Madrid at night

Sometimes cities are just much more beautiful in the evening. Here are some photos of  some of Madrid´s most captivating and famous buildings lit up at night.

City Hall 

 Plaza de Cibeles

 Cibeles Fountain

 La Puerta de Alcalá

 Metropolis Building

The Bear and the Madroño Tree - Puerta del Sol

There is always more to be seen, but realistically that was a lot of ground covered in one night...

(All photographs were taken by me personally)

Santiago Bernabéu

When a friend invites you to go to a soccer match in Santiago Bernabéu stadium to see Real Madrid play a game, be it a friendly blowout match against a Columbian team with ties to the current owner or not, you go.

Especially when the seats are such that are realistically out of your price range. Here are some photos of Spain´s best team, up close ( no zoom lens here ).

Kaká

 Özil

 Özil with the drive n´ dish

 Santiago Bernabéu in all it´s glory.

 Coentrão gettin´ clobbered by the keeper.

 Kaká on a penalty.

 Sealin´ the deal.

 My boy Benzema with a nasty cut-back.

It was a total beatdown 8-0 with some seriously impressive goals.

Here´s a video of the goals.

El Matadero - Arts Center

Imagine the gigantic, dangerous, cold slaughterhouses of Chicago, the ones that you´ve read about in The Jungle by Upton Sinclair; then try to imagine an art gallery in the giant meat vats´ place, or a theater, or a music stage. In the south of Madrid proper, an old slaughterhouse (functional until 1996) has been turned into just that; a creative arts center  for concerts, exhibitions, and films, it is called El Matadero.

There are various spaces called ¨naves¨ or warehouses, many of which have 50 foot removable walls to make the space easily manageable for various different exhibitions and / or concerts. There is a ¨cineteca¨ whos walls are made of recycled rubber hoses, that harbors various theaters of different sizes. Other spaces in the Matadero are devoted to art & design, botany, and there is even a mini-community for musicians sponsored by Redbull.

The buildings are quite beautiful, boasting a strange mix of architectural styles such as Neo-Mudejar, which has arabic influences and is exclusive to Spain. Between all of the buildings are courtyards with cafes and it all next to Matadero Park and Arganzuela Park, which run along the Manzanares River.

There are constantly events being held at El Matadero, but if art and music isn´t your thing, you can just take a walk through the winding parks nearby!

(All photos are my own)

Return to the Red Tape

Just when you´ve had enough of the papers, the signing, the commutes to buildings you´ve never been to in random parts of town, just when you think you´ve done it a thousand times and it won´t ever surprise you or upset you, or ¨grind your gears¨ as some might prefer, it makes an ugly and rather uncomfortable comeback like Brett Favre returning to play for the Vikings.

 Some people say that change is good, and I believe that whole-heartedly, but sometimes change is also something heavy and obnoxious to put up with, like when you pay for a metro pass with 20$ and get 18$ in Sacagawea coins that get easier to carry as you eventually use them, but are at first a total ball-buster to deal with. Let´s just say I´ve got a bag full of Sacagawea coins and they need to be taken all over Madrid. They´re cool 1 or 2 at a time, but a weeks supply of them sort of sucks.

Land ho!

After 3 weeks of sleeping on couches and a solid week of searching all over internet sites, texting and calling random people, riding the metro and walking all over Madrid to buzz said random people's doors, loving all of the places for one thing or another and then finding that there was just something missing, or wrong, or whatever... I've finally found a keeper. 

Being my first time living in a city larger than good ole' Winston-Salem (which is approximately a whopping 225,000 people) I've found that planting yourself next to public transportation that takes you directly where you need to go is one of the most important things to look for in your place of residence. Next comes what kind of amazingly atrocious deposits you need to leave with the former room dwellers ie; two months rent and buying the furniture in the room -possibly a single bed, wardrobe, desk and shelves-. Now the next one not be quite as easy to understand, but being a foreigner in another country requires you to typically look for a single room in an apartment full of random people, this can ultimately present you with seriously wacky situations. I've seen some impressive stuff ranging from techy nerd squad pads to possible illegal immigrant drug trafficking dens. Personally, I wanted to live with Spanish people to make sure that I continued learning, practicing, and improving my language and cultural awareness, while not risking my life, which was actually rather difficult to come across given some of the household situations that I've already described, but, I eventually found a great place with two guys; one from Valladolid, and the other from Cadiz. Sweet baby Jesus does the dude from Cadiz have the funkiest accent, he speaks exactly how Mexicans thinks Spaniards speak, lisping his c's, s's, and z's, all of them (which by the way is not at all how about 95% of the rest of the Spanish speak as they only lisp c's and z's). This is apparently a southern trait shared by very few. 

It can throw you off when talking to him because talking like this makes certain words change into other words simply by the phonetics... ie; if he says "casa", it sounds like /catha/, which normally would be written "caza" and means something completely different (casa = house, caza = hunt). Kind of nuts. 

Anyways, the house is cozy, has a balcony, AC and heating. I've moved into my first apartment in a capital city.

Huelga General (National Strike)

Times are tough in the Iberian Peninsula; Spain is boasting a national unemployment rate of almost 23% as of this year, and a whopping 50% for those who are under 25 years of age. The youth are irate as they are being denied control of their future and the future of their country. New labor reforms promise to save money for the country with budget cuts, but also allow the facilitation of firing workers for less money, along with raised taxes for select businesses, and have both the employed and unemployed sharing a similar fervent anger towards the situation in Spain as of late.

29 March showed millions of Spanish protesting all over Spain in a general strike organized by labor unions against the new reform. The entire country had the opportunity to strike -not attend work- if they so pleased, but would have their salary docked as a consequence.

Whether or not the people in Logroño, La Rioja skipped out on work I can't say, but there were definitely  thousands of protesters at 7p.m. rallying and marching across town until later in the evening.

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General Workers Union

 Avenida de la Paz (Peace Avenue) - Where it all began

 Communists and Anarchists

 The new labor reform was under attack.

 Where there's smoke, there's fire.

 Gorillas in the mist.

 Hangman's quarters

 Young and old, the streets were full.

 "The debts are socialized, but the benefits are privatized" 

 March through the plaza.

 Coffee and a strike.

 The tail end of the strike.