|
Friday, January 31, 2003 The temperature here in Madrid has taken something of a dive during the last few days, sliding from sweet, springlike levels to chillier, more seasonable depths. Cold, at times with a blustery edge. Last night, as I shuffled in the direction of bed sometime after 2 a.m., thunder crackled outside, sharp and sudden. A quick peek through a nearby window revealed rain coming down in torrential quantities. I wondered if that meant a warm front had moved in, and cheerfully went to bed dreaming about days of vernal temperatures, of flowers blooming and birds chirping, of women in warm weather clothing. (Sorry -- I'm hetero.) Until I raised the windowshades this morning and beheld the glazing of snow on the roof tiles of the building across this narrow street. (Aiiieeee!!!!) Snow! In Madrid! The first time it's had the bad manners to show its pallid face during my time here. I wasn't always snow-intolerant. I used to love winter. January and February of 2000 in northern Vermont took the bloom off that rose, a nine or ten week period during which snow literally fell every two to three days, with accumulations of anywhere from a few inches to a foot or more. At the end of which I'd had it. And this last November in northern Vermont -- a month in which snow fell every single #%^@#&*!!! day, mostly as flurries, though with snowfalls of 2-6" every few days -- didn't help. I can still appreciate the beauty of it – let's face it, snow coming down is so pretty, so much fun – but I need a break. So the appearance of frozen precipitation in the normally-snowless Spanish capital caught my attention. Luckily, the sun shone in a cloudless sky this morning, despite a cold, unkind wind. Which made today's field trip to the monster Ikea store in one of the city's outlying ‘burbs (Alcorcón) less arduous than it might have been. Today is the last day of Spain's January sales (a month-long occasion the Spaniards take to as if it were a national sporting event), I've been thinking of getting a living room chair to match the deceptively comfortable bentwood bugger I picked up when I first moved in here. Last night I stopped in at the Ikea-Spain's webpage, found what I was looking for -- the Poäng-model arm chair, a funky-looking (far more eye-candyish in person than on the webpage, BTW), surprisingly body-friendly piece of furniture at a price I couldn't refuse -- dragged myself out of bed this morning at a respectable hour and made the Metro-and-two-buses ride out there. The two previous times I made this consumer's pilgrimage, I made the mistake of doing it on Saturdays, when the store was completely, wildly overrun with shoppers. A weekday morning turns out to be much more civilized, far less like a cross between a crowd of sharks in a feeding frenzy and the WWF. Made the purchase, arranged to have the chair delivered this evening, returned home. Sometime within the next four hours it will arrive and my living space will suddenly become a bit more liveable. Isn't life fun? (Just say yes.) Most of Madrid's buildings tend not to have drainage pipes for rain/snowmelt, so that the day's bright sunshine produced a narrowly focused sidewalk-rainfall, the water coming down just far enough out from the buildings to make it nearly impossible to walk without getting, er, peed on. Unless the sidewalk was good and wide. Which led to pedestrian traffic even more erratic and unpredictable than normal (and that's saying something here) as people veered wildly back and forth in an attempt to avoid being forced under the constant sprinkling by oncoming pedestrians trying to do the same. Pretty entertaining. Despite all that, the roof tiles of the building across the street have retained enough snow to look like a photo from an artsy-fartsy Christmas card. It's January 31, 2002. February shows up in a few hours. And the days roll on. rws 12:51 PM [+]
Comments:
Post a Comment
|