Arrivals

Passing through sunset and dawn, we landed in Madrid to a full tour of the Rogers' terminal. Gorgeous morning light and a sequence of moving sidewalks made us playful. We grabbed the underground train to get to the city metro. Unlike the New York airports, passport checks and baggage collection were simple, so we made our subway connections easily and arrived in La Latina before our host had finished cleaning up the apartment for us. He sent us on a morning wander that took us around the neighborhood.

At 9 AM the city felt asleep compared to New York. Breakfast was a successful adventure in sign language and smiles in a bar with tapas, potatas bravas, tortillas (also potato) and coffee.  By 10 AM the Mercado de la Cebada was setting up, so we went in, and learning that we only spoke English and he didn't, a fruit and vegetable vendor cheerily handed us 4 free cherries, cleverly starting the negotiations for tomatoes, mushrooms, lettuce and a variety of other items. By the time we settled into our apartment, we had the Spanish versions of cornichons, baguette, cheeses and sausage to fill in the food gaps later in the day.

We took turns napping, and eventually spent three hours at the Reina Sofia museum,  paying our respects to Picasso's Guernica, seeing the Hans Haacke show before it ended, and experiencing the Jean Nouvelle addition to the old hospital building in which the museum resides. Sleep nearly caught us before we got out for dinner, but three of us got out just in time and wandered La Latina until we sank into our dobles of Estrella Damm at El Estragon, a vegetarian restaurant in Place de la Paja for our second sunset in the day.  Our local plaza was coming alive with a communal gathering of families waiting for coolness to return, but we closed our windows to the rising murmurs and crashed for the night.

We hear language all around us that is familiar and unintelligible. The sounds and scenes are definitively European, similar yet not what we know from past experiences. The conversations that waft in our windows sound just as they should, yet the subjects are mysteries. How much do we really need to know or say? The subway cars are becoming more familiar though not Parisian, not New York. What are the details that distinguish the riders of Madrid from those in more familiar places? Is it the faces, the clothing, the proximity within which they stand, the way they fan themselves with their hands to express the heat of the day? Each of us is taking it in, stashing it somewhere, adding to our inner files of this first day.