Recent sights/sounds:
-- Beginning last weekend: People with suitcases. Everywhere. Also, an upsurge of foreign languages overhead around the city center. Both those things, sure signs that Easter vacation has been approaching at a gallop.
-- This last Wednesday, at the gym: a she-male. Not your garden variety gender-bender -- an amazon. Big, blonde, impeccably done up in workout gear. Clearly sporting physical attributes of both denominations. With a baby-face, appearing strangely incongruent on that buff physique. An image I found oddly disorienting, coming as it did before my first espresso of the day.
-- Today, as I left the gym: an elderly couple, looking to be well into their 60s. Walking together arm in arm, dressed in Sunday clothes, her carrying a sprig of something green. He had apparently just murmured into her ear -- something intimate, perhaps romantic. Her cheeks showed color, she radiated pleasure, her smile reflected the young woman who still lived within that body. A great moment.
-- I go through streaks of finding money. Coins, bills, you name it. Happens a lot. This morning on the way to pick up the morning paper, I saw pieces of the paper in the gutter that resembled bills, saw they were just wastepaper but found myself feeling that it would not come as a surprise to stumble across some real money. Within 60 seconds, a five euro bill appeared before my feet. Then, half an hour ago, I found a wallet in this building's stairwell. Containing credit cards, forty euros -- and again, not feeling like a surprise that I'd be the one to come across it. That pile of cash is just passing through -- I've already posted a notice down by the main entrance telling the owner to stop by. In the meantime, I'm having fun being a cash magnet.
Madrid, te quiero.
rws 10:21 AM [+]
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