Fin.

“What mountains?”, I asked myself.

Early 2005, and my brother had described to me his new flat in Madrid.  Before Facebook, before Skype, I think it must have been in an email, or even a letter, the contents of which I can scarcely remember.  What stuck in my mind was his mention of the mountains he could just about see from the terrace.  That was the moment that the story of my relationship with Madrid began, long before I arrived suitcase in hand in April 2012.

I just didn’t expect there to be mountains (the Sierra de Guadarrama) just outside Madrid.  In my mind the mountains of Europe ran across the middle through Switzerland and Austria, down into Italy and along the French/Spanish border, dividing the countries.  I didn’t know how high up Madrid is, elevated over 600m above sea level on the mesita that occupies the centre of the Iberian peninsula.  I didn’t even know that I didn’t know these things, never having particularly given a lot of thought to the place.

Nine years later, I still feel that I don’t know the city that well, but when I think about that moment it does make me realise how dramatically the extent of my ignorance has shrunk.  I’m sitting in a Madrid suburb on the day of my departure trying to reflect on the time I’ve spent here, attempting to call to mind the way things were in order to get a clear idea of how things are.  Objectively speaking I know my way around well enough, I suppose – having had an endless stream of visitors I know every inch of the tourist beat, and the main areas of the city centre are comfortingly familiar.  I even eventually dared to drive in the city, and oddly enough it didn’t end in disaster.  I still feel a little lost from time to time though.

Here are those mountains I mentioned, by the way:

But how do I best sum up two years?  With lists?

Places I’ve been but not in the blog

Sierra de Guadarrama (on various occasions)

Salamanca

Barcelona

Cordoba/Sevilla

Merida/Badajoz/Elvas

Sierra de Gredos

Madrid bars visited

I’m not even going to try…

Nope. Too dry.  It doesn’t tell any kind of story, just highlights how poorly I’ve documented all this.

How about considering how well I’ve completed my objectives?  Did I really set any?  My Spanish has got to a functional level, at least.  I have managed to get through two years, however, without even the most incidental involvement in any project actually IN Spain.  If that doesn’t tell you the depth of la crisis for the construction industry I don’t know what would drive it home.  Understand the culture?  Getting there, but I’m only just now beginning to feel able to watch the television and read the paper with a meaningful level of understanding.   That remains a work in progress.

The trouble with attempting a conclusion, of course, is that it isn’t really over.  Just as my association with this place began long before I came here, so it will continue after my departure.  As well as my brother here, now I have exponentially increased my links to the place (you know who you are!) and have a work-related excuse to continue returning.  I may even manage to fit in the occasional blog post.  Fin.?  Not remotely.

Excess by the sea – Calatrava’s City

In a fairly spontaneous trip to the coast this weekend, I went to Valencia, hometown of Spain’s immensely famous engineer-architect Santiago Calatrava.  This icon of expressive building structure was what we all wanted to be when we were at uni – Calatrava was the paradigm of what we could achieve with our dual discipline studies: more than an architect with some fundamental engineering principles or an engineer with aesthetic sensibilities; rather a seamless combination of the two superficially conflicting disciplines.

Yet, all I’ve heard about in connection with the firm (it seems unfair to put all the blame on an individual, just as it is ludicrous to lavish all of the glory upon one) during my time in Spain has been spiralling prices, and unbuildable vanity projects.  It may well be a function of the crisis-hit country, but I’m unable to go back to the time before the economic crisis (which seems so very distant now, anyway) to check.

Here’s an example of some of the criticism that’s been levelled at the most recent Valencian show-pony, La Ciutat de les Art i les Ciencies (City of Arts and Sciences):

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/may/08/architect-santiago-calatrava-valencia

I try to think I went with an open mind (although I had seen this article beforehand), but I tend to agree.  As the tingly feeling of having stepped into a futuristic metropolis subsides, you’re left with a sense of overwhelming excess, and the realisation that the place is virtually empty.

Despite each building being a virtuoso structure in its own right, overall it’s just too much for even a massive building geek like me: the buildings, all of the signature Calatrava style but variations on a theme, like the laboratory cast-offs from the tinkerings of a deranged structural genius, compete with rather than complement one another.  The overall composition is undermined by its own homogeneity – white tiles, glass and concrete provide the only textures and the branching, treelike structural form is so overused it loses all of its style.

I did like the water.  The Ciutat is situated in the dried up bed of the River Turia, so it’s a nice touch to surround everything in water.  The downside, of course, is that is augments the sense of distance and isolation which is already excessive.  It also doesn’t help that most of the buildings appear to be closed most of the time, or that they are clearly suffering, somewhat prematurely, from the ravages of their coastal environment.

All of this said, I really like Valencia.  I’m generally a fan of not-the-capital-city sort of places, especially the ones that aren’t particularly trying to prove anything or be the edgy alternative to the capital.  The place felt comfortable, even despite the 80% humidity and the tendency for paths, roads and bike tracks to just suddenly stop as though the builders got distracted or ran out of money or both.

I hired a bike and explored.  I spent over an hour wandering around the Mercat Central on Saturday morning, and an hour sketching the vaulting in the Lonja (15^th century commercial exchange) on Sunday afternoon.  I meandered the streets, and watched the other tourists.  I did not understand any Valenciano.

Church in the Old Town

Mercat Central

My sketch

What the Lonja vaulting really looks like

The Barrio

I’ve not written a lot for a while, and this is largely because after more than a year I’ve settled into a normal rhythm of daily life.  I need to nudge myself on occasion to remember that I’m essentially a long-stay tourist, and should therefore be getting out there and making the most of it. I’ve been toying with writing about my neighbourhood, and day-to-day Madrid in general, for some time now, so here it is.

   

Unlike most guiris, I live well outside the city centre: although I hear English spoken at every step when I wander around near the office, along Gran Via or through Retiro, the community I live in is totally different.  I don’t think people particularly notice we’re foreigners, a lot of the time, because that’s just not what they expect to see out here.  It not’s glamorous, just a normal flat in a normal comunidad,  but we do have the very good fortune to have a swimming pool available to use  - no room for that in the city centre – and it’s easy to feel normal.

This evening my brother and I went running through the Aluche park, which was teeming with life – old ladies gathered on benches, people cycling the perimeter, and children playing in the dried-up concrete base of a long pond.  Just a few weeks ago this park was the scene of the local fiestas, which I was disappointed not to have time to get to – the equivalent, from the sound of it, of the village fair.  This is all in sharp contrast to the last time I ran that particular route on a damp evening in the spring, when a couple of hardy dog-walkers were all I had for company (see photos).

The comparison of the weather in Spain and back home, and people’s reaction to it, are two of the things that come up most often.  Us Brits take a perverse sort of pride in not even noticing the degree of drizzle that brings out a sea of umbrellas here.  That’s not to say that the park, transposed to the UK, would have been as lively on the soggy evening as it was today – on the contrary, back home we wouldn’t go to the park on a summer’s evening either, as much as anything because of the risk of a downpour any minute or because the benches are all still sodden from this morning’s showers.  Although in exchange you have to suffer the dust catching in your throat, and breathe air that's body temperature before getting anywhere near a body, the upshot is that these well-used parks in Madrid are well taken care of, and pretty nice places to be.

We don’t do communal, anyway.  As I discovered first-hand in Graz and Mostar, long before coming here, if I hadn’t quite grasped from my architecture studies, the continental European norm is to live in flats. There’s no sense that this might not be a preferable lifestyle, and no hint of the social difficulties that we’d tend to associate with areas of big flat blocks.  The thing that constantly astounds me is that you see people in the park with dogs the size of horses: I haven’t the faintest idea how these beasts can fit into the average flat.  Anyway, stacking everyone’s homes on top of one another then leaves space for big, open, green spaces in between the buildings: similar density of housing but without the city feeling crowded.  It’s generally agreed that this is a pretty sustainable model, and broadly what Le Corbusier was getting at in the mid-20^th century.

The British, on the other hand, are peculiar in insisting on having our own little house with its own little scrap of land that we can put a fence round, however pathetically small it may be.  That way, when the sun does shine we can fire up our own little barbecue and potter around tending our own little plants in our own 4 sqm, without having to look at any strangers whatsoever.  I’m not objecting to it, but quite the opposite: I’m a fully signed-up member of that club and have my own little patch, replete with tomato plants and a fair supply of weeds too.  I do miss it and it’s difficult to adjust.

I’m working on it. 

Bussing about Castilla y Leon part 1: Avila

This is my first post for some time.  I don’t wish to make excuses, but I have been rather busy.  Completing the tender design for my last project, with an issue date the week before Easter, has occupied most of both my time and my thoughts for almost all of 2013 to date.  Having finally delivered it, it felt like I was waking up and returning to normal just as the world outside began to emerge from its winter slumber.  It was time to get out of the city.

If you’re reading this, you probably saw the Facebook commentary. As if it were necessary, let me tell you more.   Since I originally wrote this two months ago, you’ve probably forgotten anyway.

After the deadline, Easter loomed, and my Spanish colleagues prepared to return to their respective pueblos to spend time with their families. I realised that this four-day weekend would be one of my best opportunities to explore the country outside the capital.  The last year has gone by at a frightening pace, with more time spent in airports than at leisure in Spain, and I now found myself suddenly at the halfway point of my assignment. With every available holiday dedicated to the wedding I am left with dwindling opportunities to make the most of my experience here. 

With this in mind, I didn’t let my lack of available travelling companions deter me, and got to work on finding a destination.  What with the aforementioned busyness, however, I didn’t start to plan until the week beforehand.  Despite having been to Spain over Easter and seen some of the Semana Santa celebrations before, I severely underestimated the importance of that week and the associated dearth of accommodation or transport.  The dream of a sun-kissed break to the beach down south was short-lived, so I settled on a quieter area right on Madrid’s doorstep: Castilla y Leon.

On the Thursday morning I stuffed a few things in a rucksack, bought a bus ticket and booked a night in an Avila hotel, and then set off with no clear plan of what the weekend held.  The big camera, guide book and my sketchbook made up most of my luggage.

Avila, or Steak Town, as I shall henceforth be calling it, is a beautiful walled medieval city.  There’s the odd ramshackle bit – the bus station is a touch post-apocalyptic and there are few places where I’ve seen so many ruined shells of buildings within the city – and I wonder if these are signs of suffering from la crisis or the wider migration away from this area.  I understand that many villages are slowly dying as their people abandon them, and certainly as I travelled further from Madrid I saw more and more empty buildings left for the elements to reclaim.

Going into the cathedral was a mixed experience, as although they’ve screened off the cloister with ugly perspex sheeting and replaced real candles with rather less evocative battery powered fakes, the timing of my visit meant that the nave was filled with the processional floats of Semana Santa.  These colourful renderings of Biblical personages are interesting displays of craftmanship, but leave me feeling either totally godless or at best extremely Protestant, as do the processions themselves.  I respect the solemnity but remain disappointingly unmoved.

What I did really appreciate was the speckled red apse built into the city’s fortifications…<look at pictures and describe further>. In a small museum off to one side, amongst the ecclesiastical finery and religious paraphernalia I came across several huge illustrated cantora.  These are essentially monk’s hymn books, with medieval written music, which given my recent reading (In the Name of the Rose – lots of detailed descriptions of monastic life and illustration) and singing in a choir (reading sheet music for the first time in years) were of particular interest.  I spent much longer than I might otherwise have done poring over minutely detailed flowers in the borders of the pages and trying to decipher the musical notation before skimming past the other displayed finery to continue round the city.

 

The other big-hitter of Avila (aside from face-sized, flavourful steaks washed down with very nice red wine) is the city walls, half of the perimeter of which can be accessed.  Where better to sit sketching for an hour in blustery springtime conditions than the most exposed position for miles around?  I duly climbed to the highest point I could find, one of the wall’s turrets slightly above the bustle of the bank holiday tourist crowds, and settled myself down.  It’s a good way to slow my pace when alone, although when finished I felt dazed and tired: as I finally paused all the fatigue of the preceding weeks washed over me.  I headed back to the hotel for a little rest.

Darkness fell, and the streets filled up.  Avila is well known for its Semana Santa processions, and the floats from the cathedral were brought out through the city streets by their hooded attendants, watched by large crowds in a scene repeated, with some variations in style, in cities and towns across Spain throughout the week.

The obvious next step the following morning was the next city to the West: Salamanca.

Icelandic Inspiration: here's one I wrote earlier

My first blog post wasn't the first thing I wrote this year.  The idea of writing the blog in the first place really stems from how much I enjoyed writing a short piece about Iceland, specifically the concert hall on the waterfront in Rekjavik.  Here it is for your enjoyment.

I’d never really thought about going to Iceland.  I had joked about it, when the economy crashed in 2009 – it had always been so expensive, so now was surely the time to visit – but I hadn’t planned anything in earnest.

Then one day I was in a tube station in London, I forget which, but I think I was on my way home from a trip to Paris.  I’m always particularly susceptible to planning new adventures as the previous one finishes, so when I saw the poster advertising cheap Northern Lights packages to Iceland I immediately resolved to look into it and knew exactly who I was going to take.  Within hours of getting home I had been on the website and was on the phone to my Mum; once upon a time I’d promised to take her on a Norwegian Fjords cruise to see the Aurora Borealis, but the time and the money had never appeared, so here was my chance to make it up to her.

This time, I booked it, and we were off to Iceland.  I didn’t even know how much it meant to her... until the excitement started to build and my 61 year-old mother was like a child again in the back seat of the car, barely able to contain herself as we drove to the airport on the much anticipated day of departure.  That’s when I learned about Surtsey, the island that appeared from the sea, and more of the land of volcanic wonder that had so long held my Mum fascinated.

Before we had even left the airport building, my fiancé was despairing as the two of us paused to marvel at the glimpses of mountains through cleverly placed windows and to stroke the beautifully smooth stones and superbly finished concrete.  We had hired a car, so we set off away from the tourist crowd (such as it was) and into the bleakness of the lava fields, on the way to the blue lagoon.  This uneven expanse of black boulders, spewn so recently from the inner layers of the earth, stands silently testament to the awesome fury of nature in this place where the crust is a fraction of the thickness of our own stable land’s.  Its otherworldliness is also a fitting introduction and backdrop to the steamy spookiness of the Blue Lagoon and its ice-blue, impenetrably cloudy waters.

We watched the sky begin to darken, and lights around the lagoon twinkle into life, before we made our way onward to Iceland’s capital city, Reykjavik.  A town of less than 200,000 souls, it is hardly the bustling metropolis you’d expect of a capital, but it has an outpost charm, as we discovered when we explored it the following day.  You feel a long way from anywhere as you gaze out across the bay at the snowy peaks, backed by the brightly painted corrugated iron that predominates in the town’s buildings – apparently most of the early country’s building materials drifted in off the tide from more prosperous, more hospitable parts of the world.

 

 

Reykjavik’s waterfront has a new gem, however, that is all Icelandic and a million miles from driftwood construction.  Although the Harpa concert hall’s facade of tessellated glass hexagons purports to be a reference to the volcanic activity on the island (or so the website tells us), its situation next to the harbour and its fishing boats help it to evoke a much more fish-like image.  It positively glimmers in the grey wintry light, and stands in bold opposition to the natural backdrop of the bay without detracting from it – a feat not often successfully accomplished by modern architecture.  Once you’ve passed under the dizzying three-dimensional cladding to gain entry to the building, you enter a concourse space whose size is tempered by the projecting masses of the auditoria and the enclosing planes of the stairs and walkways that give access to them.  It doesn’t feel as large as it is, and the parallel walls of black concrete leading straight through the building to another perfectly framed view of the bay cause you not to care: instead you are drawn through for yet more quiet contemplation.  The route up through the building offers more of the same: spectacular views, cunningly accommodated seating areas on the skew stair that hugs the front wall, more walkways, more perfectly executed concrete.  The walls look like lava, but lavastone is too weak and porous to support such a building.  I imagine there is a volcanic additive used to achieve the colour, but in terms of a technical achievement these walls are truly remarkable (more detail available on request), with hardly a blemish on them.

 

The following day we set out into the wilderness which, in Iceland, is not in short supply even on the main tourist routes.  This is particularly true in winter, and we soon discovered why as the mist descended and we found ourselves enveloped in whiteness – land and sky blending into one with only the road ahead of us keeping us on track.  Eventually, following the guidance of a friendly local in the deserted coffee shop that serves as tourist centre for Þingvellir National Park, we left the car and made our way up into a fissure formed by the tearing apart of the Eurasian and North American plates.  There we came upon the Oxarafoss waterfall – we looked up at the river Oxara pouring over the edge of the North American plate and into the teetering plain of no-man’s land where we stood, a deserted borderland that is inexorably sinking away from the continental plates at either side of it. The water continued to steam and rumble as we pondered the existential crisis that this placed us in.

Further along we saw evidence of volcanic activity bubbling close under the surface in a field of geysers at Geysir.  The fascinating part was the range of effects we could observe, from the humble bubbling puddles of mud on the edge of the path to the roped off crowd-pleaser Strokkur that spouted 25m into the air with frightening regularity.  The steady wind blew the steam across the surface of the ground, lending the geyser field that same ethereal quality we observed back at the Blue Lagoon: perhaps it’s an intrinsic part of areas of geothermal activity, that because they’re so rare they appear mysterious and alien to us.

Finally, we pushed onward to Gullfoss.  This monstrous double-dip waterfall had created its own canyon in the ice... and there words fail me.  You had to be there.

We didn’t see the Northern Lights.  I almost don’t even care.  Iceland didn’t disappoint, and it’s hard to get stressed in a country so intent on getting you to relax and have a soak in their hot pools.

Still, I suppose I’d better start saving for that cruise...

On the Road with Jack, and the trouble with Istanbul

Today I feel normal, relaxed and for the first time in too long I am not tired.  It has been a peaceful Sunday so far: no alarm to wake me, freshly squeezed orange juice, coffee and a leisurely chat over breakfast, followed by an hour's pilates and a bit of Spanish study.  I've luxuriated in the novelty of having the time to do these things.

Perhaps fittingly, my literary companion for the dizzying whirl of international travel has been On the Road by Jack Kerouac. This is mostly about the heady excitement of drug-fuelled, nonsensical voyages to go and "dig" American cities and "get kicks".  For me it's not been easy to get into, or empathise, and the impact of prose style is I think lessened with its age - its own iconic status probably means there has been too much imitation since to make it stand out.  That said, I'm beginning to be won over, and there are flashes of descriptive brilliance.  There are some parallels between my struggle to like the book and my struggle with Istanbul, probably much more than between my style of travel and Jack's.


The hectic writing style undoubtedly contributed to my mood the day in Istanbul I spent walking through the darkening city after work, pondering what it was that I just couldn't like about the place.  Perversely, it was as I weaved through the commuting crowds and choked on the fumes of queueing cars that this changed; following this train of thought down to the Bosphorus shore I really began to fall for the city I'd been so keen not to return to.



It was the man with the bread in a bag on a stick that started it. He was walking amongst the cars, selling bread rolls to the motorists - a step above the 'drive-in' bread kiosks they have at every street corner. It amused me, so I took a photo.  What followed was a flurry of scarcely coherent note-taking and bad photography, that summed up everything I thought and felt about the place.







It went like this (with some editing into full sentences):

Man selling bread on a stick in a bag. Roses and water [also being sold to the motorists].  Sirens, bus queues and pavement bikers [one of whom in particular had mobile phone wedged between head and helmet].  Murky sunset and the heavy unidentified floral scent breaking through the traffic fumes.  Kebabs and tea and headscarves.  Massive signs for English schools.  Hills and more hills.  Ataturk watching you eat [his picture is everywhere, including our office canteen].  Broken pavements and wonky steps.  Unaccountably falling for a place once you've freed yourself of trying to like it.  Walking the wrong way out of the metro and trying to remember the words for yes and no.

Ferry bow waves splashing the pavements as an old man sells books on the floor, people fish and grown men try bike tricks.  Commuters stream towards the ferry terminal, onto buses and into cars.  Hard to string together a single coherent thought from the boiling mass, and work out what I'm trying to say about this place.

Travelling is too often this edited and sanitised version of the world.  I see that in Madrid when I walk the same stretch of pavement hundreds of times and see a hundred different faces framed in the same photo; I saw the same in Florence.  I've appeared in the background of who knows how many strangers' favourite holiday photos. 

That's not the Istanbul I've seen, which is not the same as the Istanbul I've heard people rave about. At root it's just a city like any other, the stage for people's lives, and though that has it's own magic it requires a different kind of appreciation, more tempered and considered.  Istanbul on a mundane level is hard to love - choked up with cars, you take your life in your hands every time you cross a road, and there are simply too many people.  However, it does just have this energy, this vibrancy, and as night falls the place just twinkles.

 

I came round to thinking that the sheen of tourism is ok, really.  People go on holiday to escape their day to day life.  Maybe the illusion that everywhere is better than home doesn't necessarily produce the ideal perspective for appreciating your everyday life, but I'm glad they enjoy their trips.  And I came round to Istanbul.

What Country Is This Anyway? Coming home.

It's a bizarre sensation, coming 'home' to somewhere that was where you thought you were going on your adventure to.  We got to the airport, and suddenly the check-in queue was full of Spaniards. I understood some of what was being said around me for the first time in a month.

Coming back the contrast was so marked that I felt more relaxed and comfortable here in Madrid than I ever did before going to Turkey.  Don't get me wrong, my Spanish hasn't magically advanced through disuse (quite the reverse), it's just I'm not so scared of using it now.

On the way home today I started to think about feeling lost, and endlessly displaced - wondering whether I fit even back home home (Sheffield, that is, at least for now.  It's not even where I'm originally from).  Geek that I am, I got stuck on the word displacement and started thinking very literally about the definition of the word in physics terms.  Turns out I do remember some of it.  Which is a relief given my profession.

Displacement is a vector, defined by both the distance travelled from a starting point and the direction. Velocity is then speed plus direction, the rate of change of displacement (the gradient on a graph of distance/time, or dx/dt) and acceleration the rate of change of velocity (the gradient on your velocity/time graph, or curvature of the distance/time one - dv/dt or d2x/dt2 respectively).  Bouncing between three countries, I'm like a conker on a string - always going at ridiculous speed but still somehow constantly accelerating (if you don't follow, ask, and I'll draw you a picture) - so it's no wonder I'm feeling dizzy.

Nothing is certain, constant and normal.  If you have no base to work from, what on earth do you say to anyone?  You talk about travel, yourself, or the extremely abstract.  Then everybody gets bored and wanders off.  Must work on that.

Speaking of conkers - Autumn is upon us.  The extreme summer heat has left Madrid and a comfortably temperate environment has supplanted it. As I crossed the park this evening it was starting to get dark and the clouds were bright pink against the fading blue, wispy bits stretching across the horizon like candy floss.  I don't have a picture for you though, sorry.