Family time in Madrid

Friday, April 3, 2015.

It's really not only the young people who get to travel; however, for those of us adding grey hairs, travel is a bit different.

I thought it would be good to share adventures and here is the first entry from my April spent in Madrid, Spain where my daughter Amy and her family live. These travels are not with the young and the hip; they are with me, recently turned 69, trying to live a full life, speaking little except English.

I am enjoying waking to the city sounds: people talking, kids yelling, cars zooming down on  Calle Principe de Vergara, and a jack hammer at work near by. I am much more of a suburban girl, but this is really nice for a while. I am trying to learn actual street names this trip instead of my usual navigate by landmarks method. I have decided that a possibly interesting guide book to Madrid would be to choose some streets and then detail stories about the people for which they are named as well as what's to be found on that street. Nacho, my son in law, tells me that most of the streets in this neighborhood are named after either painters or civil war generals. However, once again my lack of Spanish hampers me because all the info and the very best stories are written in it. I think I’ll get my granddaughter Sofi, aged 3 1/2 and already bi-lingual, to be my co-author.

I was reminded Sunday of how much I love this culture of taking it easy and visiting, eating and drinking at leisure. We went to the neighborhood Melanie and Peri (Nacho's cousins) live in and it's quite obvious the economic differences from here to there: from clothing and carriage to varied skin colors and attitudes. I do know that the cousins have had trouble with break-ins and street kids over the last few years as the local population has changed and, so I'm told, more migrant families have moved in. They would like to move to a different neighborhood but property values are too low for them to sell now (as has happened all over the world)  so they live in a two bedroom/one bathroom apartment (but with a huge outside terrace) and their two children.

That said, the area was lovely and vibrant and active. We went to a plaza that you walk down a wide alley to enter so no cars, except for a drive thru by the policia twice, and a restaurant / bar with lots of outside tables and chairs and a good sized playground in one quadrant of the plaza. Melanie commented that the "floor" of the playground had been a dirty sand mix for the longest time and various groups had requested improvements; this is a local election year and just a few months ago, the ground was covered with the cushy playground flooring so common in the states. Politics are pretty much the same everywhere. Stinky! On the not -busy side of the square, a happy futball game was in progress with a varying mixture of participants running in and out from pretty young to probably middle school kids. Lots of shouts and laughter.

The owner of the restaurant/bar is the big guy you see in the photo with me and the kids. He has the perfect personality to be a bar proprietor: jovial, a bit loud, visiting with his customers. Earlier he had delivered some chicken to our table and told me it was excellente; it was! When he returned a bit later and asked, I said bueno; he said something like "just bueno?" (I'm guessing) and I told him muy bueno. He kissed my hand. So much danged fun!!

As we were sitting there, I looked around at the buildings surrounding the plaza and thought about the neighborhood; these are not the grand facades we see in this neighborhood or along Grand Via. I realized that I can write a review for TripAdvisor, for example, but this is not a place where tourists will ever intentionally seek out and only in coming to Madrid so regularly and over a long period of time do I have the leisure to not have anything in particular on a must do list.I have the opportunity to live the culture. For that I am indeed fortunate. My only wish is that Bob, my husband who has Alzheimers Disease and is in a care facility. could be here too; with his Spanish and personality he would be loving bumbling about and actually talking to people. He and the bar proprietor would have been fast friends.