A typical day in Madrid

One of the reasons I wanted to move abroad was to live somewhere long enough for the place to sink in. I wanted to be changed. I wanted to adapt to the things around me. Vacations aren't really enough time to get the full effect of a place. I wanted to really live somewhere. I wanted to buy groceries and ride the metro, be annoyed and frustrated at times and become a local. I'm only a month in so I can't really say whether or not living here has made a permanent impact on me yet but I do know that I love it here.
The people have a lust for life you can taste. The culture is centered around living, not working. And although their economy is one of the worst in Europe at the moment, you could never tell by looking at them. My walk to the metro every morning takes me down a two-lane road separated by a wooded boulevard. I wake up early when the steam is still rising from the sidewalks as fruit and vegetable vendors hose off the walks in front of their shops. Open cafes line the street and offer café con leche, churros, zumo de naranja, and pan for breakfast. Students run to catch buses, parents lead their kids by the hand to their schools and the air is thick and fragrant like a birthday candle has just been blown out.
The metro is fast and efficient. It's clean and has color coded lines that make it easy to identify and remember. I usually only wait about five minutes for one to come rushing into the station.
My school is located in Carabanchel in the southern district of Madrid across the river. The neighborhood is working class but lively. I found a kebab place across from my school that sells thick lamb sandwiches in a white and brown sauce packed with lettuce. They bring it out to you steaming, cupped in a square of parchment paper. During lunch I usually grab a cana to go with it, a cheap half-pint sized cerveza. After my regular classes I head to some private ones located in different areas around Madrid. My last class is located twenty minutes form my apartment so I cut through Retiro park to get there.
Retiro park is a massive expanse of fountains, garden, glades, ponds, atriums, and cafes right down the street from me. I take any opportunity to pack a backpack with my laptop, some food, and a book and head there for a few hours.
After I cut through Retiro to my neighborhood I stop off at the mercado to grab dinner. A loaf of bread still warm from the oven, sliced jamon, olive oil, and a bottle of wine costs me three euros.
I go to sleep full, content, and tired.
You would think a month would be long enough for the honeymoon phase of living here to wear off but I still find more things I love about living here everyday.

Running with the bulls in Moralzarzal

The main street of Moral, you can see Cody, Jake, and I looking nervous there in the middle

I rubbed my hands together for warmth in the thin drizzle of rain and regretted not bringing a jacket. Multi-colored streamers flapped over the narrow street as young men smoked cigarettes nervously and laced up their shoes. The air smelled like coffee and beer from the cafes that were packed along the streets, their entrances now boarded up with thick wooden beams that stretched between iron fence posts. The posts are designed specifically for these fiestas and are there to keep shops, bars, and onlookers safe. People snapped photos and hunkered close together on top of the fences. Through the thickening rain I could see a white gate at the far end of the street. In the center was painted the rough outline of a bull. Suddenly, I heard a crash. The gate trembled for a second then settled. The bull run was about to begin.
Jake and Cody, my buddies from the BEDA program, and I had been invited to the pueblo of Moralzarzal by Greg, another professor who lived there and wanted to check out the town's week long fiesta and encierros, or bull runs. Sipping coffee on the forty-minute bus ride from Madrid, talking about running with the bulls seemed fun in an abstract, bucket-list kind of way. Cody and I joked about how close we would get to it and who would chicken out first. We had both grown up watching Real TV footage of the carnage at Pamplona every year when thousands of people descend on the city to drink and tempt fate with the torros. Shortly before leaving for Spain my Dad had sent me a youtube video compilation of the worst mano-y-torro clips to deliberately dissuade me from ever partaking.

Lacing up for the run

The good, or bad, part about this experience was that it was 9 o'clock in the morning when we arrived. The encierros were scheduled to begin in 30 minutes and Cody and I were stone cold sober. No liquid courage no warm us as we walked along the street and noticed dozens of police officers and paramedics in reflective yellow, standing behind the fences. We began talking strategy. What ifs. Maybe we should sit the first one out, you know, just see how it all goes down.
So we stood in the pouring rain. Trying not to shake from the rain and the low, ferocious bellowing emanating from beyond the white gate.
The way it works, two castrated bulls are herded through the streets from the bullring (plaza de torros) to the corral where the bulls are kept. Then the bull comes out of the gate and, ideally, follows the other bulls down the street and into the ring. The sound I heard next caused a ripple of excitement along the crowded street.
Bang!
The shot rang out and in the split second or so I had before I started running I realized with startling clarity that bulls are big.
Bulls are VERY big.
This one was pissed and running straight at me. In that moment I could see everything. The cords of muscle straining underneath it's slick hide. Its horns a foot and a half long and sharp. Rain slid off of them and onto the cobblestones as it shook its head, registering the street, the people, the confusing cacophony of sounds and sensations. Its eyes turned to slits, its haunches lifted and it pounced, hooves clacked loudly on the street, connected, then shot forward all in one motion like an arrow shot from a bow.
I was on that fence and scrambling to the top, pushing old folk and children out of the way, faster than you could say man-card revoked.
After the bull went past and I was able to pry my fingers off the wooden beams of my seat and avoid the looks of the elderly and children I had shamelessly manhandled moments before,  I determined to make the next one count. I was going to do this.
The next bull was even bigger than the first. And faster. It was a black blur as it flashed out of the gate and once more I found myself scampering up the sides of the fence and folding myself praying-mantis like inward to avoid getting snagged by a horn. I was lucky, but the guy standing five feet in front of me wasn't. When he tried at the last second to leap out of the way his feet went one way and his body another. His head ricocheted off the street and was immediately awash in bright red blood from a gash above his eye. The bull's left horn pierced his thigh to the bone then ripped it open in all in one motion before it was past us, down the street, then out of sight.
As the paramedics and police ran over and determined whether or not the man's femoral artery had been severed and the crowds continued to order beer and wait for the next bull, I thought to myself what a strange country I was living in.
The third bull was about to leave the gate. I tied my shoes tighter and got whatever a sensible distance is from an animal that has every reason to want to kill you.
When the shot rang out this time, I was ready. I took off. Bounding around tracksuits and Real Madrid jerseys, cutting close to walls and trying very hard not to look behind me. As the street grew narrower near to the plaza de torros the crowded fences began to point and raise there voices quickly to the action behind me. Somewhere behind me there was a mini-van with spikes hurtling towards me, gaining on me every second. I didn't look but pressed forward, underneath the arched gateway of the plaza and into the sand of the bullring then immediately to my right, running along the fence then vaulting myself over into what I hoped would be the arms of impressed onlookers but ended up being an unforgiving floor of cement. Milliseconds later the bull came flying into the stadium.
I wiped sand from a busted lip and heaved myself up to join the cheering crowd as the bull was marched away until the fight later on that night.
I promised myself that I would never do anything that stupid again. Then I ran three more times.

The night Spain ruined pizza

     Moving abroad has its share of challenges. In Spain, for example,  most apartments don't come with dryers or air conditioning. Totally cool, I'm fine with that. Just don't use a comforter and leave your wash out for three days until its starting to sprout. I can deal. One thing that definitely doesn't suck about Spain is that the food is fantastic and super cheap. You can get a mini beer and a plate of paella for 2 euros down the street, and a weeks worth of groceries for 20. Not bad at all. But one thing I have been missing is pizza.
     I'm going on record now to say that pizza is the perfect food. It's portable, deliverable, can be folded, cut into squares, reheated, eaten cold. It's cheap and has a high calorie count,which makes it ideal for starving college kids. You've got the whole food pyramid hidden in its layers of cheese, tomato sauce, pepperoni, and crust. It's beautiful really.
     So last night I started going into withdrawals thinking of that greasy perfection that I had gone nearly a week and a half without. I decided to take a run at a frozen pizza from the mercado down the street. After spending exactly 18 minutes trying to understand the three strange flavors they had in the frozen food aisle I decided to go with Atun y Bacon. Being that bacon was the only ingredient I recognized, I snagged it and a bottle of vino and headed back.

     With two episodes of Breaking Bad on my laptop, my roommate out for the night and a pizza in the oven I was good to go. Soon my lust would be quenched and I would fall into that zone of greasy comfort that one experiences post pizza guzzling.
     Suddenly a smell began to waft its way into the living room. A pungent, thick smell. A fishy smell.
     I cautiously entered the kitchen and closed the window to the courtyard outside, thinking some awful paella related food disaster had drifted in. But the smell grew stronger. I sniffed the trash, the sink, the fridge.
    Then I opened the door of the oven and out came the horrific burnt fish smell. I turned off the heat and rushed to my computer to find out exactly what the hell was on my pizza.
    Atun. Tuna. I had bought a bacon, and tuna, pizza.
    I wanted to rush down to the market and demand my money back. I wanted to explain to them that there was a reason most photos of pizza show the simple but elegant relationship of pepperoni and cheese. You don't mess with a classic. But they were closed and my stomach was growling menacingly.
     So when I got over the initial shock I tried it. I really did. I sliced a piece off and gingerly tested it...and it came right back up. This was no freshly caught tuna but dehydrated, grated tuna, with a sickly grayish color. I felt defeated. And hungry. Mostly still hungry. So I did the only thing I knew. I scraped off the cheese, bacon, and tuna, and doused the sad looking pile of dough and tomato sauce in front of me with balsamic vin to cover up the smell.
    When this farce of what was supposed to be a gluttonous feast was over I donned a hazmat suit and deposited the tortured remains of my meal into the trash outside.
   
    I rinsed my mouth out with a heady dose of red wine and lay down to a comfortless sleep. It was  the night Spain ruined pizza.

Madrid-The first couple of days

     The cool thing about Barajas airport in Madrid is that the metro, the underground subway that has lines running through every major barrio in the city, connects to it and allows you to get anywhere you need to go in less than 30 minutes. I had just spent a long, cramped airplane ride trying not to think too much about the fact that I was leaving everything behind for a year. So I sat on my thick duffel bag, zipping through the dark passages underneath city. I wrote down which lines to take in a little blue book that I kept in my back pocket and lugged my bag up and down stairs and through ticket booths until I arrived at the Bilbao metro station. Because the metro is underground and the airport a few miles away from the city, I had technically been in Madrid for an hour but hadn't seen any of it. This was my first sight as I walked up the steps and stood blinking in the fresh air.
     The Bilbao stop has 5 streets running through it in a tangled web. Overlooking the monument in the center are tall, pink and tan apartment buildings with wrought iron balconies and ceramic flower boxes. Mopeds zip by as white vans park crookedly on the clean sidewalks and unload massive cuts of Jamon Iberico, Madrid's specialty cured ham that's served sliced on baguettes with olive oil or tomato.
      Waiters in black and white moved around tables clustered under an awning, serving café con leche and churros. Always in the background was the rush and swirl of air as cars zoomed by and people ran down the steps into the metro to catch their early commutes to work.
      I let my bag slip down my shoulder.
      The sun was just coming over the top of the plaza, and I was finally here.
      That was nearly a week ago. Like I've told some of the other BEDA teachers, Madrid has completely blown away my expectations. When I was doing a bit of research on the city before moving I got the feeling that Madrid was much like any other big city. Noisy, dirty, with a few museums, some nice parks, etc. Nothing about that is correct.
      Madrid is clean. Cleaner than the majority of cities I've been to in the states even. Although the city does have its barrios that are more crowded and busy than others, it only takes a five minute walk to find a thin winding street with a café or a quiet square lined with trees.
     My first few days I stayed in Malasana (the n has a tilde above it but I still haven't figured out how to do that on an American laptop). The hostel was small and cramped. I had to lug my bag up four flights of narrow stairs to get to the room I shared with twelve other guys on aluminum bunk beds. After nearly 48 hours of no sleep I was jet lagged, my arms were killing me, and I started to have a sinking feeling that maybe I had made a mistake. I dropped off my things and rented a locker so that I could stow my laptop and passport while I walked around the city a bit.
     When I went downstairs there were four other BEDA teachers waiting to be checked in. These guys have since become some of my best-friends in the city but more on that later.
     That night I was alone on the bottom bunk of my room wondering what I was doing. I had little money, no plan on how to find an apartment, and didn't know anyone within a couple thousand miles. I was overwhelmed that I would go at least nine months without seeing my family or the other people I love. Sometime during this pensive, obnoxious self-pitying I must have dozed off.
    The next thing I knew someone was nudging my foot. The room was dark and I could hear snoring coming from the other side of the hall. I immediately made sure my pants and belt were securely fastened. Then I turned on the light.
     It turned out to be the guy from the bunk next to me, asking me if I wanted to go out and have a drink with him and some of the other people in the hostel. What I really wanted was sleep. I wanted to not think or talk to anyone or have to worry about the logistics of changing clothes in a room full of people. But I nodded and struggled into a wrinkled shirt and followed him downstairs. The next thing I know I'm in a square a few blocks from the hostel, sharing a beer with two British girls, a hilarious Londoner named Nathan (who turned out to be in BEDA as well), a few university students from Holland and Germany, and the guy who had woken me up to begin with from Mexico City, who was finishing up the last leg in his month long travel binge around Europe.
     We stayed up until 3 in the lobby of the hostel, talking until we had to drag ourselves up the stairs to bed.
     This post was supposed to be smaller and kind of recap everything over the past week; how I found a place, made friends, and explored that city. Its rambling and its hard to describe everything about the past week. All I can do is flip through the snapshots in my head and try to make sense it all. I guess the one thing that stands out the most is that first day and that rush of excitement and fear.

     Travel isn't safe. Not real travel anyway. We can try to explore another culture and its people but it's hard when we return to the nice hotels and comfort of the familiar that we use to protect ourselves. I know, because that is all I wanted that first night, but what I got in return was much more valuable, and I can't wait to see where the rest of this journey takes me.

Sunset over Retiro Park from the roof of my apartment

    

Why I'm leaving

     The last month has been full of goodbyes. I said goodbye to the amazing friends I worked with for over six years, my family, and all of the friends near and far who have supported me throughout this decision. It seems strange now that just four days until my flight the reason WHY I'm leaving has become obscured. Six months ago when I was applying to the BEDA program  it was all so clear: drinking a beer in a sun drenched plaza, seeing the Mediterranean, bull-fights, sleepless train rides, and the freedom to be anonymous. Now the vision is clouded by the press of goodbyes, as if this whole time I've been walking backwards away from it. A fog rolls in and the logistics of what I'm about to undertake confront me.
     So I think I need to take the time to remember the reasons why I'm leaving.
     Travelling is not a selfless pursuit. We call attention to our conspicuous absence  by our empty chair at Thanksgiving or the presents left wrapped under the Christmas tree. So I can't really use the excuse that my leaving will somehow be better for the people I leave behind. I'm going to miss weddings, birthdays, and births. I might not be there when a friend calls and needs help or to help cheer up my brothers or sister when they have a bad day.
     If that's the case then maybe it's the experiences I will have that will be worthwhile to them when I make my way home. Maybe it's the challenge of seeing how adaptable you are when you're stripped of comfort, financial security, and your ability to communicate. Maybe it's the rush of having a few clothes rolled up in a backpack with your passport and no plan that makes travel so alluring. Maybe it's the chance to feel fear, and to overcome it, to start from scratch, learn something new, recapture your youth, meet new people, recommit to your curiosity, fulfill a promise to your twelve year old self that said that no matter how uncomfortable it may be, or scary, a normal 9-5 just isn't going to cut it. Maybe it's all of these things.
     These are just the final death throes of the me that thirsts for control of any situation, and the growing pains of a new life abroad.
     I leave for Madrid in four days. I'm terrified and exhilarated to start this new chapter of my life and so thankful that I have people in my life that make this a difficult decision.

     So I guess I'm leaving so that I can come home again. Ready to share my experiences with the people I care about.

"Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover." -- Mark Twain


    
    
    
    

Breathing Out

     Life has been, for the past couple years, the accumulation of things that make me comfortable. I left for school six years ago with a used vacuum cleaner, a mirror, a couple plastic bins that I used as a nightstand, and a blow up mattress that let air out slowly over the course of the night and left my feet sticking up over a pocket of air and my head jammed against the floor. Fast forward six years later and I had a nice apartment that I paid for without the help of my parents, nice furniture, TV, and a car that worked (although with a series of quirks such as no handles on the inside, making crawling out of the driver side window an awkward but necessary means of escape).
     I guess I'm bringing this up because the next month for me is all about giving things up. In order for me to leave the country and start this new part of my life I have to give up all of those things I worked for over the past six years. My last month in my apartment I realized the futility of trying to pawn off my stuff to my parents for the year that I'll be away. Plus I needed whatever money I could before I left. So I sold off all of my stuff, bit by bit.
     When my couches were gone I dragged in my damp porch chairs to sit on. When my TV was gone I stacked books on my entertainment center. My dvds I gave away to friends and everything else that I couldn't throw in the back of my car I left out at the curb.
     My last night in Tallahassee I slept on the floor of my living room in a sleeping bag. The counters were wiped down, the floor mopped and the walls were plastered over. My apartment which was packed with 'things' a month before was empty. I learned something that night. Everything I cared about, the things that were really valuable to me, could fit in the back of my truck.
     So now I'm breathing out. Letting go of the things that don't matter so I can make room for the things that do.

Visa Appointment Recap

     Alright, so last week I finally made the dreaded drive down to Miami for my visa appointment. I drove down to Orlando where my family lives on Thursday then woke up at five the next day and made the four and half hour trek down to the consulate. If everything goes right then the next time I'll be down there I'll be transferring planes on my way to Madrid.
     So the whole process was actually very simple and wouldn't be worth the stress if it weren't for the distance down there. I can't complain though, the father and daughter sitting next to me drove all the way from South Carolina for their appointment. The consulate itself occupies the second floor of an office building on the outskirts of the city. There's a small waiting area where you listen for your number to be called and gives you plenty of time to frantically search for missing papers, notarized forms and your money order. Also, there's a Publix right next to the building so you should be able to get your MO right before your appointment if you're like me and put everything off until the last second.
     The consulate is open from 9-1 (why have such a small window for people who have to drive such an exorbitant distance is beyond me),  but try and get there early! Even if you have an appointment at noon, get there at ten. Because this visa process is not based on ease, convenience or sanity, even though you have an appointment it's first come first serve. So, my appointment was at 11:15 and I went ahead and checked in an hour early to be safe. I didn't get to see anyone until 12:15. Although, this did afford those of us in the waiting room to air our grievances about the visa process and talk about how we would very much like to burn the building down. Most of the people I met were in the Ministry program and were basically doing it for the same reasons as me, travel, learn a new language, escape debt collectors, become a matador, etc. Anyways they seemed like good people, and if others in the program are similar it's going to be a fun year.
     So finally my number was called. D-Day. Three months of preparation and paperwork coming down to a smiling woman behind a sheet what appeared to be bullet-proof glass. One by one she asked for my official acceptance letter, my apostilled BGC, medical cert. and money order. One word of advice, try to have your paperwork in order. I had everything loose in a binder and I could tell it was not making her happy that I was having to dig around every time she asked for something.
     I gave her my express envelope from USPS so they could mail me back my passport and paperwork. Apparently the visa itself is actually a stamp that they put into you passport. Five minutes later we were done. The only issue I had was that my medical cert did not follow the model provided on the consulate website so I had to get that redone by my doctor. The good news is that if you're missing documents, at least at this consulate, they allow you to just mail them back in rather then driving all the way back down. So I went ahead and mailed the corrected cert. back down yesterday. It's officially out of my hands now and I couldn't be more relieved.
     If anyone comes across this and has any questions about any step of this process just message me and I'll be glad to help. Hopefully in two or three weeks I'll be getting my passport back with my Visa!

Me after the appointment