Tuesday June 29, 2010
The Spanish government signed a new bill to lower salary and take away benefits. So in response, the metro labor union organized an intense strike, affecting all citizens in Madrid. After two days of half-service and no results, the union decided to instigate a full-on strike, cutting off all lines. No imagine loud Spanish people who usually traveled underground like groundhogs suddenly being pushed into the hot blazing sun to figure out other types of transportation. Needless to say, all hell broke loose in the week of metro strikes.
Alex and I checked out Museo de America, a museum about the history of the Americas, located near Moncloa. Described as Carmen’s favorite museum in Madrid, the large museum on the hill was practically empty (of people not of things… ‘cause that would be pretty silly, huh?) when we went in the middle of a weekday. It’s not my typical tourist attraction when I can get all my American history at home. Before going, I told Carmen that I would be interested in checking it out just to see American history in the Spanish perspective, but she had no idea what I was trying to imply. After going through it, I could see why she was confused.
The numerous factual displays and artifacts conveniently left out the part that a super-majority of Native Americans died from diseases and at the hands of the Spanish beloved and victorious conquistadors. Hmm… I wonder how that little fact slipped through the cracks. Didn’t any Spaniards find it kind of dodgy that the rapid spread of Europeans and Africans in the Americas was somehow “peaceful”? One room explained how many of the explorers settled in the New World to spread the word of the true Christian religion. Well, isn’t that great? Good thing the Spaniards were to save those poor savage souls.
I decided to catch the bus back to my family’s house instead of doing the forty-five minute long walk, hoping that the bus would have some space since Moncloa is the first stop on the 46’s route. All the bus stops were mad crowded near the metro station. When Alex and I got there a cluster of people were crowded under the bus stop and spilling into the sidewalk. After waiting for twenty minutes, a queue had formed and some crazy lady was yelling for people in the bus stop to get into the line, because she was trying to create some kind of maniacal order in the mess of things. Of course we weren’t going to get to back of the queue when we had been waiting for so long. So everyone standing around just shared looks and snickers and ignored the lady’s commands. When the bus finally came and we were all crowded around it and trying to push on, the lady wiggled her way into the front and threw her body against the door, blocking the way into the bus, screaming that everyone had to form a line and that Alex and I couldn’t get on because we had not followed her directions. People yelled at her to calm the fuck down and the extra bus employees (all the buses had a bus driver and one or two conductors during the complete strike days to control shit like this) gently pushed her off and told her to stop causing a scene. Alex and I pushed passed her to grab a seat in the back of the bus. Thank god. Everyone on the bus laughed about her and imitated her shrieking until she got on the bus and gave us all glares. Honestly, who died and made her bus Nazi? As our full-to-the-limit bus pulled out of Moncloa, leaving half of the line behind to wait for the next bus, I told Alex that I suspected the lady just created a scene so that she could be at the front of the crowd as we boarded the vehicle. When no one got off at a stop, the bus would drive by stops even when there were angry people waiting to get on, because there was simply no room for more passengers. When people did get off, new people would just board at the side of the bus, filling up the small gaps that disembarkers left.
Now imagine this happening throughout Madrid. People weren’t getting to work ontime. People weren’t making appointments. People weren’t getting to places at all. And when I say people, this included me. After having a hurried lunch and leaving way earlier than usual, I ran up the river to catch the first bus on the 78 line, only to find that traffic was so horrible that I didn’t make it to the Prado until twenty minutes after my class’s meeting time under the statue of Goya. Of course, my class had already gone inside. When I tried getting a ticket so that I could join my class, the square working the ticket booth wouldn’t let me in as a student based on my Yale ID and wanted to see my passport. Hell was I going to pay €10 to go to an hour and a half of class. Too bad it had to be my second missed class in a row. Instead of going in, I chilled, people-watched, and sketched on a grassy hill outside of the Prado.
As if I couldn’t get enough of Chueca, I agreed to a free guided tour of it that evening with Alex through the Madrid tourism centre. Meeting the hot-red pants-wearing, early-forty-something, Spanish lady guide inside the lobby of Hotel Oscar, the lady decided to give us the tour in English, even though we asked for it in Spanish. Half the time, I think I would have understood her better if she really did speak in Spanish instead. Haha. It was one of the strangest tours I’ve ever been on. She gave a whole commercial spiel about Hotel Oscar, which made me cringe, thinking that we had somehow signed up for some inauthentic tour that was going to be full of advertisement from so-and-so business around the Chueca area, which didn’t end up happening.
I think the weirdest stop we made was into the newly renovated underground parking lot that was painted all in red and decorated with photographs and words of love, in honour of victims of AIDS.
Even though we told her we could hear her fine, the guide insisted on using her embarrassing headset microphone for our two-person tour. After Alex told her that he was taking the tour for as research on his independent research project for university, she veered from her typical touristy tour a history-intensive walk, spewing about every building and every street name. My favorite part of the tour was either stopping to check out the 3D wooden and touchable art that a pair of artists were unloading from their truck or crashing a service in a beautiful vaulted-ceiling chapel hidden inside a building with the façade of a rundown parking garage.
We ran around Chueca looking for a place to catch the Spain vs. Portugal game. None of the bars had televisions to show the game. Gay guys don’t like watching sports. Surprise! I had to convince Alex to lower himself to watch the game at a “shithole” Doner Kebab place instead of wandering around Chueca in the hopes of finding a fancy gay sports bar. And it turned out to be the best idea all day, because the place turned rowdy and fun. People were yelling “¡¡¡Vamos!!!” at the screen the whole time and groaning whenever a Spanish goal went foul. And of course, Spain pwned again. Nbd.
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