That's a photo of my new neighborhood, Lavapiés. The actual name of the neighborhood is Embajadores, if i'm not mistaken, though the area is referred to as lavapiés by everyone. I'd never been here until a few days before I came to see the apartment I moved into. Lavapiés is like a little enclave, housing a large number of africans, arabs, eastern and south asians, and the odd hispanic or two. The main streets are replete with cheapo ethnic restaurants; the side ones are mostly full of hindi textile shops and bisutería. The main plaza is crawling with dealers almost all day. Walls are plastered with invitations to anarchist rallies, assorted protests, and african concert ads. The streets are littered with cigarette butts, dog shit, and what I can only hope are discarded food leftovers. I'm living with a french couple who are very, very french. all in all, a very colorful new lifestyle.
Up till two weeks ago i'd been in Goya, in the Salamanca district. It was the antithesis of lavapiés in every conceivable way. Goya is a relatively upscale neighborhood, though its reputation as being too pijo is somewhat unearned; there's no shortage of modest, middle-class spaniards and foreigners living there. but it is a bit of an expensive place. Almost every upscale store you might want to find is there somewhere, or least in a neighboring area. It has a distinctly non-european feel; it actually reminded me of State Street and Michigan Avenue in downtown Chicago quite a bit. I suppose that was an unconscious motivator for wanting to stay there. restaurants and bars were usually a bit unaffordable, and 'traditional' places were few and far between. it was also a considerable walk from Plaza del Sol. The first few times it was enjoyable, since you could see a few sites along the way. But when you walk home tipsy and it's cold out and its five in the morning and you really just want to go to sleep right there in a corner somewhere and it's the third time you feel this way in a week then it isn't as enjoyable. originally i wasn't thinking of living in Salamanca, but when I first got to Madrid, I stayed in a building on Calle Alcántara, close to the Goya stop. As soon as I saw the area on my first night, I thought fuck's sake, isn't this me? I suppose it is, on some level. It's also very strongly not me, so I'm not sure.
I never did a proper apartment search, and I knew very little about Madrid's neighborhoods and distances to and from places. I asked friends of my uncle to help me out, and they tried to find something for me. What they found was a room in Goya in an apartment with a fortysomething year old Paraguayan waitress who had an 11 year old kid. Apparently she'd planned on renting the room to a British girl who, upon arrival, tried to squeeze two more people in and was promptly kicked out, so waitress needed a new person to rent the room to. That was what I was told, though considering everything's that happened, it's safe to say that story was probably only loosely true.
I'd more or less decided to move to Spain by this point last year. The mechanics of moving were still uncertain to me, since I had no real idea of how simple or complicated the school application process would be. As it turns out, it was not very complicated at all. It was just about the only easy part.
Moving was the consequence of a series of decisions I'd made years before, decisions that that were all encompassing in a way I didn't realize at the time. I graduated in a thoroughly unremarkable way, with a degree that wasn't actually all that useful (regardless of what liberal arts majors may believe) and very limited experience, finding myself in the middle of a collapsing economy, with low chances of getting a job in my field, and just a short window of time to fix things before I became an illegal. It was clear at the time that whatever thought I had about living and staying in america being a straightforward plan was delusional. Perhaps more importantly, I had a real fear at the time of not being able to actually start a career. I picked a weird degree, I was not really suited for continuing academics for masters and doctorate programs (so that option was out) and it seemed like being hired as an actual engineer was going to be strangely hard. So I decided to focus completely on getting a career started, working in my field, and being in good shape in terms of my resume.
This was partly because of practical concerns such as "I need money in order to exchange it for goods", but also pride. or stubbornness. I'd heard enough naysaying about picking biomedical engineering throughout the years. not to mention how hard it was. I suppose in lots of ways i'm unsuited to it, but Lord knows I am never going to say it was a mistake, no matter what the facts are.
Shockingly, things actually worked out. I realize now that moving back to Colombia (not that i had much of a legal choice) to try and kickstart a biomedical career there was a laughably bad plan, but I lucked into the one perfect biomedical engineering job for me. Or for anyone in Colombia, really, since it's one of the few biomedical jobs there I even knew existed. There were a lot of problems along the way, but overall I was incredibly lucky.
Time went by and the eventual goal of moving back to the U.S. became more and more uninteresting. There appeared to be lots of great opportunities in Colombia for me. Lots of money too. Enough to make me remember that I studied biomedical engineering precisely because I wanted to be far away from Colombia. But money is alluring. That's why it's money, as David Mamet would suggest.
So in November 2010 I was bored out of my mind with my hometown, having just come from a trip to bogotá and realizing how much better suited i was for bigger cities. I realized very suddenly that I had zero interest in actually following the long-term plans i'd made, and that by then, I'd had enough of basing life decisions around some career. Not to mention, the opportunities that I had in Colombia suddenly started looking very unreliable (and they were), so the time to jump ship was then.
Except I didn't really have the money to do it right then and there, nor was there a simple, practical path. So I sucked it up and worked the majority of 2011 in order to hoard enough money and get into a master's program in Spain. Why Spain? Applying to school in Spain is quite easy. Requirements are lax, and the process itself does not initially require doing much paperwork. You really only have to go through the traditional Spanish bureaucratic and paperwork nightmares once you've been accepted. So Spain ended up being the perfect escape route. It also helped that it wasn't a clean break from what I'd been doing before. Quite the opposite: nothing unusual about working a few years in your field, and then going off to do a masters degree. Quite typical, in fact. Easy way to avoid questions about what i'm doing with my life.
In late September 2011, after what must have been one million problems, be they legal, work-related, or financial (those being a story in and of themselves), I finally boarded a plane, watched DRIVE, got dehydrated, waited for a God damned eternity, and landed in Madrid.
now I'm here and...
I was asked to leave Goya by the insane Paraguayan woman I was living with. She could not live with another person. I think it seriously unbalanced her. If you have ever read David Foster Wallace's essay 'A Supposedly Fun Thing I Will Never Do Again', there is a part there about realizing that someone's apparent hospitality and cleanliness is really borne of the discomfort your presence causes them; they just want to scrub away all evidence of your existence by 'cleaning after you'. It started becoming obvious that my presence was bothering this woman, but she never bothered to actually tell me; instead, she would take it out on her son. I'm not quite sure if she was doing that thinking that I would hear it and get the hint. If so, that's impressive passive-aggressiveness. Though it's also possible I'm so self-absorbed I think a mother's conflicts and relationship with her son are actually about me. The final straw for her apparently was that I had a friend over for lunch, something I'd been encouraged to do by her a million times, so why this suddenly became a problem is anyone's guess. So that was that for Goya.
It was for the best, though. I was already aware that I needed to find a living arrangement with peers rather than some horrible substitute for my mother. This current living arrangement fits life in Madrid as i'm living it much more. I am a foreigner here through and through, so i might as well live in a neighborhood of foreigners. I'm probably speaking more English than Spanish in my social life, and when I'm speaking Spanish, it's almost never with a person whose first language is actually Spanish.
The overwhelming majority of people I've met are just passing by, usually working either pre or post college for a year while figuring out whatever needs figurin'. I suppose that's exactly what I'm doing, I'm just giving myself 2 years to do it rather than the socially acceptable 1.
The experience has been great so far. I'm not sure it's what I expected. I'm not sure what i was expecting. but it seems to be just about what I needed. This damn country drinks and goes out so much. all the time. they're tireless. One Friday night out in Colombia would kill me for the rest of the weekend, so I'm not entirely sure how I haven't simply dropped dead here yet. But every time I think I need a long break, it lasts all of one day. Funnily enough, one of the reasons I was looking forward to moving to a real city was to have a wider set of options than 'drink' and 'eat', but as it turns out, most other things are unaffordable, or they require so much damn... coordination. It requires considerably less coordination to go party at 1 am with God knows who. I've still done more cultural things here in 2 months than in 3 years in Colombia, though, so whatever.
Oh, school is alright too. I guess that's important.
