Segunda salida / Ciudad Real
I’ve been staying in Madrid at a small hotel near the street “Gran Via”
just a few blocks from Puerta del Sol. The room is tiny compared to most U.S.
hotels, but the price was good and everything works so I’m very satisfied. The rough equivalent of Puerta del Sol would
be Times Square in New York, so, as you can imagine, it’s crowded and
expensive. There are tons of tourists
here and none stand out more than the Americans. My countrymen are easily identified because they
are loud, hesitant to take the bus or subway and don’t speak any Spanish. One morning leaving the hotel I heard a woman
ask the lady at the front desk if she would call a cab for her. Then, almost as an afterthought, she
shrieked, “But is it safe?”
That’s us.
We want to see the world - or it could be that we mostly want to be able
to come home and say, "We went to 'fill-in-name-of-exotic-place-here'"),
but we want it on our own conditions and according to our own convenience and
we want it to be totally safe, even if it’s guaranteed by the poor desk clerk
who’s been up all night. And a lot of our
fears are engendered by our own government and institutions. When I got ready to travel I was required to
fill out an online form and file it with the Study Abroad office at
A&M. The questions and information
on the form made it evident that the university believes two things:
1. That I (not just me but all students with the temerity to leave the country) am a
booger-eating moron incapable of even leaving my house, much less the country,
and
2. That travelling anywhere outside of the U.S. is highly dangerous, even deadly.
So why are we this way? I think it's the sense of cultural superiority that's ingrained into us as early as kindergarten, maybe earlier. I'm not immune to it or free from it, either. But when you're in someone else's country you have to constantly be aware of it, beat it back into its cage and suppress it. You have to travel with a sense of humility and willingness to find out what things they do better than the way you do them. I think you also have to ask yourself if the image they have of us is better or worse for having interacted with you.
My first 2 days of research were at the University of
Castilla La Mancha at the Ciudad Real campus.
They have a section of the literature department that focuses on Quixote
images - both the illustrations and engravings from the editions of the book
itself and the popular and cultural iconography that followed. I found maybe twenty-five different political
cartoons of one personality or another on horseback tilting at a windmill of
some sort. The ability to do that in a
cartoon testifies to the universality of Don Quixote and provides a good case
study on how metaphor works, even visually.
That’s going to be a big part of my thesis, so I ain’t gonna write about
it here (you’re off the hook).
On Tuesday I took the train from Madrid to Ciudad Real and
stayed in a hotel in Ciudad Real for a night.
I took the subway from my hotel down to the train station, but I had to
sort out the short range train station (not the subway) from the medium-range
train station. It took a little while
but I figured it out. There’s always a
sense of dislocation in an unfamiliar place and one has to feel one’s way
through the procedures and systems. I’ve
been on trains and subways before, but not this
train. I had to ask someone how to get
to the “Aves” (the Birds), the fast trains, instead of the local trains. Once I got on the correct train, I didn’t
realize the seats were assigned. The
boarding pass had a space on it that read “Plaza” to tell you what seat you
were assigned which would have read “Asiento” anywhere else I’ve been in the
Spanish-speaking world. So I got kicked
out of the seat I first sat in by the rightful ticket holder. The one I was really assigned to was occupied
by someone with a group that I didn’t feel like trying to break up. So I wound up sitting in one of the throwup seats
(backwards facing) with the sun beating down on it. When foreigners seem clueless and make silly
mistakes or seem out of place when they come to the states it’s more than just
a question of language. It’s more due to
the unfamiliarity of a completely different system.
Speaking of high-speed trains, they’re great. I’d love it if we had high-speed trains from
College Station to Austin, San Antonio, Dallas and Houston. But if you took a train to Houston, what
would you do then? Houston doesn’t have
an extensive public transpo system with buses and a subway. Texas is built for the individual driving his
or her car - or pickup truck if you’re not a wuss. You don’t take public transportation unless
you’re poor and you don’t walk or ride a bike unless you’re a kid younger than
sixteen.
Anyway, the folks at Ciudad Real were great to me. The skids were greased by the relationship
that my committee chair, Eduardo Urbina, has with the people there. The main guy that took care of me, Oscar,
took me with him to lunch, dinner and the coffee breaks. Most people here don’t eat any breakfast to
speak of - maybe a piece of bread with coffee.
Coffee’s where it gets a little complicated. You need to know what you’re asking for. You can’t just go up there and say, “café.” Café solo is an expresso. Café con leche is some coffee with a lot of
milk. But you have to specify if you
want the milk they add to be warm or cold or a mix of both. If you want an expresso with a little milk
you order a cortado. If you want a lot
of milk with a tiny bit of coffee you order a leche manchada (literally "stained
milk"). Nobody really eats breakfast more
extensive than a piece of toast. Although I don't discount the possibility of someone among the three million in Madrid whuppin up some Huevos Rancheros for breakfast here, it seems to me that IHOP or
Waffle House wouldn’t make it in Spain (or Chile). It's just not in the culture to eat a big breakfast. You take a coffee break at about 11 in the
morning or so, you eat lunch at about 2:30, and supper no earlier than 9
pm. The supper, properly done, lasts
until about 11:30 pm. It doesn’t take
that long to eat, you just take your time and talk to each other for two and a
half hours, even after you’re done eating.
None of this chowing down and getting up to go watch TV.
Yesterday I did research at a guy’s house in Toledo. He has a private collection -really
impressive- and I saw some great stuff there.
Today I did research at a military library in Toledo. I was told that people would be slow and
uncooperative here, but it hasn’t been the case so far. Even these cats at the military library who
don’t know Eduardo Urbina and don’t know me from Adam knocked themselves out to
help me. Let’s hope the hospitality
holds up.
Kindness and patience grade for the last 2 days: A-
