They look at you on the street
LIVE MORE, SLEEP LESS
It's 8:00 p.m. You have worked, eaten, worked again and still have time to do things (many things), before meeting for dinner. Of course, at a time that in France (not to mention Germany, England and let's not even mention Denmark), it is synonymous with going to sleep.
IMPROVISE
But not here. Here is the time to meet "to have a bite to eat", a great expression that, as you discover, It covers from nuts to the most elaborate skewers, passing through portions of tripe (ah, the Madrid offal). And nothing happens if you haven't planned it for weeks, which is the sine qua non condition to stay in London or Paris, because in Madrid, it's easy to stay at the last minute and because the caña is sacred.
PRAWN HEAD
There, in the bar, perhaps the biggest surprise is hidden: being able to throw on the ground, in a gesture of pleasant semi-anarchism, shrimp heads , olive pits, hard paper napkins, and yesteryear, cigarette butts. You spend months with your hand clenched grabbing your used toothpick until you dare and the fingers, one by one, lift up, free themselves and... SPLASH: you drop your used toothpick on the floor.
When the waiter of the typical 'old man's bar' is missing... something dies in the soul
ICE IS SACRED
It is also where they teach you, from the waiters with furrowed temples as they choose them one by one, to the clients who observe the ritual attentively and do not hesitate to ask for "one more" in an offended tone, that ice in a glass is an essential element, almost elevated to the level of religion by some people from Madrid who, of course, like (and a lot) drinks. It may seem unbelievable but it is enough to travel outside these borders to verify it: millions of Europeans do not KNOW that they live a big lie : the one with the thin ice, sad, often lonely at the bottom of her glass, the “désespoir” of the watery glass.
MEET FOR BREAKFAST AT 12:00
A de-sa-yu-nar. Yes, yes: when in France they are already clearing the lunch tables, in Madrid you can be rushing your coffee, and think about what "the day" reserves for you . Of course it can only work here, because you still have many hours left until the end of the day (see point 1).
The time zone of Madrid are its customs
THE "CLIN CLIN CLIN" OF THOSE WHO REMOVE SUGAR IN THEIR COFFEE
As if their lives depended on the sugar being perfectly absorbed , may it disappear and, with it, every trace of sin. Let the guilty sugar die at the bottom of his cup. That way of stirring your coffee with milk, that little noise as the soundtrack of Madrid never ceases to amaze me...
FROM-MACHINE-WITH-WARM-MILK-IN-LARGE-CUP
I mean the overwhelming breadth of choices when it comes to drinking coffee : From-machine-with-warm-milk-in-a-large-cup, from-decaffeinated-sachet-in-a-macramé-covered-glass-made-in-Almería (or something like that).
It is an enormous pressure, wanting to be part of this group of people, which apparently includes the entire population of the country, who knows exactly what he wants in the morning . I already signed up for the “coffee with milk”, despite hating milk, out of sheer laziness after spending years asking for a black coffee and having it brought to me by itself with milk. Because that's what you drink in the morning. And point. But, despite many efforts, the pressure still gets to me and I am left speechless by the dreaded question "hot or cold milk?" I DO NOT KNOW!
A city with its own rules
THE STICKY CROISSANTS
With the title everything is said. Without any chauvinism, because a lover of Spanish gastronomy says it. But that syrup... I still don't understand why. And I cry.
THE HAM
Discover that there is a world between what you asked for on vacation in Spain, a basic and cheap Serrano ham and one hundred percent Iberico de bellota. And cry. Just cry. Pleasure.
Plate of pure acorn-fed ham
THE PIPES
Or rather the mantles of pipes that the people of Madrid are leaving (from groups of teenagers rapping to old ladies talking), on the floor after spending an hour on the bench chewing. And discover that everyone, absolutely everyone knows how to open a pipe, take out its seed and taste it without using their hands. Like this: clack, just with a twist of the tongue and the force of the teeth.
**Because not everything is drinking and eating (but almost) **
BEING CALLED "GUAPA" AND "CORAZÓN" IN STORES
Or how to feel wonderful about ordering two chicken breasts.
THEY LOOK AT YOU ON THE STREET
That is universal and independent of gender. It happens to all of us foreigners when we get here: to think, for a few miserable days, a few hours that, suddenly, the adventure of having gone to live in another country has made you irresistible , whom others cannot stop looking at, directly in the eyes, with unspeakable proposals that you imagine hidden in their pupils. That, until you realize, when another "gabacho" (in my case) confesses to you that he feels irresistible on the street, that it's just that people here look a lot in the eye, even if they ignore you.
Tapas, beer and terrace: happiness from Madrid
FROM YOU TO YOUR EVEN WITH THE PRESIDENT
Does not matter. Once you've had the hard time of admitting you're not Gisele Bundchen, you have the pleasure of discovering that you can address everyone . Your boss, the boss's boss, the borderline neighbor, the waiter... At first it's hard, it can even come to be experienced as a somewhat violent way of disrespecting. But after receiving a hundred stares when asking the waiter from the bar to “please, I'm sorry to bother you, could you give me the bill if you don't mind”, you learn, with a feeling of extreme liberation, to shout: "YOU CHARGE ME?"
THE YELLING
That, precisely (and with the risk of going back to the subject of the bar) is one of the things that has the most impact. The screaming, the noise, the crazy conversations, the thought that the people next door are fighting and their families stopped talking to each other for seven generations when, finally, you realize that They're just debating what kind of croquettes to order.
THE SKIES OF MADRID
They will say that it is because of pollution, they will say that the black beret kills us, they will say that the apocalypse is coming. It doesn't matter: red, orange, pink : the sky of Madrid fascinates.
those skies...