Tag: spain

My first time setting foot in Europe at long last was…effervescent. From head to toe, those first few days were like having a fizzy drink bubbling inside my brain, just wandering around giddy. Like, I imagine I looked like Danny Devito’s character Martini from “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” just a permanent idiot grin plastered across my face and a little giggle perpetually on reserve, one that could come tittering to the surface at any moment.

I was in Europe at long last, the Europe of my ancestors, the Europe of so much western history for so many millennia, the place where Shakespeare and the Romans and Don Quixote and Beowulf and Monty Python came from. The place where so many had lived and died, where so much had been built and torn down and rebuilt, over and over again.

Part of my joy was simply the notion of finally being on this other continent – this was 2018 and I am very, very old – this continent that I had read so much about and longed to visit for so many years. I wonder if my feeling was similar to the sense you still get from native Europeans about their desire to come to America.

But I wonder if it matches our reverse longing to visit Europe. It seems like it might be a bit different; their longing to come to America seems like a hopeful, wide-eyed springing forward, even at this late date. On the other hand, our desire to see Europe seems more like a longing to look backward, a need to touch the glory of the past, an expression of our national insecurity, a declaration of fealty to our betters. Both attitudes are hopelessly bound up in romanticism and delusion, of course.

The other giddifying factor (yes, it’s a word, but don’t look it up) that enraptured me was that I had just come from four years in Chile.

Now, I have a great love of Chile, and especially Valparaiso, as I hope to share with you on these pages.

But the simple truth is that the South American standards for a lot of things, and especially public facilities and cleanliness are significantly different than those of the US or EU. There are of course economic factors; colonizer states that spent centuries conquering other peoples and extracting wealth from them are by definition going to be more wealthy, and are thus likely to have a better standard of living.

But there is a certain grim ugliness in Chile when it comes to providing anything for the public, a sense of doing just the barest of bare minimum necessary to get by. I suspect that this attitude comes straight out of the Dictadura years and the brutal crush of the Chicago Boys neoliberal economic system that was imposed on Chile in the 1970s.

‘Fuck the people,’ in a nutshell. According to this economic model, all public goods are to be extracted, exploited and sold off.

Thus, things like public restrooms, public wifi, parks, buses, the metro, street cleaning and garbage pickup, the nation’s Social Security administration – ownership of the fucking water of the entire nation – pretty much all of these things are run with the very visible hand of a not-at-all-free market guiding them. Public places and public services are kept at just the bare minimum of functionality in Chile; wherever there is no money to be made, no one in charge gives a shit about how shabby things get.

Even down to something as pedestrian as walking out to the baggage claim area after passing through customs in the Madrid airport I was struck by the comparative opulence of the place: clean, roomy toilets, hand driers that work – my God, hot water! You can’t get hot water in a public restroom sink anywhere in Chile.

Even stupid things like the comfy, plentiful chairs arrayed around the baggage claim belts in Madrid were a joy – things like benches and seating in public waiting rooms in Chile always seem to have been furnished begrudgingly, as if they searched out the very cheapest, shoddiest, oldest furniture that they could find out by a dumpster – and there it remains until it literally falls apart underneath you. And that is only if they have seats at all. Baggage claim in Santiago has none.

All of this has something to do with money, of course, and those colonizer coffers that have been overflowing over the course of 500 years of exploiting the resources of places like Chile. But it also has to do with the attitudes about how to spend what public money there is.

Not that the people themselves, the actual public wouldn’t prefer things to be nicer; just that the public in Chile always seems to be the last to get any benefit from public funds, and then only with the maximum of resentment from the state or whatever subsidiary, for-profit entity is providing it.

But that’s of course not where the differences between Chile and Spain end.

There is a buoyancy and a freedom that permeates the Spanish crowds; people talk loudly and laugh out loud as they navigate the sidewalks in an open, easy manner that Chileans would never dare. In Chile there is often a furtiveness, a sense of gloom and a barely-concealed hostility as you maneuver in the streets, always in a rush to get somewhere, always worrying about money, always fearful, always suspicious. (All of this of course goes out the window when Chileans, especially young Chileans, are drunk. Then it’s like the cork has been let out of a bottle of baking soda and vinegar that has been held in check for a very long time.)

Please, please understand that these are overly broad (and slightly ridiculous) generalizations that don’t apply to every single individual. But I think a point about a Chilean cultural norm of blending in can be illustrated by how prevalent clothing that is the color black, gray, or dark navy blue is in Chile. There’s a grayness to the faces and oftentimes a black look that crosses them when you’re out and about making your way through the city streets. There’s a sense of not wanting to stand out, of laying low, of getting your business done and getting on with it, of getting away.

Not to belabor the point, but I think it’s not at all crazy to view these observations through the lens of nations that were conquistadores versus those who were conquered. And especially in Chile, where first the violence and cruelty of the Spanish, then later the Dictadura and the imposition of stark austerity and the monetizing of public goods and services have all served to crush so many people’s economic hopes for so many years, it just makes sense that a logic of avoiding trouble underlain with sublimated anger and despair would bubble under the surface.

But back to Madrid. Whatever parallel sense of being crushed by their own dictatorship the Spanish people may have had as a culture before it ended in the 1970s was not terribly evident (at least not in Madrid. That’s a very different thing in Catalonia, as I later learned.) No, what I observed was a people much more open and free with themselves, chatting on the streets not only with their friends and family but also with strangers, passing the time of day in vast, green parks, strolling on broad, pristine, well-maintained sidewalks, sitting at overflowing sidewalk cafes every night of the week drinking, chatting, eating in voices loud, triumphant, free.

Truth be told, I was terribly confused when I first sat at table at a little cafe in the neighborhood where I was staying (near Metro Embajadores or Las Delicias, if anyone’s interested. Very cool hood, not fancy but not run-down either, with plenty of shops and restaurants and bars, and easy access to a number of tourist destinations.) That was my first night there after rolling off the plane early in the morning all jet-lagged and sleeping for a few hours that afternoon in my Airbnb.

I sat at a table in the plastic-windowed tent set up on the sidewalk and ordered a beer. The old man server – one of those wiry, tough, beef-jerky old men who operate without a single wasted motion and have been waiting tables for decades – brought me some tapas with my beer and I was puzzled.

And then a second beer, and a second plate. And I was worried I was being suckered into paying for something I didn’t want, haha.

Of course in Madrid the tradition still stands of serving some kind of tapas along with each round of drinks you order, as I quickly learned. The bars often have serving lines of cafeteria-style, glass-covered pans displaying the various tapas that are on offer that day, and you can choose among them if you want, or just take your chances with whatever the beef jerky server man decides to bring. Some places have a full-time chef or cook on hand to whip up new batches of whatever strikes their fancy throughout the course of the shift as various tapas run out. It’s kind of a cool system, and really nice to have a snack with your beer.

I admit I ate more than a bit of meat while I was there, trying the Iberica ham and other tidbits. I’m a bad vegetarian…

But when in Rome, after all.

More to come…

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