Hello dear readership- it’s been another busy and adventure-filled week in Madrid, the highlights of which I will lay out here! I´m typing in a hurry w/o proofreading, so forgive any glaring typos.
PART I
Monday kicked things off with an orientation session for FERE, the Catholic school organization that runs our student teaching program. The enthusiasm for teaching was palpable as FERE management types explained in detail the role we (the teachers) were to fill and the possible challenges to face along the way – I think all of us left the building genuinely & unironically inspired and ready to work. After first checking off the “open bank account” box on my to-do list at Barclays – good people there – I attended the first day of Masters classes in Alcala de Henares on Tuesday, and it too was successful: our first quarter (there are actually four of them in the ten months - if three terms receive the “quarter” label, perhaps then this program is based on “fifths?”) will consist of Art History and Techniques of Writing, which last is turning out to be more of a pedagogy class than a writing class. (This initially rubbed me the wrong way, but I suppose the pedagogy content will actually be more useful.)
I went to the first morning of student teaching at Colegio Sagrada Familia on Wednesday, where I will be working with three other American “auxiliares de conversacion:” Ellen Wilkinson, Kelly Thurston, and Abby Coffin (all of who will be awesome colleagues). We haven’t done much real “teaching” since Wednesday – mostly sitting in on class – but we’re getting our full schedules tomorrow, and apparently there may possibly be serious amounts of solo classroom time. This is intimidating. But everyone at SAFA is really nice, especially the bilingual director Dario, and I have a great feeling about the school already. Three out of four of last year’s auxiliares opted to stay in Spain at the end of year, which I’ll take as a testament to the program’s success.
Day two of Masters classes (Thursday night) also went well, but I worry that Art History will be much more brutal than I’d first thought – class was literally two uninterrupted hours of writing down dates, names and facts about such art phenomena as Doric columns and such-and-such vases (too lazy to check my notes to supply another sample name here) at a hand-crampingly fast pace. After class ended an incredible thunderstorm woke me up late Thursday night- Friday morning - in a state of sheer animal terror: once the adrenaline subsided and I decided our apartment building hadn’t actually been hit by lightning, the primal nighttime spectacle of the storm was amazing.
AND NOW THE REAL MEAT OF THIS BLOG POST, PART II
I spent basically the entire weekend enjoying the conclusion of the Vuelta a España, Spain’s answer to the Tour de France. Saturday morning I took an early-morning train north out of town with friends Eric and Sydney, transferring after over an hour to another more mountain-type train that bore us up to the isolated town of Navecarrado, a truly alpine-feeling village surrounded by a nature preserve. As we walked away from the train station towards town I saw the first names of cyclists painted on the tarmac: MOSQUERA SCHLECK SASTRE MENCHOV NIBALI etc. We had a four-km hike to get up to the top of the “Bola del Mundo” road where the race would end, and let me tell you now that Bola del Mundo is just beautiful. It was a one-lane (if that) road winding snake-like up the mountainside out of town: in places the surface was cobbled, in others it was as steep as 20% (!!), and a pilgrimage-like procession of fans trudged up out of sight, destination obscured by clouds. We ended up at around 2300m, far above treeline and in the heart of a frigid mountain fog. With the race not projected to arrive for at least five hours more, we sat down to enjoy lunch with our new Spanish friends Lasso, Fernando, Anders and Emilio (not sure about this last name). They’d brought a real feast: bread, tortilla de España (a scrambled-egg-like dish), chocolate, sausage, even donuty cinnamon things. The TV cameras returned to us three times to share the glory of this typically Spanish mountain meal with the raptly watching world. Lasso and Fernando especially were just hilarious: singing and dancing virtually non-stop, they shared with us not only food but jokes, slang, and wisdom. By the day’s end an interlanguage “slang trade” had taken place that introduced to both Spanish and English phrases much too crude to consider repeating here.
After a few hours in a warm alpine-type cafÈ with cafes con leche, we returned to the road to stake out our spectating spot on one of the most brutally steep ramps in the last two kms. From time to time the fog would part to reveal the extent of the crowd packed along the road far below us, waving flags and wearing costumes and generally having a great time as they waited. We heard on our tiny handheld radio that Mosquera attacked with great ferocity at the base of Bola del Mundo; a few minutes later we saw him emerge out of the icy cloud, a screaming double wall of fans stepping out of his way only at the last minute. The Italian race leader Nibali was right behind him, both going “full gas.” The rest of the race came through in ones and twos: Frank Schleck, Carlos Sastre, Denis Menchov, all wearing the pitiful grimace or 1000-meter stare of the deeply exhausted. One especially spent Spanish rider mumbled as he wobbled past us “empujame” [push me]; Lasso obliged, running alongside him for a good 15 seconds through the frantic crowd. As soon as they finished the stage - and despite the athletes still racing uphill - the first ones up the mountain turned around and rode back down the extremely narrow fan-choked road at pretty incredibly daring speed. The American star Tom Danielson descended by our group and I yelled to him “great work Tom;” he turned around to share a few seconds of eye contact and a big grin! (!!!!) All of us went down the road together: fans walking, fans riding bikes, pros flying through tiny gaps between fans at top speed, everyone sharing the aura of the race’s “Queen stage.” The clouds parted cinematically to reveal a spectacularly wild view below and around us. And as if all that weren’t enough, we ended up meeting family friends of the Sastres on the train ride down from Navecerrado who confirmed that Carlos really is as humble and genuine as he appears on TV. What an incredible day.
Today – Sunday – was the Vuelta’s final stage, a 12-lap criterium-ish race around downtown Madrid. Eric and I staked out a strategic spot at Plaza Cibeles and watched the day’s five-man break form, flourish, struggle and eventually succumb to the combined powers of the HTC-Columbia, Garmin, and Liquigas teams in the finals kilometres. Native Washingtonian Tyler Farrar won the final sprint over HTC’s Mark Cavendish; although I’ve never before been a big Farrar fan, it was pretty great to see him on the podium post-race. I experienced true American pride in Farrar’s victory in the heart of Madrid, a huge city that still sometimes feels foreign to me. Nibali won the overall GC and duly sprayed the podium girls with a comically oversized bottle of champagne. Cav won the green sprinter’s jersey and David Moncoutie the blue-polka-dotted mountain points jersey. In the chaos after the podium ceremony wrapped up we noticed nine XXL boxes of takeout pizza stacked up behind the Garmin team bus: the directeur sportif sped away before anyone else noticed their rude littering. Did I consider keeping one as a souvenir? Yes, but I immediately rejected the plan for sanitary reasons. Down the road Nibali and Mosquera were surrounded by huge crowds of exuberant fans and the mood all throughout Madrid was contagiously positive.
Anyways, it was a very good first week of class and student teaching, and an unforgettable weekend. This next week means the beginning of real full-time student life, so I’m glad the weekend was so full of fun.
Thanks for reading!
Take care,
-Dave
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