City Living

So, here I am, finally settling down into the place that will be my home for the next year, if not more. I arrived in Madrid a little less than three weeks ago. In my first few days, I was still here with Rui, staying in a hostel where our bedroom had a balcony on Plaza Mayor. Not bad for 17€ a night… Having been through the city several times before, I showed Rui and her visiting college friends what I knew. We went out to El Escorial and Valle de los Caidos, the former a proud symbol of Spain’s imperial past and the latter the unpopular but undeniably impressive monument of Franco’s dictatorship (that includes an underground basilica as large as St. Peter’s in Rome). We indulged in churros con chocolate and tried out some of Spain’s most well-known staples, jamón ibérico and queso manchego. However, tourist time had to come to an end, and before I knew it, it was time for the Fulbright orientation.

However touristy I may have been in those first few days, I did have one landmark achievement: finding an apartment. I’d been talking for a few months with a Spanish friend of mine about where I ought to live, and as it turned out, he was in the market for a new apartment as well. Thus, within hours of arriving in Madrid, I met up with Javi to look at our first option. After standing for 15 minutes at the entrance of the wrong building, we didn’t feel too confident, but it turned out that this first option was also our last. As soon as I walked in, I knew I wanted it. Let me preface this with the fact that my apartment in Alicante felt like a hospital. The floors were cold tile, the walls paper thin and plain, the shower tiny (with a plastic curtain that got water everywhere and no place to hang the showerhead), and worst of all, there was no living room. While I adored my roommates and miss them to this day, I knew I wanted something totally different.

My new place is actually an attic apartment, which I was a bit worried about at first, being over 6 feet tall. Our landlord knew this, and thus had the departing resident hang around for our visit. He was even taller than me, and put my fears to rest telling me that within days “it’s like the Matrix. You just avoid the low parts without even thinking about it.” While it means that parts of the apartment aren’t really usable for me, I love it. The wooden ceiling beams, the wood floors, the stone walls, etc. all add great character that my Alicante apartment never had. We even have granite countertops and a DISHWASHER! It was exactly what I’d been hoping for. Sure my jumping abilities are severely limited by the fact that the ceiling is less than a foot from my head, but I can live with it. (And the shower is fantastic. It has jets that spray your back.)

Kitchen

Living room

And the neighborhood is the best part. We’re living in Lavapiés, the immigrant barrio of central Madrid. It’s in the middle of everything: the Prado, Atocha, Reina Sofia, Plaza Mayor, La Latina, Puerta del Sol… All of them are less than a 15 minute walk away. It is also a very cheap neighborhood with lots of cool bookstore cafes and the best variety of food in Madrid.  Everywhere you look, there are halaal markets with ingredients that are impossible to find anywhere else. Those of you who have lived in Spain before know that the hours of operation for supermarkets and such can be quite frustrating. Here, it’s fantastic. Immigrants are willing to work far longer hours, so I can go to the fruit market next to my building at almost any hour of the day. Sure, it’s a bit rough around the edges, but I couldn’t be happier here.

Before long, I’ll update you on school and the Fulbright community, but for now I’ll just say that as I take the bus home from my school in the suburbs and see the Cuatro Torres (four towers) that make up the entirety of Madrid’s “skyline” I’ve already begun thinking of it as home, something that never happened so quickly in my other experiences abroad.

Dirty little secret: The towers are nowhere near the city center.  This ain't America, y'all.