Wow.

Wow, wow, wow. I've been wandering round various places for the past couple of days, each one better than the last! Just when you think you've seen the main bits or are getting the feel for the place, you go to another neighbourhood and its completely different. The main bit of the city isn't very big, and large parts of it are pedestrianised (or the cars have simply given up) so you can stroll, largely uninterupted, across it in about 20 minutes. I don't have time to go into all of the places I've explored now so I'll save neat and beautiful Huertas, the winding streets of La Latina, the grand Palace Real, its guards with very odd hats and listening to the saxophone drift over the lake with the lions in La Retiro for later. 

Relaxing at Retiro

I think I've fallen in love with Malasaña, the bohemian mishmash of streets around the Plaza Dos De Mayo, north of Gran Via. The narrow streets are full of bars, cafes, clothes shops, history, grafitti and, wierdly, small dogs - old people with small dogs, young people with small dogs, punks with small dogs, small dogs on their own... they're bloody everywhere! But I digress. Malasaña, named after a seamstress executed by the French after being found with a pair of scissors during an uprising, is definitely somewhere I'd want to live. The bars are full, the streets are busy, the atmosphere's great and the people are a diverse bunch. This is going to sound very sad but I spent last night doing a sort of grammar bar crawl around there, nipping from bar to bar, whipping out my grammar books in each one and soaking up the atmosphere. It's great to <parents look away now> be able to smoke in bars again! Pretty much everyone seems to smoke, adding to the bohemian atmosphere of Malasaña in particular, and Madrid in general. There's a real street culture here, with bars and restaurants busy at all times of the day. Madrid seems to some extent to have resisted some of the uniformity of globalisation as well. There's the odd Starbucks and McDonalds here and there but far, far more independent little coffee shops, tapas bars and eateries.

A healthy sense of humour in evidence in Malasaña

I'm still getting used to the pace of life here – I've noticed that there's a distinct Madrid gait that makes people appear to be walking at normal speed when they are actually walking very slowly. As someone who walks quite quickly, this has led to me either nearly walking into people or walking in slow motion behind them looking a bit foolish! Also, although its officially on Central European Time, Madrid actually operates at about GMT+4. Everything is later: opening times, lunch, dinner, drinks, clubs, closing.

I got myself a Spanish phone yesterday - quite a linguistic test for me and the man in the Orange shop. I'd managed to muster “Yo tengo un telephone Ingles, pero yo quiero usar en España”, from my pocket dictionary, which turned out to be a completely useless phrase once we'd figured out the phone was sim-blocked. Anyway, we bundled through with the help of a translation website and I learnt a bit of Spanish along the way. I can just about manage “Una cervesa, por favor” without eliciting a “Huh?” from the barman now. I met up with some fellow Ingles earlier, on a trip to the notary to get my NIE number (national insurance number) who are doing the same training I'm starting on Monday and was relieved to find none of them spoke Spanish either! I'm a bit worried that I might just end up speaking English the whole time if I'm not careful though so I'm going to set myself the challenge right here, right now, of writing the last entry of this blog before I leave entirely in Spanish. (A double-edged challenge – I have to keep writing this til I leave as well).

Having spent two days here, it feels like such a fantastically different, lively and vibrant place I've pretty much decided that I'm going to stay here for the best part of a year whether I get this job or not!