This morning: woke up to the sound of military aircraft streaking over the barrio, something that continued every few minutes as I stumbled, half-awake, through shower, shaving, etc.
A lovely, cool a.m., awash in sunlight, streets alive with activity. Found my way to a neighborhood caffeine joint, sat sipping at espresso, nibbling at a croissant, the air around me thick with the sounds of conversation and the radio playing Lovefool by the Cardigans, the mix punctuated now and then by the shriek of passing jet planes.
Since arriving on Tuesday, I've found myself in a kind of disorientation I don't remember experiencing before, the being here feeling dreamlike, slightly unreal. My sleep patterns during the last two or three weeks have been all over the place, at times waking me anywhere between 1 and 4 a.m., me not getting back to sleep for two, three, sometimes four hours, other times sleeping blissfully through the night, coming to with the feeling of being in the eye of my own personal hurricane. Here I've slipped back into the pattern of staying up late, coming to consciousness during the night to sounds of revelers in the street below, drifting in and out like that, my eyes finally opening for good at an hour far later than my wake-up time in Vermont.
Monday: hopped a late-morning bus packed with a strange mix of travelers, the ride somehow feeling like time spent in transatlantic steerage. An hour down the road, they dumped us at White River Junction, the connecting bus not there, leaving us milling about in strangely summery October sunlight as a Greyhound employee appeared periodically to notify us that the wait would be longer than we'd been previously told. At some point, a bus collected us, New England scenery slipped by, I eventually found myself in an airline terminal -- checking in, waiting, boarding, then mysteriously far above a dark, broad ocean. Eating airline food, listening to the conversation of a extensive group of Dutch 20-something geeks seated near me, the male to my right outfitted in classically nerdy fashion, clothing colors strikingly mismatched, a pocket protector the only missing element.
Many weeks back, I booked the flight with KLM, which meant flying with Northwest Airlines for the trip's first leg. Next day the news about Northwest's bankruptcy hit the news. Surprisingly, I felt no panic, little concern, having the distinct feeling that all would be well. As it turned out, the only sign of the airline's troubles was a brief, sad impression on boarding of the craft's interior appearing a bit dog-eared, in need of attention. The rest of the flight passed without problem. My last crossing had been on Lufthansa, the planes equipped archaically when it came to video, old cathode-ray TV's that angled down from the ceiling, one every several rows. Each seat in the Northwest flight had its own small LCD screen with abundant choices of what to watch. Somewhere during the early-morning hours, after drifting in and out of sleep, I discovered Bejeweled among the videogame choices. The rest of that part of the journey passed in a contented blur.
Dawn, Schiphol Airport, Amsterdam. All shops and cafés open, the terminal cunningly designed to suck as much cash as possible from passing travelers during the between-flight hike. The slowest passport/customs checkpoint I've ever experienced, or perhaps it just felt that way to my groggy sensory apparatus. The wait for the next flight seemed eerily reminiscent of the wait for the second bus, punctuated by sporadic apologetic announcements of delays. When I finally slid into my seat on the plane, I found myself next to a slender, attractive 30ish Spanish woman using the time to do her nails, a brief whiff of acetone cutting through the mid-trip fatigue. Nice person, turned out. We got talking, my Castellano clicked in, the flight passed quickly, easily.
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Windowshopping along la Calle de Barquillo, Madrid (with a ghost of political graffiti past -- "[Now ex-president] Aznar, Ignoramus -- Resign"):
Madrid, te quiero.
rws 5:52 AM [+]
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