To Spain, From Spain

After months of looking around for a visa and applying late to the Spanish assistant teacher’s program I’m finally back in Spain. It’s both fulfilling and anticlimactic as I am back in a whole new part of Spain and city, I have to start from scratch to make a new life for myself. Though, that being said, I’m back in a land where everyone speaks a language I really do like and hopefully having been here before traveling two months ago will help make this second transition a little smoother.
I will admit that, it hadn’t prior to this trip anyway known how completely massive Madrid truly is. There is the old quarter which I am fully familiar with now as I have spent a month around here already, but I have only done a few walking trips outside that. Madrid truly stretches for miles (or maybe kilometers is more accurate) in every direction with multi-storey buildings being the normative. So onto how I came to this realization…

Prior to leaving Spain, I had been given a letter by a nice, if not overly busy, Spanish bureaucrat that assigned me a school where I would be an assistant teacher. About midway through December, I got an email from a different Spanish bureaucrat, telling me I’d been reassigned because I hadn’t shown up. It was a catch-22. I wanted to show up, but I was prevented by the very system that had made it impossible to show up in a timely fashion. The original school was in a small Spanish city called Aranjuez, that doesn’t have many foreigners and would have been fun to explore and was close enough to Madrid for me to visit it when I wanted. Abstractly, I suppose the new school isn’t without is advantages because its in Madrid proper and I can walk and take the Metro there. Granted I have only begun to explore the nooks and crannies of Madrid, but I just feel out of my element since the plan has changed so much. Hopefully I can make this work and I am encouraged by the fact that there are not too many people looking for apartments right now and I might be able to find a deal if I look hard enough.

The other difficulty I’m having is that Spain celebrates Epiphany, or as they call is Dia de Reyes, in a big way. They don’t give gifts until today, which means all the bureaucrats I want to talk to are celebrating with their families. I had hope by coming at the beginning of this week I could get a few things squared away early, like securing a letter of my placement to my new school (escuela nueva) or finding an apartment. With the holiday it throws a wrench into the works and slows everything down. I’ve brought plenty of money to survive in a hostel for a while, but right now I’m going nuts with all this uncertainty. So I did the one thing in my power to do today; I found the school I have been most recently assigned. It’s in a section of Madrid that looks entirely devoid of tourists, which is nice on some level. I took the opportunity once I was out there to try to walk back and was only stopped by it starting to sleet. That is how I came to the conclusion that Spaniards don’t really do low lying buildings. Even with their propensity to do high rises, Madrid is truly a massive city and not as walkable as my native Boston.