I have heard it said that you either like Barcelona or Madrid, never both. Each city has its own charms, culture, personality, food and history but are uniquely distinct — so distinct that if you like the style of either, it probably means you won’t be into the other. I have found this to be true of other country’s cities too; e.g., Melbourne and Sydney, Australia, Los Angeles and New York, USA, Munich and Berlin, Germany, Bogotá and Medellín, Colombia. Well I really like Madrid. Unfortunately, it’s so freaking expensive to find housing there that I can’t spend as much time as I’d like (months!). This year though I was able to find a week there before heading back to North America. I was again working too much, so my routine consisted of working from the hotel lobby where I was stationed in front of a big window where I watched passersby while pounding on my computer. The highlights of my trip were meeting with my friend Richard and his family who hosted me for a dinner in their house in the suburbs for a night. I met the family while I was living in the Maldives in 2020. Every […]
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I first visited Madrid in February 2017 for just a couple of days. I remember enjoying the food, culture, and architecture -- it was the first time I had visited Spain; my instinct told me Madrid is a city that matches my style. It seems that the universe also desired that I return to Madrid. While living in the Maldives last year, I met many friendly Spanish vacationers who passed through the resort I was living on. Surprising to me, the Maldives is a popular destination for tourists living in Madrid and Barcelona owing to travel promotions from their international airlines.
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I’ve been terrible at Spanish for an entire year now, starting back in Buenos Aires. Since then I’ve lived in other Spanish-speaking countries: Uruguay, Chile, Colombia, Bolivia, Ecuador — each with distinct dialects, idioms, accents and slang. In an attempt to describe the style of Spanish I speak currently — imagine a three-year-old child speaking broken English utilizing a haphazard, incongruous assortment of accents: Scottish, southern, Boston, and cockney. The child can tell you what he wants or needs and ask simple questions effectively but if asked a question containing a word he hasn’t learned yet (his vocabulary is around 100) he’ll just look at you with cow-eyes and a blank stare of confusion. That’s pretty much where I’m at. While in Spain I added a new verbal weapon with which to assault native Spanish speakers — the fabled Spanish “lisp”. In Barcelona (and apparently much of Spain to my surprise) some consonants, such as “c” are softly pronounced as a “th” turning “gracias” into an audible “grathias”. Let me tell you right now that depending on your level of aggravation, it could drive you nuts. It drove me nuts. Madrid impressed me on account of what I would refer to as its […]
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