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Tuesday, January 22, 2002 Tuesday in Madrid, mid-January, looking and feeling like November in New England. Cool, crisp air. Clouds and a brilliant lowering sun combine to provide autumnal late-afternoon light. One of my favorite kind of days. A friend who lives near Norfolk, England, wrote me that two days ago they endured the kind of stormy weather that features wind-driven rain moving nearly parallel to the ground. According to the Weather Underground, recent temperatures in northern Vermont have ranged between the teens and the lower 30's Fahrenheit, snow falling and accumulating now and then. Here, well, the temperature is in the lower 50's, the conditions gentle, though local weather people keep claiming that rain may be moving in. We'll see. For those who might be considering a move to Madrid, I think I've come up with formula that will, if not guarantee long-term success in changing countries, at least guarantee entertainment along the way. To wit: 1) Fly to Madrid. Bring luggage and $$$$$. 2) Find a flop, short-term or long-term. 3) Enroll in a language school. Take classes. 4) Get to know some of your fellow students. Go out to dinner with them. 5) Prepare to spew laughter-propelled liquids from your nostrils once or twice during the course of the evening. I've arrived at this formula after months of painstaking research that culminated this last Saturday night in a dinner featuring myself and an international cast -- Pedro (from Portugal), his sweetie, Sarah (from Barcelona), Philip (from Germany), Richard (from the States) and his sweetie, Carmen (from the south of Spain). A long, sloppy evening of excellent food and several bottles of sparkling hard cider at Casa Mingo. I enjoy watching groups of people interact, any group of people. It's a whole other experience when they're all from different cultures, in this case all having experience of some length with cultures different from their own. Pedro held entertainingly forth on whatever came to mind, Sarah contributed as well, a bit more quietly. (They're both engineers, intelligent and simpático.) On the other side of Pedro sat multilingual Carmen, across from her sweetie, Richard, who, when he wasn't pouring sidra so that half of it wound up in Philip's lap, blabbered happily about whatever came to mind, getting a bit red in the face as he waxed more and more enthusiastic, punctuating a rant or description with the all-purpose Spanish swear word 'joder' (the J sounds like an H roughly and forcefully pronounced at the back of the throat), stretching it out a bit and inserting insistent pauses so it comes out like "¡JOOO..... DER!" Philip took everything with robust high spirits, deep voice and German accent audible no matter how intense the racket produced by everyone else. I shovelled down roast chicken and the best chorizo I've ever eaten (cooked in cider, I'm told, so that the fat leaches out), to the point that Pedro and Philip counseled me to pause and breathe, Richard chiming in more emphatically. ("¡RESPIRA! ¡¡¡RES-PI-RA!!!") The two women observed the four males with patience and forbearance. Casa Mingo: a restaurant I believe was originally (and may still be) run by a family from Asturias, one of Spain's northwest provinces, a region known for natural beauty, apples and cider, the kind that's about 4.5% alcohol. (For some reason, the alcohol in sidra doesn't make a dent in me so I'm able to guzzle it with impunity.) It's a sizeable, rustic-looking joint, walls lined with bottles of sidra on one end, large kegs on the others. The seating consists of brown tables and chairs that are moved about to adapt to the number of diners, encouraging big communal feeding frenzies. Chickens cook in banks of roasting ovens and if you arrive for dinner after 9:30 p.m., expect to wait for a table -- they don't take reservations. It's enormously popular and often fills to noisy overflowing capacity with natives and tourists. One interesting thing -- many write-ups I've seen about Casa Mingo in on-line Madrid travel/dining guides seems to contain at least one notable inaccuracy. The example I used as a link earlier in this entry mentions on one hand that the food is inexpensive, yet manages to calculate that the average diner should expect to pay in the neighborhood of $2000. (Those freakin', slippery decimal points!) At the end of a night of fairly professional gorging, including at least three bottles of sidra, our tab came to 60 euros –- 10 euros apiece, around $9.00. Post-dinner, we made our way back to the Metro station at Principe Pio, Pedro and Philip bellowing national anthems, where we grabbed a train. The plan, I thought, was to return to Chueca and go somewhere for a bit of liquid refreshment before calling it a night. Clearly, I'd missed out on some critical part of the decision-making process because at la Plaza de España, the other five suddenly got off the train. They're leaving, I start to follow Philip out then backtrack, not sure what's going on, the doors of the train suddenly close and the train pulls out, my last sight of them is Philip doubled over with laughter. I'm laughing pretty hard myself until I turn around and find everyone in the coach watching me, silent, expressionless. That gets me laughing even harder, though I manage to stifle it in time to disembark at the next station. You can't plan that kind of entertainment. rws 1:07 PM [+] |