Turkey Day

My new flat

I have returned to the center of Madrid!

I just moved in last weekend to a flat near the Quevedo metro stop, a 20 minute walk from Sol, and a ten minute walk from Malasaña, my favorite neighborhood. I am living with a girl named Inés from Albacete who is studying to be a nurse. I am going to miss my old roommates, but it was hard living so far away from the center (even though Madrid has a good transportation center, it took me 1.5 hours to get home one night from the center on two metro lines and one night bus). I spend all my time in the center for arabic classes and my volunteer job, so it just makes sense to be able to walk home at night. Plus it is an old flat and I love all things old!

Off to the races

Continuing my streak of randomness, I decided to spend a recent Sunday at the Hipódromo outside of Madrid, watching a horse race. My friend Meagan had an extra free ticket so we took a bus ride out to Zarzuela, a nearby town to spend a day at the races, although extremely under dressed for this type of crowd. Motivated by our free tickets, the four of us decided to each put up 4 euro on the horse with the most absurd name, in this case it was #5 Canibal. To our random luck, he won the race and we won an incredible sum of 12 euro. We promptly spent the money on beer and spent the rest of the races hanging out on the grass.

Recent visit to Alicante

Although I love living in Madrid, I needed some fresh sea air, so I headed to Alicante for the weekend to visit Mariana (my flatmate last year) and her boyfriend Jeff. I took my coworker Andrew along (from Portland) and we spent two days feasting and wandering the city.

Encuentro Internacional sobre violencia de género

Next Friday I will be volunteering as an interpreter for women from various parts of the world who will be in Madrid for the International Meeting of Gender-based Violence. Women will be coming from Central and South America, Africa and the Middle East to spend the week in Madrid and nearby areas discussing domestic and gender-based violence.

Menos cumbres, más legumbres!

I spent Friday afternoon, kind of by accident, marching down the streets of Madrid protesting poverty and the lack of action by the main countries involved in the Millenium Goals. People in Madrid seem to love their protests (this protest garnered 3,000 people, anything in Seattle would pale in comparison, unless it were anti-Bush or anti-WTO) and the police seem to have the coordination down, it barely disrupted traffic. I hadn't exactly planned on going, since that morning I didn't even realize it was going on, but I went in to Solidaridad Internacional, an NGO started in Madrid, to interview for a volunteer position at a fair trade store. Sandra, the volunteer coordinator, and I bonded over food (Venezuelan food is similar to Colombian, where she is from) and she invited me to the protest. We spent the first half on the street catching large balloons that were being thrown from the windows three stories up, while dodging cars and motos, and trying not to pop the balloons. The organization I marched with is affiliated with Pobreza Cero and they are organizing marches to hold governments accountable for poverty reduction, and to not use the financial crisis as an excuse. The protest was very spirited but I was a bit disappointed to see that at the end, a majority of the people (teenage girls) skipped the first part of the march and waited at the end near the stage because Dani, the singer of El Canto del Loco (a Spanish pop band) was there to perform. But I guess people don't show up if there are no big names. Sadly.

I head to the fair trade store on Tuesday to begin training and figure out my schedule, but I am excited to finally start volunteering and feeling as though I am giving back in some way like I am used to doing in Seattle. The store is in La Casa Encendida, which is a cultural center that has exhibits and film screenings which is pretty cool (even though it is run by Caja Madrid, a fairly large bank).

Picnic en Retiro

A favorite pastime here in Madrid is spending the weekend at Retiro Park, which is like their Central Park, it is right in the middle of downtown Madrid and it is huge. There is a pond with rowboats, restaurants with outdoor seating, and trails for running. Weekends are usually spent lazying around listening to music and drinking a cerveza or two.

This Saturday happened to be a goodbye party for a friend of Mariana's, so a group of about 20 or 30 people gathered to play music ranging from Cuban to flamenco. Although gatherings like this are not technically legal (the beer drinking part), cops usually turn their backs as they do with most public drinking (once in awhile I think they are pressured to crack down). Saturday they were determined to be annoying and came over to complain that Jaime had an amp plugged in. He unplugged it and the rest of the day was acoustic, but nonetheless we were surrounded by 4 cop cars and about 10 cops just hanging out watching us. There are people being robbed in the city (like me) and they put half of the park's cops on us, a harmless group of musicians and us, the "chorus" putting on a free music show for everyone. But apparently we were in the zone of a lot of "junkies" which when they pronounce it it sounds like "yankees" so I get confused.

"There are a lot of Americans in this area??"
"No...jankees".

In other news, Mariana leaves for Cork, Ireland this Saturday to study English for the month of October. If she can find a nanny position or a job in a bar she will stay through November maybe I can find a cheap flight through Ryanair.

Picture at right (The Venezuelans and moi):
Julio, Anais (Mariana's cousin), Jeff, Mariana and me