Madrid update #4

Abstract for the "tl;dr" crowd (here looking at you, Stephen Moore):
Butane runs out, is restored; adventures in student teaching and classroom management; hike near Alcalá de Henares; talent-show-esque benefit concert falsely billed as "flamenco show;" impressions from the General Strike; "Ecocríticas" lit conference; Museo Nacional Reina Sofía; day trip to Toledo.

Hi all,
The last two weeks have been busy and stressful but for the most part positive. Ellen and I kicked off our first week of full student teaching and Masters classes (the week before last) with the death by starvation of the butane tank that powers both the cooking elements and the hot water in our apartment - without it (the butane), no hot showers or cooked food! And, chillingly (pun?), no coffee. The standard bombona-replacement procedure involves home delivery of a new tank, but that only works if someone is home when the Repsol folks arrive and they never call ahead to confirm this; in desperate need of some butane, I opted for the ad hoc technique of carrying the empty canister about 15 minutes on foot to a physical Repsol station, buying a new one, and carrying that heavy f***er back. Home-size butane canisters are massive.  The full replacement tank truly put my composure to the test. And then it turned out that the station attendant gave me the wrong type of fuel (propane and butane canisters are for some reason labeled identically), so that the entire Sisyphus-type odyssey didn't even pay off! Our saintly landlord Diego saved the day with a butane home delivery, but the entire episode left us w/o hot water for most of the week, an episode exemplary of the level of difficulty that simple chores sometimes unexpectedly assume here. Others e.g. catching the wrong train to class because its destination board's bulb was burned out or something; using Skype in crowded, loud, very un-private internet cafes; accidentally locking yourself out of your apartment for many hours on a work night etc. etc. There: my venting is done and out of the way.

Student teaching at Sagrada Familia (henceforth referred to as SAFA) is off to a solid start. I teach mostly ESO and Bachillerato, the rough equivalents of middle and high school grades - inexplicably, my schedule also includes a few classes as young as 6 and 7 yrs., which is a totally new experience for me. I'm having a hard time even beginning to learn names: 18 classes x roughly 30 students per class means a lot of kids. The ESO and Bachillerato kids get sassy sometimes, and iron-fisted discipline does not come naturally to me: controlling unruly classrooms solo has been a true learning experience. (Read that last in kind of a nasally sarcastic/mocking voice to convey my full distaste for it.) But the kids are all incredibly smart, most speak impressive English, and when it comes down to it they're mostly well behaved. All of the other teachers are fantastic, and one of last year's American student teachers (Abby) is working again at SAFA this year as a "real teacher," which is great. Plus the teacher's lounge has internet, so it's a prime spot to do homework, blog entries, or lesson prep in the afternoons. (Still no internet at home.) I feel really blessed to be working at a school as all-around good as SAFA, and I'm sure (or at least hopeful) that the whole thing will feel comfortable in a matter of weeks.

Of course there have been a few good adventures alongside work and classes. Last weekend we went hiking in the hills behind Alcalá de Henares, hills whose existence I would never have posited looking at the flatness of the nearby landscape. Led by our fearless Eric, we crossed a pretty good-size river via the slippery-algae-covered lip of a totally submerged cement dam, the current pushing urgently sideways at our feet with every step. After crossing that very effective tourist blockade we saw almost no one all afternoon. The trail wound up past the crumbling towers and walls of a Moorish castle, totally unmarked and unprotected and vulnerable to exploration - there's something surreal about architecture over 1,000 yrs. old not warranting even a fence or road or info board. We eventually ended up at the top of a decent-sized hill: certainly not a mountain in the North Cascades sense of the word, but nonetheless a beautiful getaway from the urban bustle of central Madrid. After returning to Alcalá de Henares we stuck around for a "flamenco show" in the town bullring: a show that turned out to be a benefit concert featuring one Carlos Barroso alongside a ton of other acts, all of them vocally and repeatedly - every other song or so - indebted to Carlos, who was evidently organizer as well as performer. Flamenco-wise we knew something wasn't quite right when the warmup act was, rather than a classical Spanish guitarist in the tradition of Andrés Segovia, a DJ dressed head-to-toe in angelic white mixing beatz from behind what I'm pretty sure was a turntable-equipped lectern.

The big adventure of this most recent week was the "29-S Huelga General," the much-hyped city-wide strike targeting Zapatero's apparently insufficient labor reform policies. With SAFA resolutely open but three separate metro lines between home and work, we weren't sure if we'd even be able to teach on Wednesday the 29th - I guess most of the other non-striking commuters were even more concerned, because even with only 20% of the trains running, the metro was so empty that the strike day was the easiest commute all week. That evening Neal Parker (who just moved to Madrid; welcome Neal!) and I walked to Puerta del Sol via Calle Atocha to scope out the rally/march. An hour after the published rally time we left disappointed by the utter lack of crowds; as we walked away from the plaza an incredibly huge crowd appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, marching the opposite direction (back towards Sol). Although the whole thing didn't/doesn't feel like "our strike" at all - ie we're earning Spanish euros here while the unemployment is at 20% - we accepted proffered union stickers and joined the march back to Sol. The gargantuan crowd wore mostly red, and quite a few hammer-and-sickle and Anarchy flags flapped amidst the ubiquitous UGT union banners. The size of this crowd was just astonishing, especially once we realized that similar crowds were converging on Sol from all other directions for a speech and rally. And the papers deemed the strike a failure the next day for its lack of numbers...

The great irony of the day occurred while watching the crowd gather in Sol before the speeches.  Over 60 feet tall, at least 80 feet wide, a massive promotional poster for "Come, Reze, Ama" ("Eat, Pray, Love") looked down on the would-be-revolutionary crowd with benign contempt.  Julia Roberts' was the face of neoliberal capitalism, utterly undisturbed and smirking.  No one around me seemed to notice the dissonance between the populist urgency of a general strike and the ad campaign that, "gold-shot with looming wonder," visually dominated the event; nor between the gritty economic reality that brought the crowd together and the comfortably pseudo-orientalist world view (non-US countries romanticized) projected by the film. (It must be even stranger to see posters for it in Rome.) Start by tearing down the ad, people!  Nothing against "Eat, Pray, Love" - just the ironic distance from the strike that its ad forced on us.

Other happenings - I attended a few events at the "Ecocríticas" literary conference hosted by the Univ. Alcalá de Henares, specifically a book launch and a poetry reading/discussion with some visiting authors. While eco-crit as a literary sub-genre (or whatever we want to call it) has existed stateside for decades, it is apparently almost brand-new to Spain. And while Spain's national self-image isn't so bound up in wilderness as, say, that of the American West, there is certainly more than enough spectacular/iconic landscape here to warrant hope that Spanish authors and readers might take readily to the idea that writing and reading about nature are effective (and worthwhile) tools for its preservation and sustained use. I missed the rest of the conference's events due to disappointing combinations of work, class, and getting lost on my way there.

And - Friday night we SAFA student teachers went out with Abby and some Spanish friends of hers. The plan was to keep things low-key because of a rudely scheduled thesis meeting early Saturday morning, but ill-advisedly that plan evolved into staying out to nearly 5 before a 7:30 wakeup. Consequently, Saturday was a relaxing day made up mostly of a visit to the Reina Sofía museum (literally five min walk away from our apartment) during its ample free hours. The Reina Sofía tends toward the modern end of the art spectrum, and highlights for me included: "readymade" and totally indecipherable installations from Duchamp, Klein et al; Picasso's "Guernica" (incredibly huge, overwhelming in person); various Miros and Magrittes; a collection of early-20th-century propaganda posters (mostly communist); and a spectacular but all-too-small collection of paintings by Dali. The Reina Sofía is awesome.

And - I took a Renfe train down to Toledo today, exploring the cobbled historic district for hours. Toledo is a beautiful town to begin with, and today was extra good: with a cold rain-scented wind blowing looming clouds and light showers between gaps of brisk clean fall sunlight, the winding and narrow pedestrian-only streets were gorgeous. Toledo's historic walled center is perched on top of a hill that in turn is surrounded by a river, so that the edges of the old center end in cobbled terraces overlooking the sheer drop down to the water and the rocky bluffs of the far bank. It felt good - in fact, comforting - to have some verticality in the world again. Flocks of swallows dart endlessly after invisibly small insects out over the current, and the wind generates intricate whirling patterns of dry leaves as it comes off the flat plain and hits Toledo's taller buildings, so that the narrow roads are either totally tranquil or - having turned a corner - unexpectedly funnels for the gusts. The Toledo trip was definitely one of the highlights of my time in Spain so far.

Well, that's it for the last two weeks... now back to work at SAFA.  Iron-fisted discipline time.  Thanks for reading!
Take care,
-Dave