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Wednesday, April 16, 2003 I woke up and made my slow, yawning way outside this morning to find that Madrid has begun closing down for the long weekend. A fair number of restaurants, bars and tiendas have already shut their doors for the entire week, leaving polite notices taped up explaining that they've bolted -- the phrase here is ‘de vacaciones' or, as I saw on one notice this morning, ‘de vacaciones personales.' Yesterday's local news programs talked about the amount of traffic leaving the city and about the growing holiday traffic around the country, tallying up the highway fatalities that have already begun to accumulate. This morning's Metro ride to the gym was less packed than usual and street traffic is way down from the usual midweek goofiness. The gym itself seemed far quieter than normal. In fact, the city in general is feeling quite a bit more tranquil overall. Clearly, loads of folks have scampered off to other part of the peninsula, with more set to follow today, tonight, tomorrow a.m., a certainty visible in the increase of people making their way through the streets lugging overnight bags or pulling wheeled suitcases, heading toward the Metro, bound for points unknown. Tomorrow and Friday are official holidays, meaning here on the local level that lots more stores and places to eat/drink will shut down. The news kiosk down the street in Chueca Plaza had a sign up today warning its customers that they'll be closed tomorrow through Sunday. And here in the building, a sign has been tacked to the front door since Monday notifying everyone that there will be no garbage collection tonight through Friday night (trash collection normally happens every night of the week). Of course I blanked on that and brought a sack of refuse down with me when I left this morning, to find the building's cleaning woman had taken in the trash container and locked it away, forcing me to use a dumpster down the street like a bad citizen. The weather in these parts, normally a joy at this time of year, has been less than user-friendly lately, rain continuing to wipe out Easter Week (Semana Santa) processions in some of the southern cities (TV news programs showing images of weeping, frustrated Andalucian Catholics) and high winds/gray skies/cool temperatures/damp conditions making vacation life less than ideal in the north and along much of the long Spanish coast. Here in the capital, clouds have brought rain at times, blue skies at others, the temperature sliding manically up and down with each change. Local life stoically carries on, though it's clear that local folk are less than euphoric about the general weather wackiness. The upside is that the land around here, by now usually well into the slow turn to the thousands of shades of brown and tan that characterize the warm season, is green and pretty, the reservoirs nearly at capacity. The construction site across the street has gone into a new phase after weeks of relative quiet in which work by hand was done around the periphery. A few days back, a front-end/rear-end loader showed up and began the process of excavating a far deeper hole than currently exists, work whose hours have slowly expanded until yesterday they went from 8 a.m. until well past 6 p.m., minus the traditional half-hour 11 a.m. break and the 2-3 p.m. lunch hour. The morning start-up has developed the steadiness of an alarm clock -- 8 a.m., the machine's motor starts up; at 8:15, they get down to business. A double-length dump truck appears in the street in front of our building, the loader slowly fills it with soil/debris while a worker stands at its rear by a metal grill that gets dragged out into the street while the loading process is underway, so that traffic has no illusions about what's up and must veer off in other directions instead of parking behind the truck in growing annoyance. When the truck disappears to dump its load, the loader works around the lot loosening up soil, creating great banks of dirt to go in the next truckload. It would be fine with me if this routine were interrupted by the holiday weekend. We'll see. [Update, 1:20 p.m.: the loader has been shut down and parked in the lot's rear corner, far earlier than the usual lunch stoppage. Pardon me while I go make some fast burnt offerings to the stop-construction-work-for-the-long-weekend gods.] This morning: I head down into the Metro, get into a train, winding up near a 30-something man in business clothes who stands with one hand on the overhead support bar, the other holding an English-language copy of The Catcher In The Rye, which he appears to be reading intently. He looks up, briefly meeting my eyes, his expression surly, then looks back down at the book. Entering the Nuñez de Balboa Metro station, post-gym, I hear the sound of a street musician who frequently positions himself at the bottom of the long escalators that span the distance between street level and the concourse leading to the trains. A 20-something male with a fine voice and a pleasing guitar sound, this morning doing a pretty damn good rendition of "Imagine," a song that's come to feel far more meaningful to me in recent weeks, especially in light of its being banned by American radio. I drop some money into his instrument case, continue on down to the train platform, where the first bench I pass hosts a couple huddled close together, her giving him a long, sustained kiss on the neck, him accepting it with eyes closed. This afternoon, walking along Gran Vía, traffic -- both automotive and pedestrian -- that would normally be heavy and frenzied had thinned out to near Christmas Eve sparsity. The city was quiet enough that there were moments in which silence fell and the sound of church bells floated through the mild air. There will be Easter processions threading their way through different parts of the city center during the next few nights. If the one I saw in Granada last year is anything to go by, they'll be worth checking out. On with the day. rws 1:00 PM [+]
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