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.