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Monday, December 10, 2001 An overcast December afternoon in Madrid, breaks in the clouds providing tantalizing glimpses of blue sky, muffled sunlight. As they do periodically, the City sent out a crew to clear the posters off the wall across the street. First thing this morning (meaning, in local terms, somewhere around 10 a.m.), a pump truck materialized, they got to work. Between manual scraping and spraying of pressurized water, the entire length of wall on this street got cleared off by lunchtime, looking, well, not virginal exactly, but chaste. As immaculate as something that's endured countless generations of local advertising wars can get. Down to basic gray and black, nary a speck of paper visible, at least along this street's stretch of the structure. A three-or-so-meter length extends around the corner, completely be-postered ["Shakira -- la nueva CD, ya a la venta" ('the new CD, now on sale'); "Sauna Men -- para gente joven" ('for young people' -- that accompanied by an image of muscular, highly-chiseled black guy from the waist up, the poster getting its message across without stooping to subtlety]. They left that alone. I headed off to lunch shortly before two. An hour later, fully one-third of the cleared wall had been reclaimed by a solid block of posters. How the Spaniards got hung with a reputation for laziness is beyond me. They are as industrious as all get-out when they put their minds to something. One of the first harbingers of Christmas here is the annual fair in la Plaza Mayor. The plaza: an immense cobblestone courtyard, enclosed by a huge, four-sided building, built in a restrained Baroque style. (Restrained because the era's King/Church wouldn't allow anything as expressive as unrestrained Baroque.) A focal point of tourism -- during the warm season, many of the cafés, tapas joints and watering holes that line the building's ground floor fill large swaths of the cobblestoned ground with tables and chairs. Off to one side, populist art (caricature-style portraits, variations of the Elvis-on-black-velvet school of painting and pastels) does its best to generate revenue, at other points around the plaza musicians and dancers (flamenco, tango) of various skill levels carry on. When the calendar turns to the early days of December, long rows of booths fill the plaza's space, festooned with strings of white lights, appearing like a sizeable craft fair. Around the plaza's perimeter, vendors sell Christmas trees and food, street entertainers hold forth. The general atmosphere: festive, crowded, bustling. Last year, a woman I was dating hauled me downtown one evening to get an eyeful of the Christmastime version of the plaza. It's an institution, the fair -- well attended, that night, by Madrileños out to get the holiday season hooha underway. The crowded streets that surround and feed into La Plaza Mayor are narrow and winding, medieval style -- at times contrasting strangely with the shops that line them, a melange of old-style businesses, bars, cafeterías, fast-food franchises. It's a great scene, especially if one is not bothered by having to walk at a slower pace than one might hanker for. (Madrileños often exhibit a tendency to take up as much of the sidewalk, stairway or walkway as they can, moving at a speed that's in sharp contrast with their general tempo when, for instance, they're behind the wheel of a car. In the Metro, as a train pulls into a station, on-board passengers get up and crowd around the doors well before the train comes to a standstill, positioning themselves to get out first so they can hustle to the stairs where they then spread out and slow down. I can't say what's actually going on with that, but it sometimes comes across as a communal display of passive-aggression.) As we neared the plaza, the crowd intensified, squeezing together to pass through an archway into the plaza itself where the whole scene spread itself out before us, looking and feeling pretty fine. I took a moment to gaze around as people flowed by, then headed with Victoria for the rows of booths. Expecting something akin to the holiday craft fairs that have become commonplace in the States, what I found was a whole different thing. The booths come in essentially four different varieties: three different versions of Christmas ornaments/doodads/tchotchkes (one dealing mostly in religious items, two dealing in more secular Christmas paraphernalia -- ornaments, toy trains, etc.) and one dealing in joke items -- wigs, goofy fake spectacles, plastic vomit, all that. And that was it. Those four types of booths, repeated over and over and over, vending essentially the same wares, up and down each aisle. Once the lack of variation became apparent, the thrill rapidly wore off. Times like that, I truly get how different this culture is from the one I grew up in. But the street entertainers were fun and the rest of the city center provided plenty of Christmas lights, crowds, decorations, and the normal staggering overabundance of places to eat and drink. Plus, I had good company to share it with. Madrid, romance, the holidays -- not a bad combo. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ It's now 5:30, well past the end of Madrid's lengthy lunch hour. The city crew has not returned to take on the rest of the wall. I'll be curious to see if they have the will to show up tomorrow and finish what is clearly a futile job. rws 1:17 PM [+] |