Madrid Trip Report
All it took was one week and I'm ready to convert to being a Euro
As many of you know, I’ve been studying Spanish for over five years using the Refold method. I took the B2 test and passed back in May, but wanted to test my skills out in the real world. My parents wanted to do family Christmas in the UK this year, so I thought I would take advantage of needing to be in Europe to travel to Spain and use my Spanish and see many of the sights I had been reading about in books or hearing about from my tutor Rafa. I had planned to go with a girl I was dating in the spring, but we stopped seeing each other, so this ended up being a solo adventure which is not usually my thing. However, I had a blast in Madrid (and Toledo) because of how friendly everyone was here and because of how satisfying it was to put something I have worked so long and hard at into practice. I also learned a lot about myself during this trip: I’m much more extroverted than I thought and I don’t enjoy traveling just to travel.
What I did (roughly)
Monday: Arrive, ate a tortilla at a bar, slept 13 hours
Tuesday: Easy run through Retiro Park, history museum, vegan restaurant #1 (Mad, Mad Vegan)
Wednesday: Easy run casa del campo, paella class, language exchange, cocktails with Anna Landler (college friend)
Thursday: River run with Anna, romanticism museum, cheese shop, walked around university and read a book, vegan restaurant #2 (Musgo)
Friday: Toledo + dinner with Zack
Saturday: Exploration run + Prado + vegan restaurant #3 (Oveja Negra)
Sunday: Retiro Run Club+ vegan meetup + chilling/writing this post
Los Lugares
Madrid and Toledo were both extremely beautiful cities. Madrid has a historic core (from ~1600) that is surrounded by successive layers of development: the center feels like a medieval or Renaissance labyrinth, the zones a little bit to the north or south have wide boulevards and apartment buildings that reminded me a little of Paris or Washington DC, and even further out you have something that feels like an American suburb. I spent most of my time in the city center: all the museums, restaurants, and even supermarkets were within walking or metro distance. There was absolutely no need for a car. I was especially impressed with the metro: it felt clean, safe, and had extremely high usage. From about 2pm-10pm it was pretty much cheek to cheek, at least on the lines that I took. The only American metro system that compares favorably is Boston, which I think is pretty embarrassing for us. Of course there were also plenty of cars on the roads, but the city is designed in such a way to funnel most of the car traffic onto specific busy streets and keep most of the city center for pedestrians only. Madrid unfortunately did not seem very bike friendly: not a whole lot of bike lanes and those that I did see were not protected from traffic. Bike infrastructure is probably unnecessary in the city center here: walking and metro are fast enough, especially as there are supermarkets on almost every block. I didn’t spent enough time on the periphery to know what the situation was like there. All in all, it seems like the center of Madrid is a pretty positive model for American cities to potentially follow: high-density, mixed zoning with key roads for cars, and the rest for pedestrians.
I was also really impressed by the number and quality of parks in the city. The two big famous parks, Retiro and Casa del campo, felt like Central Park and Van Cortlandt Park respectively1. In addition to these two big ones, there were a ton of smaller parks dotted along the rivers that run through the city that made for some really good running.
In terms of museums, I was not super impressed. The art museums were great, but even the Prado I think is a little overrated. It felt like half the museum was just royal portraits by Goya and Velazquez. The history museum concentrated on Madrid itself, but stopped before the super interesting (to me) era of its history: the Civil War. The museum of Romanticism was terrible and I do not recommend going.
Toledo was much more sleepy and provincial, although there were a ton of cool historical sites to see, including the Toledo Cathedral, Alcazar2, and the reconstructed workshop of El Greco, one of Spain’s most famous painters.
La Gente
My favorite part of Madrid by far was the people I met there. I managed to arrange one meetup via HelloTalk for language exchange. It was with a Venezuelan woman Nath, and we got churros and went book shopping together. Because of Strava I realized that a college teammate, Anna Landler had been living in Madrid for three months and we got drinks and ran together. On Friday I had dinner with Hank Wiedefeld and Ryan Clancy’s old college roommate Zack. Today I did a few miles with the Retiro runners, and went to a vegan meetup arranged by a girl I met on Bumble!
Throughout the whole week I was impressed again and again by how kind and open the Spaniards I interacted with were. Yet another thing that Americans could learn from.
I was surprised by the level of open-carry by the police and Guardia civil. I saw a lot of submachine guns this week, which is not something one expects coming from supposedly “gun-crazy” America.
La Comida
I tried to eat vegan as much as possible during this trip, but decided to make exceptions for Spanish tortilla and paella. The paella that I had I made in class and was very good, and the tortilla that I ate from Pez tortilla was also amazing, but honestly it was not necessary to make these exceptions in Madrid, especially after I found the local vegan scene through a girl Marta, that I matched with on Bumble. My favorite of the three vegan restaurants I went to was probably Musgo.
La Lengua
I’ve studying Spanish for five years, but this is the first time I’ve really spoken with natives outside of learning context. The first day was really bad: jet-lag made me feel really dumb, and I tried to avoid interacting with natives as much as possible. However, things got much better after that first day and I got some extra sleep, and I was able to turn things around. For almost all one-on-one conversations I was able to understand 100% of what was being said to me, and reply with relatively few mistakes. Group conversations were more difficult, and I especially had trouble understanding this one madrileño at our vegan meetup when he was speaking to the whole group. I had no problem understanding the signs at the museums, but I found after hours of being immersed in the language, it was very difficult to concentrate on even the simplest reading. Still have further to go with Spanish it seems, and unfortunately that improvement I think will only come easily if I live in Spanish speaking country3.
Lecciones Personales
I’m much more extroverted than I thought. My best days on this trip (today and Wednesday) were when I had a shit ton of social interaction. Next time I go solo traveling, I think I should plan on staying in a hostel where by nature there will be far more social interaction. When I get back to Baltimore I think I should also make more of an effort to fill my week with social activities4.
I don’t like being a tourist. While here I found myself gravitating towards activities that Madrid natives would do: run clubs, meet ups, bookshops, etc. I think meeting new people and seeing new things are really valuable, but if they’re done in a consumptive, touristy manner, it actually takes away value. When we come at travel from this manner, rather from that of openness and a desire to learn, we end up changing the place we are visiting rather than that place changing us. I saw a lot of this in Madrid: English absolutely everywhere, and it made me quite sad. This New Yorker piece explains my travel skepticism better than I ever could. I think I will be limiting vacation travel to visiting friends in the future, and if I really want to experience a foreign culture try and live there for a few years. This requires a lot more investment than people usually put into their vacations.
Walkability really makes your life so much more pleasant. Even though I am car-free in America, getting around Baltimore on my bike is light years worse than walking and metro-ing around Madrid. The walkability really facilitated social interactions: you can just do things so much more easily. As much as I love Baltimore, the walkability in Europe is just so nice that I might have to leave.
I’m really inspired to continue my foreign language study! It was so rewarding to be able to communicate with Spaniards in their native language. I can’t wait to keep improving and to lock in on Italian next year5.
Hope you all have a very merry Christmas! And special shoutout to my first paid subscriber ever!
Josh
or Patterson Park and Leakin Park for you Baltimoreans
Basically means fortress
The other possibility is just to watch tons of TV or listen to talk radio. I hate both of these things, so this seems like an unlikely route
Of course there is a balance. Maybe part of the reason I felt more extroverted here was that my usual solo activities felt a little bit like a waste. Pay a couple hundred dollars to read my book in Madrid when I could have done so for free in Baltimore?
I am taking an Italian class at Hopkins next semester.
Great report! Did you notice your Spanish improving over the course of the trip? I went to Mexico City once for 5 days and noticed my ability to read and listen got gradually better over the course of the trip—not sure how this scales up to the B2 level.
Love the use both HelloTalk and Bumble to meet new people. Seems like "random" meetups like this is such a great way to both make some friends and get a real glimpse into the culture/ground level of the place without it being tourist-washed for you.
Any takeaways on the kindness? I think a huge piece of traveling is the learning from other cultures and trying to bring pieces of it back to improve your own culture (e.g., kindness from Spain, trust from Singapore, community from X, etc). (You seem like a very kind person already so probably not much more you can do on that front haha.)
Strong agree on "When we come at travel from this manner, rather from that of openness and a desire to learn, we end up changing the place we are visiting rather than that place changing us." I guess this is just the market adapting to the demands of the customers, which may be better in some sense for the businesses, just at the expense of their roots.
Loved this!