TheBlueLife.net

March 3, 2010

I got up early this morning (5:30am) and caught a taxi from my hotel to the main train station, the Atocha, in downtown Madird. My train departure was scheduled for 7:20am. Boarding a train in Spain is quick and easy so long as you have ticket, even though you must have your bags scanned and you must pass through security. The Spanish have made the process extremely efficient. No other place in Europe checks your bags as you board a train. In spite of the security you only need be in the station 15 minutes before your train. It had been raining most of the night so everything is wet and cold, but once inside my carriage everything is warm, clean, and modern. Train travel in Europe is the best way to get from one place to the other. This train will attain speeds exceeding 340 km/h. Yet you hardly feel that you moving! There is nothing in the US like this. We are far behind Europe in many ways, yet we pride ourselves as being advanced. It is just not true.

The Spanish countryside between Madrid and Barcelona is trim and neat. Once outside of Madrid the countryside is snow covered, but as you get towards Barcelona the snow slowly vanishes and the countryside becomes mountainous and even green! What a change. The green color reminds me of Southern California in winter. One thing I note over and over, the countryside of Spain and all of the Europe that I have seen is never plastered with bill boards. The Spanish countryside is clean and prosperous. People in America do not realize just how much their mental peace is affected by the visual pollution created by outdoor bill boards. Such things are terrible.

Train travel always puts me into a contemplative mood. Perhaps it is the rocking sensation, although this high speed train is absolutely motionless. Today I am thinking about the paintings I have been seeing. Madrid is at least as good as Paris and London for paintings. As I travel from gallery to gallery throughout Europe–the Louvre, the Uffizi, the National Galleries, and now the Prado and Reina Sofia and other places in Madrid–I am gradually building up my range of experience in art. What a blessing this is. I sometimes think of myself as the Flaneur to the world. I am of course thinking the French poet and art critic Charles Baudelaire who fashioned himself as Le Flaneur de Paris, the city stroller of Paris. My journey through the museums and art galleries of Europe, through the cathedrals and churches of the Western world, and through the streets and cafes of so many major cities is my attempt to study life in all its facets and from as many points of view as possible. Baudelaire could walk the streets of Paris and London of 150 years ago, but in my times I have the luxury of traversing the countries and cities of the whole world. This is a huge blessing.

When I travel I feel absolutely free and happy. Sitting in this train and speeding through the Spanish countryside towards the Mediterranean coast is a dream some true. I am at peace.

Spain Madrid, March 5, 2010

I did not wake up until 10 AM and by the time I showered, had breakfast and consulted with the concierge, it was noon, but Madrid only seems to get going by that time. I have never seen a city that opens so late and stays up so so long, and I don’t mean just bars, every museum and art gallery is open till 9PM, and restaurants only start filling up after 10, for food, not just drink! One never has to worry about sleeping late while in Madrid. Whether this is true for the rest of the country, I have no idea, but I like it.

Atocha Train Station, Madrid

Once I did get going my first trip was to the train station to buy a ticket for Barcelona. However, being in a foreign country for the first time means that even buying something as simple as a train ticket is not an easy matter. One first has to know where the station is and even how to use a bus. Yes, I could have easily taken a taxis from my English enclave, the hotel, but I always insist on doing things the indigenous way. I want to be with the people. This is where one’s concierge is extremely important, you at least get a directed push out the hotel door and you are armed with at least some hint of where to go and what to do. After that you are on your own.

Madrid’s main train station is called Atocha, and what a place it is! This is the station that

Atocha Train Bombing 2004

was bombed in 2004 just before the Spanish elections. This is the place that forced Spain out of Iraq and drove a wedge between active Spanish support for American actions against Sadam Husain. It is an eery feeling to be in a place that was in the grip of death and destruction just a few years before. A hundred and ninety-one people died and over 1800 were wounded on that day, and here I was! But what got me the most about being here is that Madrid does not look like “some other place.” Athens, Rome and even Paris look like that other place and so you might expect, a bomb blast, but not here. Madrid and the Atocha, looks too modern, too much like home, for something of this magnitude to have happened.

Atocha Train Station Inside

The Atocha is a huge glass structure filled with shops, cafes and even art galleries nestled amongst trees, ponds and running brooks. It is almost a botanical garden. There is nothing like this I have seen before. And it is clean and absolutely efficient. One can arrive here, pass through security, and be on a train within fifteen minutes, if one has a ticket. For me it was another story. Not a lot of English is spoken in Spain, unlike the rest of Europe, so it took over an hour just to find an English speaking ticketing agent, but once I did, I booked two trips, one to Barcelona and one to Seville. The girl at the ticketing counter herself was from Seville and so she even made a personal phone call for me to check if the day I was traveling on was a good day for museums. That would never happen in the states! She also talked about how Madrid was so cosmopolitan

Puerta de Atocha

and fast paced, but to me it is like a village, a very nice village, and I reaffirm my opinion that Madrid is a monoculture. Relatively speaking, this is a white Spanish speaking world, without a large immigrant population compared to London or Paris. At the Atocha I spent the whole day in downtown Madrid and saw few immigrants. Madrid is a solely Spanish world unlike the rest of Europe.

March, 7, 2010 Madrid, Spain

Stonehenge

When you have stood under the ceiling in the Sistine Chapel and looked up at Michelangelo’s magnificent fresco, the hands of God and man, when you have stood atop the Acropolis and marveled at the beauty of its architecture, when you have stood in Notre Dame Cathedral and heard the organ play a thundering Bach fugue, when you have stood on the Salisbury plain at sunset and seen the ancient ruins of Stonehenge; you become changed as a person. You expand your mind and emotions and you become lifted away from the daily struggle of simply living. People travel for many reasons, for pleasure, for business, for romance; who can count the reasons? But in the end travel moves you beyond yourself and allows you to see other possibilities and to have bigger dreams. Travel is about the nourishment of the soul. This is why I travel.