bicicritica noviembre

When I asked Jesse what he wanted to do while he was here one of the only things he said was that he wanted to ride in the Critical Mass.  Which, of course, necessitates a bicycle.  Since I theoretically have this bike project going on I thought I could likely get some progress made on that and provide Jesse w/ something to ride at the same time.

So, I went to the bike workshop at SECO, where I had seen a frame that seemed usable before.  When I got there it had a new name on it, even though I had verbally reserved it last month.  This then turned into a long, stupid discussion about me wanting a new bike.  It went like this:

You already have a bike? Yes, but I am trying to learn and want to build another one.  When I leave they will all come back and no one uses road frames anyway.

Wait, you don’t want a road frame. Yes, I do.

No, you will be all stretched out, you don’t want a road frame. Yes I do.

How about this mountain bike frame? No,  I want a road frame.

What’s wrong with the bike you have? It’s really heavy to get up and down the elevator and I’m doing this project and I prefer a road frame.

You don’t want a road frame.  It’s so american of you to want two bikes.  You think that bike is heavy? It’s heavy.

And on and on and on and repeat at least twice with at least two different assholes.  Really frustrating and demeaning and made me just want to leave.  Don’t tell me what I want, I know what I want.  So, eventually I was offered this other frame that was sitting at someone’s work.  Since it was near my house I agreed to go get it, since at this point I was kind of desperate for something Jesse could ride.

The bike was pretty destroyed.  But, I did what I could and then Jesse did some more.  Mainly this involved a quick and dirty single-speed conversion and trying to get the brakes to work, and although it was kind of death-trappy, we took off.  We got about 4 blocks from the house and the chain busted.  Luckily, there is a bike shop really close, so we hurry down there.  We walk in and I ask the guy for a bike chain.  He looks at Jesse and asks if we need a chain or a lock (which, as in english are different words).  A chain, I say, a chain for the gears.  Then we start in on what width it needs to be.  I say, its a standard width for a road bike, and trying to explain that length didn’t matter I stated that it doesn’t have gears.  Then the guy starts explaining to me about chain width, about how some bikes, BMX, the little bikes (here he holds out his hand to show what little means) use a different chain.  Again, I say we need a standard bike chain for a road bike.  He is still trying to explain me things like a moron, but somehow we get out of there with the chain and it’s back to the house to cut and fit it.  Done lightning fast, we head north through town looking for the mass.  After several calls to Morgan, we catch up!  Amazing!  It’s really cold so there are only about 700 people this time, but it was fun and I at least felt like we had really accomplished something incredible by overcoming the obstacles.  The ride ended at this squat called the Dragon where they are wanting to start a bike workshop.  It was in this amazing building next to a large cemetery.  There was some food and when we came out to go home our bikes had somehow found silly hats!

turkey day

After paying the fee for missing the train, we got back in Madrid to make Thanksgiving dinner.  I had invited Shelby, Oriana and Morgan as well as my roommates.  The Irishman and his visiting welsh friend went out, but we made the following: Salad, mashed potatoes, biscuits, gravy and green beans.  Also, Jesse had brought cranberry sauce for the occasion and Shelby had made this delicious baked apple/pear thing.  The plan was to get a roast chicken from the roaster around the corner but they were randomly out of chicken. Morgan had gone for the chicken and when there was none he bought two tubs of kabob meat – one of chicken and one of lamb.  It actually turned out pretty tasty.  Also, there was so much desert – Morgan and Oriana brought three kinds of ice cream and I had some awesome fudge my mom had sent with Jesse.

It was great since my other roommate, Xavi, is Spanish he had never had Thanksgiving before, so everything we did he would ask if it was that traditional way of doing things.  Which is complicated because I think Thanksgiving is pretty flexible and each family has their own things.  It got really funny though when Morgan decided he had to listen to the Band or else it wasn’t Thanksgiving, giving Xavi the impression that we all sit around the table and sing the Band at the top of our lung after dinner.  Sigh.

Since arriving here I have become some kind of spokesperson for the US.  I give geography and history lessons.  I explain the crazy ass news that comes over here as best I can – people are forever asking me about some totally of the wall thing they read in the paper/online/heard from their aunt who once lived in Florida/etc.  I explain holidays and tried to make sense of the electoral system.  While most folks here are very vocally cognizant of the difference between the nation and individuals and are cautious of generalizing, we get painted with a pretty bizaro brush here sometimes.  It’s also an uncomfortable place for me to be in – I’m no authority and I certainly don’t want to be speaking for everyone.  There is also a certain level of anti-american sentiment.  Or maybe it’s that we are perceived as greedy and closed-minded and kind of small.

train ride

So, since the idea had been to stay the night in Toledo but instead we wanted to leave, we made a new plan to go to the sea.  The closest sea is in Valencia.  This involved some really perfect timing on our part, since we walked into the train station in Toledo just at the right time and arrived back in Madrid with just the right amount of gap to pass by the house and return to the station to get the departure for Valencia, which is a four hour ride.

The trains here, Renfe, are really pretty nice and not too expensive, plus if you buy things round trip the return gets a pretty decent discount – seems like between 30 and 40 percent.  Nice train ride, it was pretty, and we passed vineyards and olive trees, nice and typical.  Then we noticed the dirt.  The dirt was so many colors, reds and yellows and dark browns, really crazy color gradients too – in one field all of these were represented.

Then we got off in Valencia and it was like a mean trick.  Bicycles! Everywhere! Tons of ‘em! Like a plague of locusts.  It;s not that big of deal, but Madrid has a noticeable absence of bikes, on a good day I’ll see one or two other cyclists.  Also, Valencia has orange trees in the street.  It really seemed quite magical.  We found a nice hotel easily and then began wandering in search of dinner.  Valencia is also very flat.  We ran into an advertisement for bike rentals and were happy to plan that for the next day.  The wandering took on a little more urgency.  We tried to find one of the recommendations from the guidebook, but no one was eating in them, just drinking and smoking endlessly.  More wandering, blood sugars dropping…we eventually reached that desperate state of hypoglycemia where the only thing that matters is that something hit the stomach so we made a choice.  Peace returned.

In the morning we were torn about the bike rental and decided to walk towards the beach and the city of science and see how we felt. Yes, Valencia also has a City of Science (really the city of art and science) which is not only a really excellent name, but looks like aliens have landed. Or maybe a leftover set from Star Wars.  They also have a large drained riverbed that is a nice, wide park.  It seems the river flooded catastrophically in the past and has been made to flow elsewhere.

But we did decide to ride bikes after all.

And, the beach!  Here we are, or rather here are the photos.  

 And then here’s Jesse saying “I’d like to build a boat like this”

 Since Valencia is a port, there are these giant cranes that look to me like dinosaurs always.

 We rode quite a way down the beach, did the obligatory collecting of bits of the beach and wine drinking (it is Spain) and then made an attempt to ride bikes on the sand.  Nope.  But, I did manage to lose the U-lock that came rented with the bike.

We also saw a mad with a pony cart that didn’t appear to have much in it and was dragging a tire.  This seemed eccentric and cute and then he stopped the pony and added more sand and then took off, still dragging the tire, back onto the road.  A few minutes late we crossed paths again investigating this interesting and apparently abandoned building.  Does make for a strange scene.  We decided he was likely training the pony for some high-stakes equestrian event.  We bought oranges.  Then we caught the bus back to the train station and realized mid trip that we were going to make it.  This prompted a lot of running, a lot and, predictably, we still missed the train.  The lady even laughed at us.  However, it was really an opportunity to learn something else nice about the Spanish rail system, which is that even if you miss your train it only costs 8 euros to change the ticket.  So we waited an hour or so and rode back to Madrid.

Skippin’ school

Then we went to Toledo, which is supposed to be a good place to see the three cultures of Spain in one little place.  The town is nice and majestic, since most of it is on a hill over this sweeping river.  However, we were a little put off by the fact that as we were walking away from the train station, walking just off the sidewalk in an empty parking lane, a car pulls up quite aggressively as thought they wanted to run us over.  Then, two kind of smarmy looking men get out and say “Buenos dias” which I don’t respond to and Jesse doesn’t respond to.  I mean, two aggressive men outside a train station are usually the kind of thing to walk on past.  Eventually after quite a bit of confusion and them following us down the sidewalk, it turned out they were undercover cops and demanded our documents.  I mean, nothing happened, but it wasn’t nice.  Plus, I wondered if in the US it is required to carry ID at all times?  Here, I think it is here…and functionally it is at home even if it’s not technically.  Well, it kind of flavored the visit sour.

But it is nice and mostly what we ended up doing was wandering around and being lost in all of there tiny winding streets.  Somehow we accidentally found the cathedral, which looked interesting and so we spent a long time trying to make a circle around it (we first found a 3-story plaque commemorating Franco).  We also saw this dead bird creepily sitting on this religious figure’s arm.  In the end, the cathedral costs to get in so we began to lose ourselves some more.  Thing is, I love those hanging balconies that are common here.  You can see them in the street picture,and they are very narrow and usually made up of all windows.  Something is really appealing to me about them.  It’s also always fun to be exploring and I at least never got to the point where I felt like I was in a maze (which seems entirely possible in Toledo).  We found the edge and a giant escalator! ! The new part of Toledo is down low and so in order to get people from down to up there is an escalator that runs up the side of the hill.  This is apparently part of a project called Toledo-Futur(a).  Wild.

We gave up and had some more coffee.  Then we found a very old mosque, that was actually under some kind of construction where they had dug out around it, which made it possible to see some very old buried walls.

!

You fly half-way around the world to find your neighbors…or something like it.

Jesse came to town…

…and the first night we stayed in a nice, simple hotel with this fabulous staircase.  And pleasant furniture and light.  There was also a giant construction scaffold out front, which enabled us to safely climb drunkenly to the roof and look over the city.  The first few days we spent wandering around Madrid, looking at things, eating.

one night at the Patio Maravillas

Just some photos…the bike, as is the norm when you try to put a schedule on that kind of project, took 2 hours longer and three more sets of hands than was planned.  However, in the end it all worked out.  Also, I was involved in a crazy photo shoot that day, which explains the excessive eye make-up.

Creek porn, woods porn, gutter porn – Ed Templeton’s shout-out.  This is from an exhibit at the Casa Encendida, which is a cultural center really close to my house.  They have changing exhibits, and movie showings, but they also do a huge number of workshops and events.  There’s a fair trade shop inside and free Internet.  It’s really pretty alright.  However, the exhibit, Beautiful Losers was only kind of okay, in my opinion.  It lives on the edge of some nice pieces about kind of ‘alternative’ things – skateboarding, surfing, punk, graffiti, etc. – and some really hip stuff that was a little boring, plus they included these animatronic mannequins that were ‘tagging’ the walls.  I dunno, seemed a little forced.  Plus, the security guards tried to steal my coffee cup!

Thunderdome?

Way back in November, even as far as the beginning of November, a strange metal cage began to appear in front of the Atocha train station.  In front of the station there is one of the biggest traffic circles in the whole city and in the middle the cage was rising.  I was excited because it looked interesting – curving metal shapes and tough looking.  I waited.

The problem was that it kept growing.  By the time I took pictures it was to here:

  Still stranger.  Here’s the close-up.

 

So.  In the end? Just a tree.  Soon I’ll fix a picture, but its really just a giant light-up tree.

Dalieda

This is another example of all the rad things I ride past everyday that I am slowly discovering.  A dalieda is a garden of specifically dahlias.  Which, is a thing I didn’t even know existed.  The place is very nice, actually the panorama from the Madrid is big post was taken from here as well.  The view is great because along the west side of the center of Madrid there is a big/cliff where it drops down to the Rio Manzanares (a wholly uninspiring river).  The nice part about this is that a lot of that drop is park and green space.  Unfortunately dahlia season is more or elss over, so of the few things left bloming this was by far the wildest. But think about spring…