Los Madrileños y sus almas

Hello Chaps!

Gotcha! If you thought that you were still chaps, you, mis amigos, are sadly en el pasado. In this moment (en este momento sounds so elegant, making me wonder why its literal translation sounds vaguely creepy) I am in Madrid, staying with some friends from school. After a sometimes-terrifying, sometimes-not-because-I-was-asleep flight on the illustrious(ly cheap) easyJet from Gatwick to Barajas, yo soy un Madrileño provisional.

Temporal presence means temporal learning - meaning we need to get down to the soulful matters right away. I spend most of the day navigating the serpentine (dios mio!) Madrid metro, second in length among subways in Europe only to London's. Second in length, maybe, but not second in soul - the Madrid subway pulses with life 250 feet below a semiarid capital ciudad. How do I illustrate this? With a dialogo, of course:

(Linea 2 con dirrecion a Ventas, dos de la tarde. A young woman sits on a seat across from the tired author, who is enamored with his recent coca cola light purchase. A man in his late fifties enters, looking tired, too):
Woman: Oy, papito, puede tener mi asiento
Man: Ahh que amable chiquita, no, no puedo
Woman: Vale, vale, tome el asiento.
Man: Ayy que es esto determinacion, ella tiene una misión!
Woman: Solo quiero que tu tome mi asiento.

CUT SCENE

The Londoners in their Paul Smith suits on the tube were nice, but not this nice. When a young woman persists so in offering a debilitated old man her seat, it is a luminous experience - it even made the author and his coca cola light give up their own seats for a similarly debilitated old woman. I went to Madrid and caught some soul.