Madrid for the Weekend

     It was the weekend before Christmas, classes were winding down for Christmas break, and it seemed like a good time to go somewhere really festive.  So we did!  Off to Madrid for a long weekend.  It’s only a two hour fight, and we  had come across some cheap tickets.  We had never been there before, so there was no excuse not to go.  We loaded up the carry-on bag, joined our friends David (in the same program at the University with Don) and his wife April, and scurried off to the airport.

Welcome to Madrid, Earthling!

     We arrived about 8:00 in the evening and, after a little confusion figuring out the metro connections, finally got on the right line to our hostel. We had gotten a really good price for the room, so I was a little concerned about the location, but when we emerged from the metro, we were greeted by a huge lively square filled with throngs of people, surrounded by stately ornate Spanish style buildings, decked out with an electric blaze of lights, and a 100 foot tall electronic Christmas tree.  We were in the middle of Plaza de la Puerta del Sol, Madrid’s version of Times Square, in the heart of the city.  Our Hostel was a block and a half away.

     Madrid is a very social and lively city, and the square only got busier as it grew later.  We checked into our room and decided to join the crowd and explore the city center.  Of course all the shops were open, so it wasn’t long before Veronica and April fell under the spell of the impressively inexpensive Spanish prices, and Boot-and-Purse Shopping Fever set in with a vengeance.  Much later, we made our way back to the hostel loaded down with goods. 

Plaza de Cibeles

     We had signed up for a “free” (tips please) walking tour of the city the next day, so we were up and out early.   Our tour guide, a bilingual grad student, was full of interesting historical and social facts, so we felt like we got a good feel for the city.  We started at the Plaza Mayor, a 17th Century Square surrounded by stunning grandiose facades, once the site of the condemnation of heretics during the Spanish Inquisition, then later the scene of spectacular bull fights. It is now filled with street vendor booths and tourists.  We wondered down the winding streets to the Chocolateria de San Ginés, famous for its chocolate con churros (churros dipped in melted chocolate). We spent the  next couple of hours going from plaza to plaza, past the original moorish city wall, the Iglesia de San Nicolás de los Servitas, the Palacio Real, and heard story after story.  It was delightful.  When our guide invited us back for a tapas bar tour that evening, we jumped at the chance. 

     Tapas, the Spanish custom of eating a variety of small sampler dishes with your drinks, is a uniquely Spanish experience.  There are many stories about how Tapas originated.  One says that medieval travelers often arrived in town with only enough money to buy either something to eat or something to drink, but not both.  Usually, they would opt for drink, and trouble would soon follow.  To prevent drunken rowdies, the government decreed that inns could only serve beer or wine with food, so the owners would place a slice of ham or cheese on top of the glass, like a lid (tapa).  This also conveniently kept dust and bugs out of the drink.

 Traditional Paella- Yummy!

     Fortunately, we didn’t have to worry about dust or bugs on our tapas tour.  We had a wonderful time in La Latina quarter going from tapas bar to tapas bar with our guide, sampling the various dishes, and sharing laughs and experiences with her.  The night life in Madrid starts to ramp up about 10:00, when groups of friends start accumulating at the various favorite watering holes, and often goes long and loud all the way through to the next morning.  Hemingway described it by saying that “nobody goes to bed in Madrid until they have killed the night.”  In our case, however, the night was winning, and we were back in our hostel shortly after midnight.

This baby needs a shave....

     The street performers in Madrid were undoubtedly the cleverest and most entertaining we have seen anywhere, including San Francisco. With unemployment currently hovering around 20%, they have a plentiful supply.  Of course, you have your standard selection of human statues and cartoon characters.  But you also have a wonderful variety of interactive street performers, including a magician worthy of any stage in Las Vegas, an invisible man with his hat and sunglasses suspended by a thin wire above his jacket, a clacking tinsel covered llama, and our favorite: the man-baby in a carriage.  His body is concealed beneath the carriage and his head pokes up into the carriage on top of the baby body with little movable arms.  He was engaging all the passerbys and flirting with all the women, and was totally hilarious. 

    Our final day was spent quietly at the world famous Museo del Prado (Prado Art  Museum).   It houses an impressive collection of Goya, El Greco, Rubens, Rembrandt, Dűrer, and others.  We returned home both culinarily and culturally enriched, and ready for our next adventure.

Veronica's new friend

Metropolis at Calle de Alcalá

April, Veronica, and David at the Puerta de Alcalá

The Clacking Llama (with person inside)

Dutch New Year's Traditions

     Holland on New Year’s Eve is no place for the faint of heart.  Just like the other holidays, they have their own quaint traditions unique to Hollanders, which for New Year’s, includes “Olliebollen” (literally “Oil balls”), a sort of deep fried (of course) ball of doughnut dough, frosted or sprinkled with powdered sugar, loaded with raisins or creme or whatever.  Its the kind of treat that would make Krispy Kreme proud, and should probably come with a coupon for two free defibrillations.  You can only get them for one month out of the year during Christmas season.  The stands start sprouting up right after Sinter Klaas avond (December 5) and go away shortly after New Years until next year.

The other quaint tradition they enjoy is legal fireworks, as in totally legal for anyone to own.  I don’t mean little whistling petes or ground flowers, we’re talking anything goes, no age limits.  As near as I could tell, there were no restrictions on the size or type, or if there were, nobody knew what they were.  One of our friends told us there was some kind of size limitation, but with so many kinds available on the internet, the limits are mostly unenforceable.  I wondered if maybe the Dutch were a little jealous  because they did not get to shoot off fireworks like us on the 4th of July, but I was not prepared for the magnitude of the fireworks display on New Year’s.  Although individuals are allowed to set off fireworks in Germany, Scandinavia, and Eastern Europe, the Dutch set off more fireworks per capita than anywhere else. It surpassed by far anything I had seen in the US.

It started with a few cracks about 10:00 in the morning on New Year’s Eve.  It quickly built to an on-going din, with the constant rattle of smaller ordinances echoing near and far throughout the city, sounding much like small arms fire, punctuated by an occasional huge window-rattling boom that would have triggered a red alert from Homeland Security at any other time.  Having just watched “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” the night before, I was sure the battle for Utrecht had just started.  No, our neighbor assured us, it was just young boys having fun.  Veronica, the constant mother, asked if perhaps young boys and big fireworks didn’t seem to him like a recipe for disaster?  He conceded that there was the occasional injury to the hands or eyes, but he remembered how much he had enjoyed the tradition when he was that age, so he assured us most people didn’t think it was a problem.   The typical easy-going Dutch attitude toward life in a nutshell, I thought.  “I got to play with unexploded ordinances when I was a kid, so my child should have the same opportunity.”

Sure enough, when we went out on the balcony to watch the live action, we saw groups of teenage and prepubescent boys walking around the neighborhood with their plastic grocery bags full of fireworks.  Some stopped to make elaborate piles of fireworks to set off, and others just casually tossed out lighted cherry bomb things as if they were hand grenades while they ambled around.  The noise was annoyingly constant throughout the day, but I have to admit I did not see any serious misbehaving of the type that American parents would fear most: throwing fireworks at each other, under cars, or putting them in planters, bottles, or small domestic house animals.  I can imagine that if groups of 12 year olds armed with unlimited supplies of recreational explosives were released on LA, half the city would be leveled by the end of the day.

Utrecht did somehow manage to survive until the kids’ bed time, and somewhere around 9 pm, the constant battle sounds began to subside.  The truce seemed to hold for the next three hours, and I thought the worst was past.  Then suddenly, at the stroke of midnight, the city erupted.  It was the adults turn now.  Across the city and the country, thousands were taking to the streets.  It was time for the skyrockets.  

Its one thing to go to a fireworks show where all the fireworks are going off in basically the same area.  Its quite another to see them going up all around you, near and far, 360 degrees, all across the horizon.  There probably was someone else besides us in Utrecht who hadn’t gone out and blown their entire food budget for the year on skyrockets, but you wouldn’t know it from our vantage point.  There is no public fireworks display- with all the private fireworks, there is no need.   On our street alone there were tons of rockets going off, some exploding right at roof level, and some going up 100 or 200 feet and exploding into huge patterns.  There were all types of ground and arial displays where ever you looked, down the street or across the town.  The spectacle continued non-stop for an hour before it finally started to slow down a little, and eventually became quiet again by 2:30.  It literally took hours for the smoke to clear.  The next morning the red paper debris left behind by the multitude of fireworks had been reduced by the early morning rain to a huge fields of red sludge.

With the fervor that the Dutch have embraced their fireworks, you might think this is an old tradition, but not so.  They were not legal prior to World War II, and such spectacles did not become traditional until the 1960s.  Such a tradition, however, does not come without a price.  Dutch opposition groups have recently mounted an effort to ban fireworks.  The government estimates that the New Year’s celebration causes 10 million euros damage each year.  This year, 16 cars in The Hague were burned and there were nearly 250 eye injuries related to the fireworks, and last year, two young people died in fireworks accidents.  Notwithstanding this, the tradition is not likely to change soon.  Members of Parliament and other officials say that it is impossible to imagine Dutch life without it.  With such a tradition, it is probably not a coincidence that, where we would say “Happy New Year,” the typical Dutch greeting translates literally to “Lucky New Year”.

You can see an excellent example of this typical Dutch tradition on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XBYlcf2cttI.