipped into my pajamas(men’s boxers and a ratty Beatles t-shirt), and walked over to the window. I could see the city lit up and alive out there. I stood there for a while to take it all in.

Goodnight Madrid. I’ll see you in the morning.

…and the morning after….

….and the morning after that.

Fuckkk….